The sale of the Tampa Bay Rays to a group headed by a group led by Jacksonville home builder Patrick Zalupski isn’t finalized yet, but that isn’t stopping MLB commissioner Rob Manfred from Manfredding like crazy about how it’s a new day in Florida:
“I think that there are opportunities in the Tampa area that can be exploited in order to get a new stadium and keep the team,” Manfred said.
“With new ownership, I think you have to assume it’s kind of a clean slate. That they’re going to decide about location. They’re going to have to build and make relationships and contacts with people throughout the region to decide what’s the best place for the ballpark in order to make the Rays successful over the long haul.”…
“They’re going to have the same options that the prior owner had in terms of one side or the other,” Manfred said.
It’s back to square one! To Year Zero! Zalupski and his fellow owners (still largely TBD) will have to start from scratch building “relationships” with “people throughout the region” — presumably Manfred here means elected officials — but has the same options as outgoing owner Stu Sternberg did, which were 1) an offer of $1 billion from St. Petersburg that Sternberg backed out of and which St. Pete officials then officially withdrew, or 2) the vague idea of a stadium in Tampa that nobody wanted to pay for. When you haven’t even gotten started, the possibilities are endless!
It is, of course, possible that Zalupski or one of his fellow owners has some ideas for how to spend a billion dollars or two on a stadium to move from one part of the Tampa Bay area to another and make it pay off, or even how to make Tropicana Field work better for the time being. That’s not Manfred’s goal, though, which is to get the Rays settled in a new stadium so he can finally pursue his long-awaited plans for MLB expansion, which he doesn’t want to do until the Rays (and Athletics) are sure they don’t need any potential expansion cities as move threats. So optimism is the word of the day, as is “options,” because he knows the only way to shake loose public stadium money is with a bidding war, even if nobody particularly seems interested in bidding. Though Manfred seems to have backed slightly away from his commitment to expansion at all, now saying it’s only a decision whether to expand:
“That decision, how easy or hard it is, depends in part on how much central revenue you generate, right, and how the owners are going to react to creating two additional shares of that central revenue,” Manfred said. “Assuming you get over that hump, that they want to expand, then it’s where, right? Which two cities?”
People have convinced themselves that cities like Charlotte and Nashville would be good-to-excellent expansion cities — and even perfect relocation candidates for the Rays — but I’m not nearly as convinced.
Just to belabor the point, both cities/metro areas, like many in the Southeast and across the Sun Belt, have grown largely off the backs of transplants, which is to say people moving into town and carrying their hometown allegiances with them, and who wouldn’t switch teams just because a new team has arrived there. Those two in particular are essentially still small markets, even more so than either Tampa Bay or Miami.
Maybe teams in those towns jump out to the kind of start that the Marlins and the Dbacks did (i.e. winning a World Series during their formative years), or even that the Golden Knights hockey team are still on, and that keeps the numbers high for a while. But I don’t think the team, the league, and the city will like what they’ll see if and when the inevitable on-field downturn occurs. Having experienced this myself as a Jaguars fan and a (lapsed) Magic fan down here in Florida, it could even reach a point where the franchise’s very existence in their current market could come into question.
The Carolina Panthers and Tennessee Titans have been established for 30 years, give or take a few. Do you think everyone in the Mid-Atlantic and the Mid-South are transplants?
Check out those teams’ home crowds whenever they play a team from the Northeast or the Midwest, and you’ll see what I mean. The visiting teams’ fans aren’t at those games because they “travel well.” It’s mostly people who have moved into town from those regions and stuck with their original teams in their new locales.
That those franchises have both been around for roughly 30 years is beside the point. The number/percentage of Charlotte and Nashville natives in their respective cities and regions are still much lower than those of more established cities to their east and north. And there’s no guarantee that even people who were born and/or raised in those cities and rooted for the Panthers or the Titans their entire lives will switch over from the Braves or the Cubs or the Reds or the Yankees or whichever baseball team they were a fan of during their childhood.
Nobody who doesn’t stand to directly profit from putting teams in Nashville or Charlotte is convinced there ought to be MLB teams there.
“Ought to” has no role here. It’s all arbitrary.
There’s no clear line between which cities are AAA and which are major league.
In the short term MLB owners get a cut of maybe $10 billion in expansion fees, maybe 300 million per team. But then they’re giving up games against the marquee teams to add even more chum to the schedule. The Rockies vs The Charlotte Expansions is not must see TV.
If the twins can’t find a buyer for $1.5 billion. The orioles are worth $1.7 billion. How is MLB getting $10 billion in expansion fees? Are they adding 5 teams?
As both commenters above have alluded to (and very well), MLB has backed itself into a corner.
They will now require something like $2bn for an expansion franchise because no existing owner will accept a number lower than that. And there are no ‘good’ – or maybe even average – MLB host cities left to expand to.
So, Manfred and co have an issue… they have to sell soap to customers, but the soap is very poor quality and there aren’t many customers left who need soap. It’s a problem.
Could they find a bigger idiot? Sure. It’s happened in the past.
But the entry price was much lower then and the markets, while not great, at least weren’t very much bottom tier. Any of the new markets being discussed will be Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Kansas City or even Oakland (which, if marketed properly, is a better location than all three of the previously named) – teams that will effectively always be in the bottom quartile.
One can’t help but note that even in the NFL, where central revenues mean you can put a team literally anywhere, people aren’t clamouring for an expansion team for Pensacola or Fresno. Billionaires are holding battle royals for existing franchises, but the last new ones sold were in 1999 & 2002 as I recall. Again, the price was around 1/10th of what the Washington Foreskins just sold for.
