A number of folks have already noted the likely reasons why MLB isn’t likely to expand into Mexico (or other Latin countries).
I also think it’s highly unlikely that they’ll further expand into Canada. MLB realizes that there’s a serious imbalance between the big-market teams (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, etc.) and the small-market teams (Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Milwaukee, etc.) A large chunk of each team’s income comes from their local media contracts (local TV and radio coverage of their games), and that’s revenue which isn’t shared across teams.
Most of the Canadian markets would qualify as “small” markets in MLB parlance, at best. This isn’t a perfect list, because it only shows the size of the cities, not the entire market area, but this gives you an idea of size of Canadian cities, relative to some of the “small market” MLB cities in the US:
Pittsburgh: 316,000
Milwaukee: 579,000
Cleveland: 452,000
Kansas City (MO): 445,000
Minneapolis + St. Paul: 648,000
I’d have to believe that adding franchises in Canada (short of putting a new franchise in Montreal) would be simply adding more poor-sister, small-market teams to the leagues.
Population size is tough to judge. Why include Minneapolis+St. Paul and not include Kansas City (MO)+Kansas City (KS)? Here are those 5 US cities by market size:
Pittsburgh: 1,979,400
Milwaukee: 1,453,300
Cleveland: 1,763,700
Kansas City (MO): 1,607,500
Minneapolis + St. Paul: 2,712,500
Larger/Similar cities without a MLB team:
Portland: 2,106,200
Charlotte: 2,008,600
Sacramento: 1,839,800
Salt Lake City: 1,735,700
San Antonio: 1,698,300
Las Vegas: 1,574,100
(I couldn’t find anything regarding market size for Canadian cities. Anyone’s google-fu not acting up?)
Yeah, I should probably have included Kansas City KS. I was only showing cities because I, too, couldn’t find total market population for the Canadian markets.
It looks like (and I may well be wrong here, I’m going off of what my road atlas tells me) the western provinces have very thin populations outside of the major cities. For example, Alberta has Calgary and Edmonton, but only 6 other cities with 20,000 or more people. Manitoba and Saskatchewan, combined, are only around 2.1 million people.
Would Americans travel to Mexico to watch their teams play? I know it’s not uncommon in the US for die-hard fans to visit every stadium. I also know that tons of Chicago, Boston and New York fans travel to Cleveland just to watch a game.
I know it’s not the case for southwesterners, but a trip to Mexico is kind of exotic for most Americans, isn’t it? Going to Toronto is no big deal. Heck, I even went to Montreal to see the Indians play. But I don’t think I could see myself going to Mexico to see my team play. Mostly for the language factor, but also just that it’s too exotic for my midwestern tastes.
My point is that a Mexican team would just seem too distanced from the rest of the MLB. I can’t imagine that teams don’t count on a little bit of revenue from non-local fans. It might be novel for some, but I just don’t see it being a stable source of income in the long term.
Before the Expos moved out of Montreal, they played some of their regular-season games in San Juan, Puerto Rico for a couple of years.
Monterrey and San Juan were both in the conversation as possible relocation sites for the team before they landed in Washington. I can’t say how seriously those cities were considered, but it wasn’t just out of the question.
There certainly are other issues. Security is a huge one. Image a mlb player kidnapped going to a game. Altitude is another as Mexico City I believe is higher up than Denver. Ultimately, if the economics worked though, they would find a way to make it happen.
It takes more than having enough people who can theoretically afford to go to games. Who is building the stadium? Would a private party be willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars? Would the Mexico government be able to justify helping with the cost.
Who is going to buy luxury boxes? Would there be enough corporate interest?
How interested are locals in major league baseball? It is hard to see it being instantly a popular there as it is in the U.S.
How are the secondary markets? Are there enough people who will travel 30, 45, 60 miles a couple times a year? Will they buy merchandise, watch on TV, and support in other ways. The reason Vegas doesn’t have a team isn’t due to gambling issues. It is because the secondary markets don’t exist.
And so on. I am not an expert, and can’t answer these questions thoroughly, but I suspect a Mexican team isn’t worth the effort. Nate Silver did a piece a couple years ago on where an expansion team should go. #1 was Charlotte, I believe Puerto Rico was 4, and Mexico City wasn’t even considered.
Some more thoughts about Mexico: the Mexican League is a AAA minor league affiliated with MLB. There are 16 teams in the league, which is divided into northern and southern zones of 8 teams each. Each team schedules 110 games a year. Total attendance for the entire league was about 2.3 million as late as 2003. The most expensive single-game ticket for the Laguna Vaqueros (based in Torreón, Coahuila) is 110 pesos, or about $8.54 in U.S. dollars with today’s exchange rate. It looks to me like baseball isn’t nearly popular enough in Mexico to support a major league team.
As for putting teams in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic - while it’s true that baseball is very popular in both of these countries, putting major league teams there would create big travel problems. Each team in MLB plays almost every day for a six-month season. It would be especially hard to fit Venezuela into a team’s travel schedule, and a Venezuelan team might drop dead from jet lag before the season is half finished.
