Rating the expansion options
We’ll examine 37 metros as possible homes for baseball’s newest teams
Rob Manfred has repeatedly expressed his desire to expand Major League Baseball beyond its current 30-club structure.
“I would love to get to 32 teams,” the commissioner told a reporter last year. He was a bit more, well, expansive in another interview three months ago: “I’d like to see us get serious consideration in trying to get to 32 teams. There’s a lot of advantages to 32.”
So that’s the talk. But there has been a scarcity of action.
Manfred remains preoccupied with the stadium and financial problems afflicting the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays. It seems unlikely that he’ll set an expansion timetable until the A’s move to Las Vegas and the Rays strike a deal with St. Petersburg officials for a new ballpark.
So we’ll probably have to wait until next year — perhaps even longer — for Manfred’s announcement of an expansion schedule. But that shouldn’t stop us from looking ahead at baseball’s options.
You might recall that I reviewed the five previous rounds of expansion earlier this year. Here are the links:
These stories demonstrate, if nothing else, that expansion has always been a crapshoot. Several new clubs were consistently successful at the box office, such as the Colorado Rockies, the New York Mets, and the Toronto Blue Jays. But others were financial flops from the start, including the Tampa Bay Rays, Miami Marlins, and the late, unlamented Washington Senators (who moved to Dallas in 1972).
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I’ve rounded up an unusually large group of expansion candidates — 37 in all.
The list includes all 34 U.S. and Canadian metropolitan areas that have at least 1 million residents, but don’t have big-league teams. I’ve also tossed in Mexico’s two biggest metros (Mexico City and Monterrey) and the capital of Puerto Rico, San Juan.
My plan is to rank the 37 candidates from least to most desirable over a span of four weeks, beginning next Wednesday, August 2. Subsequent entries will appear on August 9, 16, and 23.
The rankings will be based on a range of demographic and geographic factors, such as a metropolitan area’s population, its current minor-league affiliation (if any), the distance to the closest big-league market, and the metro’s average personal income. The local ballpark situation is not part of the formula, since it’s assumed that any city that receives an expansion franchise will build a new stadium.
My formula won’t identify markets that are certain to be successful — baseball’s past expansion record should cure us of such hubris — but it will isolate candidates that are truly worthy of closer scrutiny. Some will probably surprise you.
We’ll start next Wednesday with the longest of longshots, the markets submerged in 31st through 37th place. Then we’ll climb the ladder, examining a new group of 10 candidates in each of the subsequent three weeks, culminating on August 23 with a list of the 10 expansion hopefuls that seem to have the greatest potential.