MLB Stadium Saga: Oakland/Tampa Bay/Southside

[GDAWG]

4 hours ago, FiddySicks said:

All you really have to do is look at the two most recent rounds of expansion to let you know how it’ll probably go in places like Nashville, Portland, or (lol) Orlando. 
 

1993: Denver and Miami

 

1998: Phoenix and Tampa/St. Pete

 

You could very easily make the argument that at least three of those are the three weakest markets and most precarious situations in MLB (I’m not including Oakland/the A’s in this because their whole situation requires a lot more nuance to understand why it got so FUBARd. Plus, it sounds like that’ll be moot because the A’s are now moving to a market that’s… Somehow even worse than Portland, Nashville, or Orlando. I’ve gone over my skepticism on Vegas a million times here though, so I’ll spare the details on that for now). 
 

Miami: A market that, despite the team having some early success, has NEVER worked, and is only currently viable because the previous ownership group absolutely fleeced the city for a new park. 
 

Denver: Easily the best of the four, but still tempered due to the Rockies almost always being unwatchable. 
 

Tampa: Disaster of a situation and the team has had talks of leaving the area basically ever since they began play. New stadium is great, but they’re probably going to have a lot of the same problems they had before drawing a crowd. 

Phoenix: just a huge area with a ton of baseball history, and it’s still one of the most anemic markets in pro sports. 

And the worst part is all four of those cities have the same thing in common. They’re absolutely enormous. Despite that, the success has been pretty limited. 
 

So with all of that, I have a very hard time wrapping my head around the idea of MLB putting an expansion team in a city that has like 1/10 the population, basically zero history with baseball fandom (I’m sure Nashville has a nice minor league history that had a good following, just as every other moderately sized city in the US does. And I’m sure they think their history is “special”, just like all of those other moderately sized cities do, too), and has enough markets close enough that they’ll compete for eyes with teams that have a century and a half head start on them. 
 

I’ll even go this far. If a team decides it has to move, Nashville may be a somewhat decent market for them if they play that situation perfectly. It’ll be the weakest market in the league and everyone will know that, but at least in that circumstance they’ll have a chance, albeit far fetched. But an expansion team? Lol, come on. Can we at least try to keep things realistic?
 

And I say all that not meant as a put down, but as the guy who thought (foolishly) for DECADES that Sacramento would be a viable market for a MLB team. 
 

There’s a reason we haven’t had expansion in nearly 30 years. It’s because there isn’t anywhere left that actually makes sense. There’s currently two or three markets they already have that don’t make sense. 

 

They don't make sense, but it's not like contraction is the solution either.  The only way (and this is such a long shot, that I don't know if they would go for it) is if MLB asks the MLBPA if they would like to expand the active roster from 26 to 40 (Pre-September 1st) in exchange for contraction of two teams.  There would have to be some sort of compromise for the MLBPA to allow them to accept contraction, otherwise they will vehemently oppose it.  

[The_Admiral]

5 hours ago, FiddySicks said:

I’m sure Nashville has a nice minor league history that had a good following, just as every other moderately sized city in the US does. And I’m sure they think their history is “special”, just like all of those other moderately sized cities do, too

I bet they have a really impressive craft brewing scene.

[Fowler]

I guess Salt Lake City is the new sexy pick according to some. 

[McCall]

3 hours ago, Fowler said:

I guess Salt Lake City is the new sexy pick according to some. 

It's not. They just put themselves out there as wanting a team and some went with it. "Intriguing pick" would be more accurate.

[Sec19Row53]

8 hours ago, GDAWG said:

 

They don't make sense, but it's not like contraction is the solution either.  The only way (and this is such a long shot, that I don't know if they would go for it) is if MLB asks the MLBPA if they would like to expand the active roster from 26 to 40 (Pre-September 1st) in exchange for contraction of two teams.  There would have to be some sort of compromise for the MLBPA to allow them to accept contraction, otherwise they will vehemently oppose it.  