A big problem with the Dominican Republic is that the country is very poor compared to the U.S. Yes, you could fill a huge stadium for almost every game, but how much could you charge for tickets, souvenirs, TV rights, advertising, etc.?
I’ve known several businesspeople who’ve lived in Mexico City (solidly middle-class by U.S. standards, but pretty wealthy by Mexican standards). They told me that having bodyguards, security fences, etc. was simply the standard for them. Can you imagine what it’d be like for a millionaire baseball player, and his family? And, I suspect that most of the players would be more concerned about their families being kidnapped than themselves. I suspect this would be a huge disincentive for players (particularly non-Hispanic players) to play for a Mexican team, particularly in Mexico City.
Probably so, but it still demonstrates that there are only three markets in Canada which are likely to be big enough to even have a ghost of a chance of supporting an MLB team:
Toronto (already has one)
Montreal (lost the Expos. Even back in the 1980s, when the Expos were pretty good, the conventional wisdom was that Montreal was a hockey town, and the Expos had a hard time drawing big crowds. I don’t see MLB going back there)
Vancouver (only 140 miles from an existing MLB market in Seattle)
Well, you’re responding to arguments i never made.
Your first argument in this thread was specifically about income levels, and that’s the argument i was addressing. It has nothing to do with security or altitude. Neither of which, by the way, are very compelling arguments in my opinion.
Which is pretty much what i said.
I’m sure that the potential owners would do exactly those sorts of calculations. They would look at the potential market, and decide whether or not it was worth it to invest in the costs of bringing a franchise to the city.
As for the Mexican government, i don’t think they should help with the cost at all. If the team is economically viable, then let a private owner foot the bill; if the team is not economically viable, then don’t saddle the Mexican government, and the Mexican people, with the financial burden of subsidizing it.
I don’t know, but there is no shortage of prosperous companies in Mexico, including both local corporations and the Mexican offices of transnationals. Mexico City has a wealthy financial and commercial center; it’s not just 20 million people living in a shantytown.
I don’t know. It could be that no-one would go and watch. That’s the sort of thing that the potential owner and MLB would have to think about. But i’d be pretty hesitant about dismissing it out of hand. And again, it’s not the same thing as income and economics, which was the argument i was responding to initially.
Again, i don’t know. but neither do you. It could be that, if Mexico had one team, the whole country would rally around it in the spirit of national unity and “beat the Yanquis” fervor.
I’m pretty sure that Tokyo wasn’t considered either, even though you know that an MLB team in Tokyo would sell out every game and draw a huge television audience.
The reason Mexico City wasn’t considered, i would guess, is that Silver’s argument was explicitly based on an assumption that the United states and Canada were the possible places where a new team would be added. He says:
If he had explicitly considered Mexico City, and rejected it, you might have a point. But the fact that he was only focused on the US and Canada doesn’t really tell us much at all about Mexico.
Didn’t they see an opportunity to make some more money by allowing another team in an already existing market? I mean wasn’t it just picking the low lying fruit essentially? No language barrier, no border issues, existing overlapping tv exposure, shared advertising demographic.
Only 140 miles? Wow! We can’t have two teams within 140 miles of one another.
Guess we should ask two teams out of the Phillies, Orioles, and Nationals to fold. And maybe either the Giants or the Athletics. Detroit and Cleveland are only a bit further apart than that, too. And Cleveland is only 140 miles from Pittsburgh.
Not to mention that Portland, one of the largest markets without a baseball team in the US, is only about 20 miles further away from Seattle than Vancouver is.
Just to note that the Orioles owner protested vociferously when the Expos became the Nationals, and moved into their backyard. Of the rest of the teams you mention, all have been in their current locations for 40 years or longer.
It may not be a primary consideration, but I would suspect that proximity to existing franchises is a factor which’ll be considered if MLB expands again. They’re likely to want to move into an untapped market.
Yeah, but the Orioles owners is a raging selfish asshole. And i say that as an Orioles fan. MLB should have told him to go fuck himself when he started whining about the Nationals.
Hey, Dickweed Angelos, it’s not the Nationals cutting into your viewership, it’s the crappy performance of your team. You know what might get people to watch Orioles games again? Put a team on the field that can go above .500 for the first time in over a decade.
I believe they had to mollify him somehow. I can’t remember how exactly, but one part of it was they had to guarantee him a certain price if he decided to sell the Orioles, and if he didn’t get that much, MLB had to make up the difference.
The six teams you described are today often called the “Original Six,” but they are not, in fact, the original NHL teams. The NHL started with four teams, all Canadian, and expanded into New York, Detroit, Chicago and Boston later.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the OP is more familiar with the soccer world, where it is a (stupid) FIFA enforced law that all leagues must contained within domestic borders. Any variences (Toronto in the US league, Auckland in the Austrailian league) must be petitioned for from FIFA.
This is probably why the OP is astounded that MLB is “allowed” to have teams in Canada.