I’ve always thought Mexico City was an obvious candadate for an expansion team. It could potentially have the largest fan base of any team in the majors. Perhaps distance from other parks is a factor. Has anyone ever figured out what the maximum radius is for a sport that plays almost every day of the season? Could, say, Honolulu qualify logistically .
“Baseball Expansion”?
Yay!
Bigger
Baseballs!
We have met the enemy, and He is Us.–Walt Kelly
Mexico City might present a few problems for baseball expansion.
It comes down to air.
First of all, it’s incredibly polluted. What millionaire player is going to want to spend six months of the year in crud that makes LA look pristine.
Second of all, it’s really “thin.” You think you’re going to see balls flying all over the place in Denver, wait until you start playing above 7000 feet.
I don’t know how a team in Mexico right now would be able to compete economically with US teams. The Canadian teams are having a hard enough time.
A Mexican baseball team would have to be closer to the border. Monterrey might be a better choice.
It might also help if the people of Mexico liked baseball a bit more. It’s still a soccer country. There haven’t been many famous Mexican players in the big leagues (Fernando Valenzuela and Vinny Castilla have been the biggest stars) as yet.
You could try Hawaii, but that’s a really long flight if you’re coming from the East Coast. Any time a team finished a series in Hawaii it would have to have a day off to adjust for jet lag and maybe two days off if you were flying all the way to the East Coast.
International expansion is more likely to take the form of a postseason World Cup type tournament I think. (Japan, US, Cuba, Korea, Taiwan, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and a qualifier).
Okay, this is my bit. Somebody was yapping about “dilution of pitching” as a reason against expansion. This is the oldest bit of poo-poo that keeps getting recycled.
a) The country is considerably bigger than it was, say, 50 years ago.
b) Baseball was not fully integrated until the 60’s/70s – the same time as expansion started in earnest. In the 50s, most teams kept two or three star blacks and that was it.
c) The number of international players has grown rapidly in the last 10-15 years.
In other words; over the last 50 years the pool of talent has increased roughly in proportion with expansion.
I’m opposed to adding more teams just because it becomes unwieldy; fans can only keep track of so many teams& players, ESPN can only so many highlights, etc.
To me the problem is the whole structure in which minor-league teams are wholly owned subsidiaries of the majors. Cities kill themselves to keep teams becuase they dread becoming a “minor-league” (ie second-rate) city, even when anybody can see Pittsburgh is not in a caliber with New York. The reason: Minor league teams, as institutions, aren’t trying to win. They exist only as farms.
IMO, we’d all be better off with a free minor league system as existed before the 30s. Players sign a contract with whichever team, at whatever level, they can. That player moves up when his contract expires, or when the lower team sells his contract–in exchange for players, money, whatever. The point is that the minor league team is the master of their own fate, and trying to win, not a slave to the bigger cities. That would make Kansas City less worried about not being “big league,” just as fans of smaller universities don’t care that their team isn’t as good as Michigan. (and most college sports fans aren’t alumni.)
Which means, eventually, that the owners can’t hold up those cities for sweetheart stadium deals, because teams will, by natural selection, end up in a league with cities of comparable size/support. Players get complete free agency, and fans in EVERY city get a local team competing for themselves.
It’s a dream…
pardon my rant.
“It all started with marbles in school…”
Furt: I agree with you about minor league cities being exploited. The baseball writer Bill James raised similar points in his last “Baseball Abstract”, circa 1988.
The reason not all cities that can support a major league team have one is that the owners keep supply below demand so that they can use the threat of moving to an open city to extort new stadiums out of the taxpayers. I don’t believe there is a shortage of talent, given that we currently have so many players from the tiny Dominican Republic. Out of the millions of people in the US etc, it seems that there are enough players for 40 major league teams, if they could get the umpires to call strikes properly.
A city that could support major league baseball that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Buffalo, NY. They have a beautiful stadium of about 20,000 seats which I understand is designed to be expanded to 40,000 in short order if they ever get a team.
I amend my reply as I see that Buffalo was already mentioned. My apologies.
Lousy choise for expansion actually… The Mexican National League team in Mexico City folded a few years ago… the city can’t even support its own leage teams. Baseball is immensely popular in many Mexican cities and towns, but not Mexico City…
For an analogy, look at Los Angeles or Houston and football. 2nd and 4th largest cities in America, and no NFL franchises. Now, admittedly, there is something more important than fan base that leads to a team moving (Ask Mike Irsay or Art Modell about this one) but L.A. did not particularly support its teams very well.
I’m waiting for baseball to “contract” and return to a league with a managable base for the player talent… as it is now, the talent is spread so thin that, coupled with free agency, we’re stuck with “Florida Marlins” syndrome… Plus if I see one more teal and/or purple sports uniform, I’m gonna shoot someone.
Jason R Remy
“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate”
Warden in Cool Hand Luke
This is slightly off topic, but fan support of a team is often phrased like it is the fans fault for not showing up, instead of team management’s fault for not putting a better product on the field or for not handling public relations better. Fans don’t have a duty to support a team, just like they have no duty to support a particular restaurant or movie or any other form of recreation / entertainment. Just putting the name of the city in the team name doesn’t make it a civic enterprise (except for the Green Bay Packers, of course, which are a civic enterprise).
IMHO you can’t blame fans for not turning out when the team stinks of when team management is busy crying about what a poor venue they play in. If management calls its own park a dump, how can they expect the populace to think differently, or to readily pay money to sit in a dump?
Contrast this with the Cubs, whose announcers constantly use the phrase “Beautiful Wrigley Field” so now their fans believe it.
Yep, I’m a former abstract reader, too.
I have to disagree with you somewhat on fan support, though. First off, Wrigley IS beautiful, and people go for the stadium rather than watch good baseball.
And there are some teams which aren’t adequately supported. The Phillies this year, for one. They were in in the thick the WC race until a month ago, they feature exciting young players (Rolen, Abreu) and one of the best pitchers in the game. And they were pulling in less than 15k a night all season. Or think of the white sox of the early/mid 90s–always better than the Cubs, with a new stadium, but the Cubs drew better.
In general, yes, people come to see good teams; but there are plenty of exceptions.
“It all started with marbles in school…”