As to Manfred’s comment about splitting the pie… this is something that only a commissioner who isn’t planning to push expansion would say. If it were true, it’s a disincentive.
It’s not true. What any commissioner is selling is just inventory. More teams equals more games equals more revenue. It doesn’t happen straightaway, but a 32 team MLB would eventually generate five or six percent more in tv revenue than a 30 team MLB does. If the pie stayed the same size, MLB would still be a 16 team midwest and northeast loop. It isn’t.
The fact that the grammatically challenged Manfred is saying these things suggests to me that the desire for expansion within MLB has cooled significantly. Maybe that is because the owners aren’t happy with the possible revenue projection. Maybe it’s because the potential owners just aren’t materializing in the number (and wealth) MLB would like.
The Rays just sold for well under $2bn (although the sale is not done yet…). How many other existing teams in better markets than any expansion site available could be purchased for that amount? Or less?
Despite the artificial nature of the entire enterprise being designed to prevent just such an outcome, perhaps demand for MLB franchises is not outstripping supply at present?
I’m going to push back slightly on the idea that a 32-team MLB would generate 5-6% more revenue than a 30-team one. As you note, any new markets would be on par with the Pittsburghs of the world, so they wouldn’t generate league-average ticket sales — and does anyone really think that putting a team in Nashville is going to create a ton of new baseball TV viewers rather than at least partly cannibalizing the audience that currently watches the Braves?
Yes, the pie would grow somewhat with expansion. But there are diminishing returns each time.
I agree. I had to pick a number. Mathematically, expansion should produce: 2/30*100=6.7%.
We know the pie won’t grow that much across the board because there are no as yet untapped new Chicagos or new New Yorks or new LAs.
But more games means more tv revenue over time, certainly. Even if all those games are now on gaming company networks and not RSNs.
With respect to “new” markets, very few fans switch. What leagues count on is the 30-50yr horizon, where youngsters have grown up cheering for the Nashville Sounds and only the Nashville Sounds. Baseball fandom being what it is, transplanted Red Sox or Cubs families will always try to make their kids and grandkids stick with the hereditary club. It doesn’t always work. But sometimes a Fernando comes along and makes some locals forget all the perfectly good reasons they had to hate the local club.
There is some talk that the NBA is no longer enamored with expansion because of this same issue.
The bigger the media deal, the less interested owners are in diluting their share of that media deal. That’s what the expansion fee is for. But as that fee moves further and further into the stratosphere, the number of billionaires willing to pay it for a team in a marginal market approaches zero.
Meanwhile, the NBA has some markets that are a bit meh –
Memphis and New Orleans are frequently mentioned. They would probably rather move them than expand to Seattle or Vegas.
The NHL is more interested in Atlanta and Houston, because those are big markets and could add TV viewers, but they are not as excited about expansion as they used to be.
The problem with Atlanta is that twice they’ve had the NHL with the Flames and Trashers in the past 50 years. I’m not sure unless its a well ran outfit that NHL is going to do well in Georgia long tern no matter how much they want to expand. I know that Tampa Lightning do relatively well and Dallas Stars but we also have the Arizona Coyotes that went downhill even as soon as not long after their relocation as the original Winnpeg Jets. You have the Kings and Ducks in LA area and Sharks in San Jose that used to have a team in the 1970s the Seals who folded later after moving to Cleveland and merging with the North Stars.
As far as basketball goes the teams in Memphis and New Orleans are pretty shaky and have been for a good while. Orlando is another city with a not very good fanbase or ownership. They might move eventually as well. Its getting to the point that they can rearrange the chairs on the deck all the way but the ship still can head downwards.
Baseball isn’t ready to have another expansion and the reasons have to do with labor.
First: There are barely enough big-league ballplayers to cover 30 big-league ballclubs as it stands. Adding two more ballclubs will turn the major leagues into a supersize Class 4-A league. On top of that, the supply of ballplayers from Latin America and the Pacific Rim could easily be shut off by the xenophobia and McCarthyism that have become frighteningly resurgent.
Second: The possibility still exists that baseball will lock out the MLBPA when the union contract expires in December 2026. Big business cannot reasonably plan for the future when labor peace is under threat in the present — and baseball is big business.
Agreed that the MLB talent pool now is so diluted that average dude that is hitting .215 or .220 is still somehow on the roster and starting. Back when I was younger if you weren’t hitting .245 or .250 and up then you were probably going to be shipped out. Now you have pitchers with 4.00 ERA getting big contracts and guys hitting .240 to .250 getting big contracts too.
I watch a lot of baseball and the quality of the play and game has went way downhill in the last 15 to 20 years. Too many players in there at 25 to 27 a team and 30 teams and the quality of the play has declined. Plus you have the 150 to 200 dollar MLB package and cable and you can watching any game you want at any time of the day most of the year including replay from the previous season until the new season starts.
I would like to bring into this story, the fact that we have been told all along the new stadium “must” have a roof or retractable roof. Can’t play there without it. Is anyone familiar with how many rainouts the Rays had this year? 1. One measly rainout.
That’s mostly a byproduct of MLB shifting a bunch of home dates from the midsummer months to April and May, when the late afternoon/early evening thunderstorms are considerably less frequent. Great for avoiding rainouts, not so much for the deep imbalances it causes to the schedule — fewer home dates during the heart of the season when the crowds are at their strongest, the team having to spend an abnormal amount of time on the road down the stretch, etc.