With the Athletics seemingly settled on setting the Fisher family fortune on fire in Las Vegas, and Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski about to receive the spendiest gift stadium in history, the thoughts of bored baseball writers are turning toward expansion. Sure, there’s the little matter of a new union contract first, which could have monumental impacts in terms of incentives for MLB expanding or not. But league commissioner Rob Manfred said he wants expansion cities picked out by the time he retires at the start of 2029, at least before then saying maybe there won’t be expansion after all, so sure, let’s survey the field of candidates.
This week, we’ve had ESPN’s Jeff Passan, Yahoo! Sports’ Matt Larter, and Sportsnaut’s Lincoln Zdunich all chiming in with their lists of prospective expansion cities. Let’s go through the possibilities — since the three can’t agree on a ranking, let’s do it in order of TV market size:
Montreal: Being in Canada, Montreal doesn’t actually appear on the Nielsen market size list, but it’s pretty damn huge: There aren’t directly comparable numbers, but it looks like if Montreal were in the U.S. it would fall around 14th, between Seattle and Detroit. It also doesn’t have either a workable MLB stadium (unless you count the re-refurbished Olympic Stadium, which MLB probably wouldn’t) or a prospective owner in place; Passan notes that “at the forefront of the latest push is Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the owner of WatchMojo, and he sees himself more as a facilitator than the money man for a bid.” (I’ve now read a fair bit about WatchMojo, and still can’t figure out exactly what it does, which makes it a very 2026 candidate for sports ownership, or at least sports ownership facilitation.) Montreal also still has all the same other issues as when the Expos left, like a sometimes-weak Canadian dollar. Larter calls Montreal a “longshot”; Passan includes it in his top six; Zdunich doesn’t mention it at all.
Orlando: The largest U.S. market without an MLB team, something local team advocates mention at every possible opportunity. It’s also only 84 miles from Tampa, which looks like it will have the Rays to kick around for the foreseeable future, and sure, that’s only a little less distance than Philadelphia is from New York, but Tampa-Orlando isn’t anywhere near as big a combined market as NYC-Philly. (Tampa already swiped Orlando’s prospective lead investor, Rick Workman, as a Rays co-owner, Passan notes.) It’s also in Florida, where MLB expansion franchises go to suffer league-bottom attendance. Orlando does have a name picked out (the “Dreamers”) and a plan for funding a stadium, albeit one that has been rejected by local officials so far. Passan insists that MLB owners “will consider it”; Zdunich says MLB would be concerned about an Orlando team siphoning off fans from Rays and Miami Marlins fanbases that can’t afford to lose any, but that “the Dreamers have time to improve their proposal until an expansion committee is convened” — maybe by moving Orlando to a different state?
Raleigh: North Carolina’s second-largest media market (behind Charlotte) seems to have taken a leap past its neighbor to the south recently, if only because Carolina Hurricanes and Portland Trail Blazers owner Tom Dundon has expressed interest in owning a baseball team there, which gets MLB owners salivating. North Carolina doesn’t have a stadium plan (though it’s funded other teams’ projects before), and it has the disadvantage of splitting its population among three markets (Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, and Greensboro) that would each be among the smaller metro areas in MLB. Passan says it’s “punching well above its weight” without really explaining why or what that means, while Zdunich calls it the “surprise frontrunner” while noting “the only remaining roadblock would be [stadium] funding,” which is kind of a significant hurdle.
Portland: Has an actual stadium plan with $800 million in promised public funding (allegedly from player income taxes, though that’s unlikely to work out without dipping into existing public money) and a group eager to land a team, though one without a billionaire on hand to pay the expansion fee. It’s also on the West Coast, and Manfred has said he’d prefer to add one team on either side of the continent, which gives it a leg up on the larger East Coast cities, but not on one smaller West Coast city, supposedly.
