For organized baseball, yes. As much as I love an inexpensive summer night at the minors, scouting has gotten so good that you just aren’t going to find many rough gems in the minors. Most of the men are there because you need nine men on the field even though 95% jabs no chance at the majors.
Maybe we will see more independent leagues.
Not true! It was 20 years and 2 months when the Miami Fusion and Tampa Bay Mutiny were dissolved 
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This interesting and well-done video talks about the problems associated with the NFL expanding into the UK (2019/14 mins):
The Twins owner, Carl Pohlad, voted for it, then tried to deny it.
What seems like 20 years ago, I did some calculations related to baseball and how many teams could be supported. Given the population in say 1900 for 16 teams, population growth, not to mention integration and tapping into players from other countries, there could easily be 36 teams (I think I came up with more) with no reduction in the play level. So if your argument is there is not enough people to fill that many teams without sacrificing the quality, I don’t buy it.
Seems to me if the same teams keep winning (or seemingly so), it’s more because the top tier talent is concentrated on those teams. There may be reasons for that: big market team, players want to play there because of the money. Those teams may just be smart too. The Yankees for example have not had losing seasons in 30 years, can’t be just because they’re richer. Apart from the few teams that seem to do well year after year, the talent level is distributed pretty evenly it seems to me. Nearly every team in the last 20 years have had good and bad years. My guess is that the cumulative records, most are around .500 +/- 030 with maybe ten teams or less outside that range.
As I recall since I was an Expos fan, it was VERY serious. The thing is, they needed to contract two teams and unfortunately, the Twins were the ones picked on. I think the union also helped prevent it, there would have been less jobs. But it was mainly the Twins’ stadium issue. The owners’ vote was 28-2 in favor of contraction.
I agree that New York for example could support three teams. The problem is that the Mets and Yankees would never allow another team in their territory. I also think if you’re going to expand, you want to build more baseball fans in areas where there is no team. It makes less sense to put a team in a city with two teams or even one team already. You want more people interested in the game, not give an extra option to people who are already fans.
Oh I agree MLB doesn’t have the political will to do the right thing.
I would like substantial expansion that both exploits existing markets and finds new ones.
Especially since baseball fandom seems to getting more and more hyper local. It would make better sense for MLB to put a team in Portland (OR) and Charlotte before putting a 3rd team in NYC. And sometimes putting a 3rd team in a metro area isn’t the best of ideas when the fans of a particular sport have already made their choice. I’m reminded of the New Jersey Devils in hockey, who have almost since the beginning been hamstrung by hockey fans in the NYC area being Rangers and Islanders fans and then in South Jersey hockey fans being Flyers fans. Devils got some unserved New Jersey people (myself included when I paid attention to hockey), but they’ve always been on the bottom tier of attendance. Even when they were winning multiple Stanley Cups, it didn’t lead to a massive increase in fans.
I’m not sure Jersey is a great sports market. Brooklyn is where I’d target a new baseball team. Manhattan is likely not physically possible.
The largest markets without a baseball team in North America are all Mexican cities - Mexico City, Monterrey, Puebla, Guadalajara, (and if you don’t mind the Caribbean, Santo Domingo is one hell of a market) and I think you could make that work, but if you want to limit this to the USA and Canada you have, more or less:
ALL of those markets are bigger than Kansas City (well, the last few are arguable.)
But however fertile they may seem, you need a billionaire, or a huge corporation, to WANT to pay a massive expansion fee to create the Vancouver Blue Sox or whatever and who can either build, or prevail upon government to build, a shiny new baseball stadium. That is not going to be an easy sell when MLB can’t even get its own shit together on starting its own season, and in some places it might well be impossible; Montreal fans would be delighted with a real baseball stadium, but I don’t think they’d ever vote to pay for it.
In the NFL, perennial success or failure really comes down to QB quality. As it stands right now, there’s not even 32 starting-caliber QBs.
How well would that sit with the New York Mets, who play in Queens? The driving distance between the two boroughs is only 14 minutes. Would they allow a Brooklyn team to compete with them for attendance or TV and radio rights? The Mets have had all of Long Island to themselves since 1962 and may not give up territory so easily.
