Baseball expansion burning on my mind, around 2015 I had Charlotte & Portland pegged for the nods.
In 2026 I’m seeing Nashville & Salt Lake City in their stead. Utah MLB was just not on my list of feasibility a decade ago. Speaking of Nashvegas…
I wasn’t huge on Vegas. Cautionary tales vacationland Yankee Florida, especially Tampa had me backed off even beyond gambling, let alone expanding the NBA to Sin City or scooting a MLB franchise there.
To me Big Four there in Vegas is still nuts. The economic incentives to diversify economic migrancy there beyond the service economy leaves me wonder if businesses will ever pay taxes there. Are they aiming for more visiting fans than home team ones?
Will NBA be back to Seattle? Will NHL ever be in Portland. How hard does ice melt in Houston or Austin? Arizona isn’t Coyotes anymore. They reincarnated in Utah. Ice melts there an a Mammoth came out. Big league hockey costs almost the most money it takes for a market to support a team. MLB takes an amount well north of $100 billion to house a team. Then NHL at about half that. Then NFL. Then NBA. And alas MLS. The money is over the mountain in Utah baseball.
I guess I should mention it was actually floated out into the business of baseball to consider splitting time for the ol’ devil Rays to part time in Tampa along with Montreal. Forget it, Frenchies. The try didn’t go through.
Any hoot, time flies. Any NFL Maps search in my blog will show there’s no enormous gaps beckoning the league, but you can bet the momentum in the likes of Utah, and abandoned mirages of San Diego and Oakland can feel fever pitch.
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