Nashville: Like Orlando, it has a team name picked out (the “Stars”). It’s less than two-thirds the size of Orlando, though, and has even less of a plan for a stadium, with public funding unlikely to be coming soon after Nashville emptied its stadium budget for the Tennessee Titans. The consensus opinion appears to be that Nashville’s time as a frontrunner has passed, if the consensus opinion really matters here.
Salt Lake City: On the face of it, Salt Lake seems like a bad place to put an MLB team: It’s the smallest market on this list, and while it’s been growing fast, it’s also running out of water and facing a future of toxic dust clouds. But it does have two things MLB really likes: a prospective owner (the Miller family, former owners of the Jazz) and a plan to spend $900 million in public money on a stadium, though not specifically where the $900 million would come from. This is enough to make Passan call it “by far the most advanced potential bid”; Zdunich writes that “Salt Lake has been known as a sports town for a while,” though that’s another way of saying it already has a lot of teams (NBA, NHL, MLS) for a smallish city.
In short, MLB has a bunch of imperfect expansion candidate cities (San Antonio, Sacramento, and Vancouver didn’t even get mentions this week, but they’re still out there). And while the league can — and certainly will — play them off against each other to see who comes up with the most lucrative bid, beyond a quick infusion of expansion fee cash and possibly some stadium money, none seem like they would significantly increase the league’s revenue going forward, certainly not enough to make up for giving up a 1/32nd share of national TV and streaming and other revenues. This financial calculus is the main reason MLB hasn’t expanded yet this century, and it hasn’t changed much, though the soaring sale prices of sports teams as North America fills up with multibillionaires presumably has at least some baseball owners salivating for a quick cash infusion, even if it would only come to a couple hundred million dollars per existing owner.
Going back to that Marc Normandin article from February that I linked to above, he wrote at the time:
As I put it back in 2023, “As much as the current 30 owners would love to split some 10-digit expansion fees, they’d also love to be able to threaten to take off for Nashville or Charlotte whenever they aren’t getting as much taxpayer money as they’d like for a new stadium or renovations of an old one. And if new teams fill those slots, well. Threatening to move to Manchester, NH just doesn’t carry the same weight, you know?” And while a market as small as (and as bumping-up-against-Boston as) Manchester might never actually be on the table, somewhere like Las Vegas is a whole lot easier to put up with, media-market size-wise, if the Dodgers, Yankees, et al are subsidizing it a bit. “We can’t put teams in another market the size of Milwaukee” doesn’t hold up when you have a revenue-sharing model that makes Milwaukee work better than it already does.
That’s true, but it also means that going into collective bargaining agreement talks that will include discussions of how teams share revenue, big- and even medium-market owners may not want to saddle themselves with even more people in the owners’ club who don’t bring much to the table other than a one-time check and an expectation to get a big chunk of MLB.tv revenue into the distant future despite not providing many new eyeballs of their own. We don’t know without a fly on the wall inside the owners’ suites; it would be nice if access journalists like Passan would use their contacts to suss out what the jockeying for power within MLB really looks like instead of just passing along what certain insiders want repeated in print, but I guess that’s the kind of reporting that is less likely to get you continued access.
The cynic in me thinks that MLB’s “expansion” efforts aren’t about actually adding teams so much as seeing what cities can possibly be used as stalking horses for the existing franchises in the future. Nobody took the Rays’ or the Royals’ move innuendo seriously because it was obvious to everyone that there was nowhere for them to actually move to.
A roll call of expansion “candidates” could potentially change the equation, but even then, MLB could reject certain locations based on geographical and economic grounds (with Orlando being the most obvious example from that shortlist).
One more thing to consider, especially when it comes to places like Nash, Raleigh, and Orlando: outside of maybe Atlanta, every rapidly-growing city in the Southeast is functionally a very small market because of just how few people in the age 40+ cohort are originally from those areas. This isn’t Cincinnati or Milwaukee or Cleveland where the vast majority of people there are actually from there; there aren’t too many ties that bind in places like Orlando where the only thing most people have in common with each other is that they all came here from somewhere else.