Probably not (almost definitely not). Jobs would be maintained in name only. Those extra players on the rosters wouldn't be playing.

[LMU]

14 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

Portland chose their MLS club over AAA baseball. That alone should tell MLB expansion folk to back off and leave the city alone.

Choosing a team in a top-level league over a minor league team doesn't seem like a very hard decision.  You can't use that as an apples-to-apples comparison for MLB expansion interest, especially with a city such as Portland where the only stadium options were converting the ballpark in the city or playing way out at a rec league field in the suburbs.

[Sec19Row53]

3 minutes ago, LMU said:

Choosing a team in a top-level league over a minor league team doesn't seem like a very hard decision.  You can't use that as an apples-to-apples comparison for MLB expansion interest, especially with a city such as Portland where the only stadium options were converting the ballpark in the city or playing way out at a rec league field in the suburbs.

You're assuming that the people in this debate on this site will use logic, and not logos, to determine the course of action.

[gosioux76]

15 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

Portland chose their MLS club over AAA baseball. That alone should tell MLB expansion folk to back off and leave the city alone.

 

I've seen this point made several times over the years and, while I understand how someone comes to this conclusion, it's disingenuous at best.

 

First of all, Portland didn't make a choice in this matter. The owner of the Timbers, who also owned the AAA club, was required by MLS to convert his venue into a soccer-specific stadium, which meant it would no longer work for baseball. He was unable to secure a location for a new baseball stadium, nor public money to finance it, and made the correct move to sell the team so he can focus singularly on MLS. 

 

And let's face it: the AAA product isn't that great and shouldn't be used as a measurement for whether a market can support MLB. Even if it were, a few years after the AAA Beavers left, the Portland suburb of Hillsboro landed the Hops, which has shifted from being a low-A club to a high-A club and continues to draw enough support that its owners are plotting a stadium expansion. 

 

This, however, isn't an endorsement of Portland as a MLB expansion market. I think a team there would do fine, but it's nowhere near a safe bet, and the metro's decades-long period of growth appears to be at its end. I just can't stand the argument that losing AAA baseball is the reason why MLB would fail there. 

 

Also: What @LMU said, but with far fewer words. haha

[McCall]

15 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

Portland chose their MLS club over AAA baseball. That alone should tell MLB expansion folk to back off and leave the city alone.

Not even remotely accurate. If anything, they chose the potential of MLB over Triple-A. With Providence Park being converted for soccer, their only other option was to build a new Triple-A stadium. But if their intentions of getting an MLB team were ever realized, that could've left them with two baseball stadiums and potentially only one team. Now maybe they'd be able to keep both, but if they couldn't, then they just wasted money on one.

[SFGiants58]

Ok, so I was wrong. That doesn’t mean that expansion is a viable option, nor does it mean that Portland’s MLB stadium efforts are actually drumming up any serious local support. As Fiddy said, we don’t have enough viable baseball markets. Hell, of the ones we do have, several are utterly awful.

[gosioux76]

2 minutes ago, SFGiants58 said:

Ok, so I was wrong. That doesn’t mean that expansion is a viable option, nor does it mean that Portland’s MLB stadium efforts are actually drumming up any serious local support. As Fiddy said, we don’t have enough viable baseball markets. Hell, of the ones we do have, several are utterly awful.

 

If it's done right, with a small footprint stadium and minimal to no taxpayer investment, I'm confident Portland will show up to support MLB. But it's not the kind of market where you're going to get a full-throated community endorsement without seeing the fine print, and that's a good thing. The people there, from my experience, are going to want some guarantees that a stadium development won't gentrify or tax resources, that it'll make ample use of public transit and be otherwise sustainable.  In a city with a severe housing shortage, they're going to fight like hell if resources get diverted away from housing to fund a baseball stadium, as they should. So any project would have to find a way to address that issue.

