Other city?
Good heavens, I don’t care. Someplace with financially well-established ownership, and realistic plans for a ballpark. Other than that, why should it matter to me where MLB decides to put it?
It won’t be in Dayton, I know that! 
Sorry. Guess Montreal was only city you felt strongly about.
I would expand as well to 16 teams per league, and have 4 divisions each.
It’s not a matter just of cities, but of finding an owner with a billion dollars. Montreal is the best available open city, but you need an owner with a billion dollars, and while there is a grassroots campaign there and a lot of interest in getting baseball back, there is not an owner stepping up with a billion dollars.
If you could find owners with a billion dollars the most logical choices would probably be - nobody wants to hear this, but here goes - New York and Los Angeles. Both markets are so immense and physically large that a third team would go just great; a New York-area team in Brooklyn or New Jersey would pull in more than enough people, and Los Angeles could put a team in Ontario and have it make a zillion dollars.
If you want to avoid metropolitan areas that already have teams, here’s your list of the biggest cities (by metro area) in the USA and Canada that aren’t already hosting a team:
- Montreal, QC
- Vancouver, BC
- San Juan, PR
- Portland, OR
- Sacramento, CA
- Orlando, FL
- Las Vegas, NV
- Columbus, OH
- Charlotte, NC
All around the same size for #10 are Austin, Indianapolis, Nashville and a few others.
None of these cities are exactly slam dunks and I’d be skeptical of any effort that did not involve a MAJOR corporation, especially one with a media arm, that could use its deep pockets and cross-media marketing abilities to fire it up. Once you get below Orlando you are below metro populations of 2 million. There are MLB teams in that area, but not many of them and they are the ones often claimed to be hamstrung by salary limitations.
Montreal is (by a wide margin) the largest city on the list, but the city government is unlikely to pony up for a new stadium, something MLB insists on; they don’t want the teams building their own ballparks.
Vancouver’s an interesting possibility.
San Juan is very spread out and I’m not sure it’s wealthy enough to pull off MLB, but of course baseball’s a religion there and there’s the pride factor. It’d be an interesting case.
Portland, like Vancouver, is an interesting possibility. The Mariners wouldn’t like it but oh well. I’m not sure they get that many ticket sales from a city 3 hours away.
Sacramento is close to two existing teams.
Orlando is in Florida, which has not turned out to be a sensational idea.
Las Vegas has a transient population and baseball dislikes open connections to gambling.
Columbus is two hours or less from two other teams.
When you get down as far as Charlotte you’re getting well under two million people.
Fair question, and the answer is that I’m a third- or fourth-generation Giants fan who recently moved to the northeast. All I can say is that I understand the objections that were raised when teams started moving west… it’s a bitch to keep up with a team that hardly ever plays during your waking hours. 
(Except in the very old-school form of reading the box scores the next morning.)
So yes, I have overlooked some of the details of the last couple of years. But I never liked the wild card format and extending it for essentially non-game reasons sucks.
If we can’t contract back to two divisions in each league, I’d rather see a three-team playoff series than these increasingly mickey-mouse “audience participation” rounds.
Or, fuck it, let’s go to a 50% playoff format like basketball. It’s all about keeping the attention of folks who think a dog and a beer once every two years is what it’s all about, right?
Agreed. This is the best possible course.
Eh… the issue with both NY and LA is that fans have already chosen their team. The Mets worked out because you had a number of NL NY Metro fans who fell in love with the Giants and Dodgers and were never going to transfer their allegiances to the Yankees. As for LA, the Angels started major league play in 1966, not too long after the Dodgers moved (in 1958). The fan bases have become too entrenched.
I mean it seems like a good idea on the surface, but then the question is, which fans could you mine for a base?
For one, the Charlotte metro area is actually larger than a lot of these (including Portland, Orlando, etc). 2.3mil people and growing by over 5% from 2010 to 2013:
I think that’d be a great spot to put a team. It’s minor league team gets some good attendance (it helps that the park is nice and convenient to downtown).
San Antonio is also fairly large (2.2mil) and growing fast (over 6%), and not really all that close to Houston.
So, I think that Charlotte and either Portland or San Antonio would be good additions.
Oops, make that 1961 for the Angels.
(while I’m at it, put Charlotte in the AL and Portland / San Antonio in the NL - therefore the closest MLB team will be in the other league)
It’s a game, not an art form or a sacred ceremony. The only reason it exists in the first place is to intrigue the audience.