Any new/existing team that sets up shop in the Southeast would have to keep up their winning ways forever (a la Rays and Brewers) to have a shot at being a merely league-average operation in terms of revenue and fan support — and even that might not be enough.
I agree that the cities exist to shake down cities, especially after the As did the most asinine by moving to Sac-town. We will move to Greensboro. Just you watch.
Also, the two expansion teams will need minor league markets. By taking away potential spots, minor league teams cannot shake down their markets, either. We will move to New Orleans. Just you watch.
Neil:
Is regional MSA or TV market size a better metric for evaluating an area’s franchise-hosting capability?
J.C. Bradbury believes it MSA, while you appear to believe it’s TV market size given your order of cities in the above post and your doubts about John Fisher’s move from the No. 10 TV market to the 40th. Bradbury isn’t high on the Raleigh-Cary MSA being viable for MLB, but the census separates Durham from Raleigh for some reason while lumping Dallas and Fort Worth together despite the Texas cities basically having the same distance from each other as the NC cities. I think RDU should be evaluated as one conjoined market in part due to a shared airport like D-FW. I do agree with Bradbury that Charlotte and Nashville are better markets than Raleigh but there doesn’t seem to be much political will for an MLB subsidy in either place given the amount of money forked over to the local NFL teams.
TV market size, if you’re talking about the viability for bringing in TV dollars. (Or streaming dollars, same difference. Viewer eyeballs, either way.)
If you’re talking about ability to sell tickets and souvenir jerseys and pulled pork sandwiches, probably some combination of MSA and per-capita income (or better, per-capita income for the top 30%) and number of competing major-league teams in the market would be best.
I seem to remember Sports Business Journal or some similar publication coming up with a ranking years ago for most oversaturated and undersaturated sports markets, but I don’t know how scientific that was. Raleigh and Charlotte and Portland and Nashville are all close enough to be in a virtual tie, either way — Orlando is slightly ahead, Salt Lake slightly behind. They’re all Pittsburgh, pretty much.
I think that was the ranking that showed the best place to expand would be a third Los Angeles area team. In the Riverside area. (Population, incomes, corporate HQs) But it was a nonstarter because of the Dodgers and Angels.
I think a team in Riverside might actually do well, although by that logic, San Jose would be the actual best candidate.
San Jose is 100% the right choice by any metric.
The city itself has a population of 1 million, and Santa Clara County has 1.9 million. Median income is one of the highest in the Country, the corporate base is enormous and wealthy beyond reason.
Throw in the best weather in the world to make SJ a no-brainer.
I think the CSA is a better indicator than MSA since it mostly accounts for regions with multiple “dots” (like Raleigh and Durham) — but like all the other measures, it has its share of flaws.
Orlando CSA counts everything from Ormond Beach (roughly same distance from the Jacksonville city limits and Orlando) all the way down to Plant City (usually a 30-minute drive from Tampa). Meanwhile, Tampa Bay apparently doesn’t even have its own dedicated CSA, which means places like Sarasota, Bradenton, and Lakeland aren’t included in the census total, even though they’re within reasonable distance of Tampa and St Pete.
To me, the real mistake is in conflating “media market size” with “potential audience for the local teams” There are only so many avid (or even casual) sports fans in any given city — and even among that cohort, a large percentage of transplants in Sun Belt cities have proven themselves to be totally unwilling to engage with their now-local sports franchises.
It’s a good proxy for “potential *TV* audience for the local teams,” which traditionally results in bigger cable deals, which has been a large part of differences in team revenues.
How that will translate into a streaming world is unclear, especially since nobody has a clue how MLB will divvy up shared streaming rights money — probably including MLB. But suffice to say that a team in Salt Lake City isn’t going to increase the number of MLB.tv+ subscribers much compared to most of the existing teams.