 

Because of all this, you're not going to see, outside of the typical meatheads on sports-talk radio, a ton of evidence that the market is thirsty for MLB, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't still fill a stadium on the regular. 

 

The bigger issue with Portland is that the group vying to bring MLB there has gone out of its way to avoid saying who's backing the effort financially. So far it's been a lot of talk about stadium locations and negotiations with the city, but no hint at who's money is driving the effort or who would own the franchise. To a lot of people, myself included, that's a big red flag. 

[Sec19Row53]

Just now, gosioux76 said:

 

If it's done right, with a small footprint stadium and minimal to no taxpayer investment, I'm confident Portland will show up to support MLB. But it's not the kind of market where you're going to get a full-throated community endorsement without seeing the fine print, and that's a good thing. The people there, from my experience, are going to want some guarantees that a stadium development won't gentrify or tax resources, that it'll make ample use of public transit and be otherwise sustainable.  In a city with a severe housing shortage, they're going to fight like hell if resources get diverted away from housing to fund a baseball stadium, as they should. So any project would have to find a way to address that issue.

 

Because of all this, you're not going to see, outside of the typical meatheads on sports-talk radio, a ton of evidence that the market is thirsty for MLB, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't still fill a stadium on the regular. 

 

The bigger issue with Portland is that the group vying to bring MLB there has gone out of its way to avoid saying who's backing the effort financially. So far it's been a lot of talk about stadium locations and negotiations with the city, but no hint at who's money is driving the effort or who would own the franchise. To a lot of people, myself included, that's a big red flag. 

I thought you were talking about the new Arena Football League there for a second 

[Fowler]

Just leave it at 30 teams. Expansion is nice for the owners, 2 billion in their greedy pockets. Even if it happens, we are looking at 2030 at the earliest with the bidding process, the owners voting on it and the winning groups getting the ballparks built. 

[GDAWG]

3 hours ago, Sec19Row53 said:

Probably not (almost definitely not). Jobs would be maintained in name only. Those extra players on the rosters wouldn't be playing.

 

That is why contraction will never be an option for the MLB.  The MLBPA is said to be the most powerful players union in sports.  They would support expansion all the way because it's 52 new jobs and 52 players playing (As we know, per team 9 starters in the field and one starting pitcher, but also a DH, which is ten, and whatever bullpen and bench moves the manager makes).

[Fowler]

Nashville 

Charlotte

Portland

Orlando

Salt Lake City

Montreal

Mexico City

Raleigh 

San Antonio 

 

So who wins?

 

[The_Admiral]

2 hours ago, Fowler said:

Nashville 

Charlotte

Portland

Orlando

Salt Lake City

Montreal

Mexico City

Raleigh 

San Antonio 

 

So who wins?

 

 

I've never seen so many impressive craft brewing scenes in one place!

[GDAWG]

Unlike NBA expansion, where there are two cities that are locks (Seattle and Vegas), MLB expansion is wide open.  

[Sec19Row53]

15 minutes ago, GDAWG said:

Unlike NBA expansion, where there are two cities that are locks (Seattle and Vegas), MLB expansion is wide open.  

That's in part because it's theoretical. Until MLB says it is happening, it's just message board fodder.

[McCall]

11 minutes ago, Sec19Row53 said:

That's in part because it's theoretical. Until MLB says it is happening, it's just message board fodder.

In theory.

[gosioux76]

9 minutes ago, Sec19Row53 said:

That's in part because it's theoretical. Until MLB says it is happening, it's just message board fodder.

To be fair, Rob Manfred has addressed the likelihood of expansion about as often as Adam Silver has. Both commissioners have said their leagues would explore expansion. Manfred has been saying as much since at least 2018, and even mentioned six likely markets at that time: Las Vegas, Portland, Montreal, Charlotte, Nashville and Vancouver, and even suggested Mexico as a possibility.

 

He's addressed the topic so often that I don't really think you can call it theoretical.