As one who lives in Columbus, I think it would be a hard market to do. There’s not a lot of space for a MLB ballpark without tearing out something or putting it away from downtown. We have two MLB franchises within two hours and three within 3 hours, and a AAA club that is the farm team for the Indians that keeps the baseball fans satisfied. (And their ballpark is quite awesome for a minor league park…wonderful place to see a game). I do think an NBA team could work in Columbus. The Blue Jackets have had pretty decent support over the years, and Nationwide Arena could certainly do basketball too.
Indianapolis makes more sense to me for a midwest team.
Not really. It’s a Reds town, and is only 2 hours from Cincy. There are plenty of Cubs fans as well, which is 3 hours away. We also have one of the best minor league parks in the country right downtown, and building an MLB stadium would make it obsolete - which no one is interested in doing. People are still a little sore over the tax increase to pay for Lucas Oil, and there’s rumblings over a possible soccer stadium in the future for our new NASL team (not to mention the disastrous attempt to build an international cricket stadium/field/thing last year). We’re near a saturation point, and MLB baseball is unlikely to do well here.
Yes, and no. It intrigues the audience because it has a specific form and complexity. Attracting a larger audience by making it shinier and noisier adds nothing and detracts much from the specific form.
These gimmicks are like the Hollywood formula of throwing in proven demographic magnets whether they have anything to do with the story at all - a love interest, a dog, a sporting event, a crisis - and in most cases they detract, not add, no matter how it affects the bottom line.
Baseball is a rare sport in that it’s about the longest possible grind. A season is not a handful of games that could be tipped one way or the other by a few flukes. It’s not a half-season of calisthenics followed by a half-season of elimination playoffs. It’s 162 games in a row, day in and day out, that determine the victors. To add even one loser to the mix is a shortcut that weakens the meaning of the three teams who were victors. To add yet another loser makes the whole playoff scenario a joke and makes the season itself largely irrelevant. With a second wild-card team, a flat-out loser six or seven games out of contention could fluke their way into a pennant or even a Series win… making a pointless joke out of all that went before it.
Making baseball into a fast-moving, all-comers, free-for-all is to miss every point except the owners’ profits. I’d rather see MLB drop to a minor sport, on the level of the current AAA circuit, than see it destroyed by sticking clowns and audience-participation nonsense all over it.
But then, I feel the same way about poker. Get off my goddamn lawn.
To be fair, I think the Midwest is already saturated with teams. The Southeast and Northwest are fairly empty (just Atlanta, and then the Florida teams [who don’t particularly count 
) in the Southeast and just Seattle in the Northwest) and would likely be better places to put teams.
Which is why I picked Charlotte and especially Portland.
(Bolding mine)
How is the new system “more fair”? If anything, sorting teams by record without consideration of their divisional standing is more fair. Now, you get teams with superior records having to play the wild card play-off because they were unlucky enough to have an even better team in their division.
Last year, the Pirates had the 3rd best record in the league, but had to win the 1-gamer against the Reds. Meanwhile, the Dodgers got automatic entry into the division series despite playing in one of the worst divisions in baseball.
Even worse, in 2012 the Tigers won their division and gained automatic entry to the ALDS with an 88-74 record, while the 93-win Rangers and Orioles had to duke it out in the WC playoff, and the 90- and 89-win Angels got to watch from the sidelines.
This year could be the worst yet, as the A’s could finish with the 2nd best record in all of baseball and have to play a playoff just to get into the playoffs proper.
Jumping in here to say thanks for that comment. I searched to find that you must be talking about the Columbus Clippers. My search led me to this handy-dandy page that summarizes the MiLB affiliates, and I wanted to share for any who weren’t aware of this page.
MiLB Affiliations: http://www.milb.com/milb/info/affiliations.jsp
Because if you can’t even win your own division, why do you deserve any advantage at all? Who cares if your record is bigger than someone in a different division - you didn’t win your own division. These teams don’t play balanced schedules after all - they play far more games among teams in their own divisions than ones outside of them.
Exactly. I’m not going to assert it as a fact that this is fairer, but I think you can make a good argument that it is and that the playing field needed to be leveled. Under the old system, wild card teams didn’t always play the best team in their league, and because of the format of the division series they had a good chance to finish the series at home. By my count, between 1995 and 2011 five wild-card teams won the World Series.
The downside to this, or any non-wildcard system, is that it’s worse for teams in strong divisions. If the second-best team in the league is in the same division as the best team in the league, they don’t get to go to the playoffs, when much weaker teams might.
That’s very true, and quite frankly, given a schedule where every team in a division plays the same number of games against the same teams, I don’t care. Them’s the breaks; life’s not fair.
Nobody says it has to be fair. It has to be* meaningful*. If a noncontending team gets a golden Willy Wonka ticket at the last minute, it may be “fair” on some level but it renders so much of the season and effort meaningless.