If you want to rank these by CSA, btw, they would go: Montreal, Orlando, Charlotte, Portland, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, Nashville. The two designated frontrunners still don’t look great. (Raleigh is behind New Haven-Hartford, which is a CSA for some reason.)
Does MLB have problems or what?? Let’s add a couple more teams to an already watered down on field product. The pitching is so poor, not major league quality so put out a couple more teams with low minor league talent! OUCH!! Teams will need new seats every 5 years after the pitchers give up homers that rip out seats! Let’s hope when the CBA dies it puts MLB out of its misery.
Not sure what you mean about bad pitching: Offense is up slightly this year after all the rule changes, but still near historic lows. If anything, there are tons of Quadruple-A type pitchers who wouldn’t look out of place in MLB uniforms — that’s why you see teams calling them up and sending down other similar players every week when they want fresh arms.
Relative to population, MLB can certainly afford to expand by a couple of teams every couple of decades, especially when you take into account more international players being available. But none of this has anything to do with whether more teams would be profitable for MLB owners, which is completely unrelated to quality of play.
Didn’t Sternberg have Montreal tentatively agreeing to some sort of public financing for his bonkers plan to have the Rays splitting half a season in Canada? That idea went a lot further than anyone ever thought it would until MLB put an end to it. If they were open to contributing towards half a season it would make sense to do so for an actual Montreal based team, although they’re already sinking a lot of money into Olympic Stadium for whatever reason.
Nope, Montreal never got close to coming up with money for a Tampontreal Ex-Rays stadium.
Kalamazoo didn’t make either list this time?
Greensboro should be on the list after their failed attempt to lure the Bills away from Buffalo, shouldn’t they?
THIS IS WATCHMOJO’S TOP TEN REASONS MONTREAL SHOULD GET AN EXPANSION TEAM
Salt Lake City’s market is too small to sustain three teams, and there are already plenty of sports teams in the desert.
The biggest question here is why multiple sports leagues are placing teams in a desert that’s being ravaged by climate change.
Most of the owners probably still think climate change isn’t real.
Most of the owners are probably counting on being dead or in prison before the toxic dust clouds hit.
Or living on a space station or Mars or something.
Fits MLB’s history of getting to medium sized markets 2nd/3rd/4th.
If baseball wasn’t so arcane and silly- and the goal was to just make money-You expand to San Jose and Northern New Jersey. You could charge a lot in expansion fees, the teams wouldn’t be revenue sharing welfare queens. The only teams that get “screwed” are the giants, Yankees and Mets.
A stadium on the waterfront in Hoboken or Jersey City would have the greatest view in sports.
The last time a Northern New Jersey baseball park was floated was nearly 40 years ago. Soundly defeated in a referendum, the opposition more obvious as you got further away from New York.
That’s the elephant in the room, but the issue goes beyond just these cities. Montreal is the exception. Most of the other proposed markets feel more like satellite cities within larger regions, chosen for convenience and population growth rather than because they have a strong, independent economic or cultural identity that naturally supports a major-league franchise.
Portland and Salt Lake City, along with Phoenix and Las Vegas, are benefiting from population migration out of California as rising costs push people elsewhere. Las Vegas stands out because it has built an economy and identity around casinos, tourism, and entertainment. Portland, meanwhile, is already exposed to weakness at one of its most important corporate anchors, Nike.
MLB could also run into a Jacksonville 2.0 situation with some of these markets. A region may be growing, but that does not necessarily mean one city clearly dominates it. Raleigh making the list instead of Charlotte is a good example. Charlotte was once talked about as the next Atlanta, and its metro area is larger than many of the cities now being discussed.
Nashville is another market where the hype feels somewhat disconnected from the city itself. Its infrastructure still feels relatively limited for a city being positioned as a major-league destination, and much of its national image revolves around a concentrated downtown entertainment district.
That is why I would have expected cities such as Vancouver, Charlotte, or Indianapolis to receive more attention. They strike me as more established metropolitan markets than several of the smaller cities currently being discussed.