US population in 1900 was 76.3 million, so 4.75 million people per team. With a 2020 population of 330 million, there could over 60 major league teams. Of course, baseball didn’t have much competition from other sports for athletes, but even so, MLB could expand without too much quality drop off.
What has really changed are the many fewer minor league teams. Baseball had many, many amatuer, semi-pro, and D, C, B, and A leagues in the past.
One cannot take a look at just the population but it’s a good start.
Montreal, yes
Vancouver, I think the Mariners would have something to say about that, no?
Orlando, you want a 3rd franchise in Florida where the first two are struggling?
SLC, don’t know why you suggest it. Small population, about same as my hometown of Ottawa. Do mormons like baseball?
Charlotte, I don’t know, maybe
Portland, same.
Vegas, bigger than I thought. MLB was reluctant before to put a team there, are they still?
San Antonio, Indianapolis, Austin, I don’t know.
Why not Mexico? Why leave out Mexican cities?
Another problem is as you point out, you need someone with money willing to acquire a team either through buying an existing one and moving it or through expansion. Montreal may be a problem there, unless some corporation does it like with the Blue Jays but right now I don’t see it.
Building a stadium doesn’t seem to be a problem in most cities, most American ones anyway. Atlanta is already on its third one in 25 years.
Do you think that Brooklyn is physically possible? A new stadium in NYC is filled the reddest of red tape (ask NYCFC).
Not to mention that area is pretty saturated with fans of the other two teams in reaaaaly close distance. You’d have really disappointing attendance at least.
Yes, thank you. That’s closer to the number I had in mind but I lowballed it as it seemed too big. And we’re not even taking into account integration and more non-American players than ever before. I even remember talk some years ago that Russians like baseball and in a few decades, we might see Russians major leaguers much like the NHL.
There are less minor leagues today, not to mention independent leagues. The quality of play in the minors has and is improving as well. Got to put all those players somewhere.
That’s definitely a concern. When both the Rams and Chargers announced they were moving to LA, I heard a number of analysts say that even though it’s a huge market, it’s just not a football town. They are all about the Lakers and Dodgers. The Chargers, at least, had a rocky start:
I don’t know how well the teams are doing, relatively speaking (in comparison to the size of the market they are in). The Rams played to pretty empty stadiums not long after the move, but that was before the new stadium got built. I can only imagine that they are doing better with a fancy new stadium, and the influx of bandwagon fans cheering on the current champions.
Bill James once wrote an essay arguing that baseball should lose its antitrust exemption, and that would lead to free minor leagues and more teams and players playing baseball. There may not be as many millionaires playing the game, and teams would go broke and leave town in the middle of the night, but it would lead to a freer system, like before 1900.
Not well, I’d assume. Oh well! I am sur
e the Maple Leafs don’t want a new hockey team in Toronto, either, but Toronto should have one or two more teams. Of course any business wants a monopoly.
If anything that understates it. In 1900, Black people couldn’t play MLB and there were no players from Japan or South Korea or Australia, almost no players from Canada, no Dominicans, no Venezuelans, no Mexicans. Some MLB-quality players from the West played their whole careers, or close to it, in the PCL. Scouting wasn’t as thorough, sports medicine wasn’t as good, and not as much was known about pitching or hitting technique. Players today are WAY better.
Of course expanding to 36 teams in 2023 would mean a downgrade in talent in the short term as compared to 2022, but in all likelihood it would mean a talent level no worse than it was 20 years ago and it really wouldn’t be visually noticeable.
British Columbia is shared between the Mariners and Blue Jays. The Blue Jays have rights to every square inch of Canada; they share BC and Alberta with the Mariners, the Prairies with the Twins, and the Maritimes with the Red Sox. The Jays have rights over Quebec, too.
I would think the Blue Jays would see a lot of opportunity in Canadian rivals. They would want a new Canadian team in the American League.
If your concern is being in another team’s territory, well, you can’t expand. Every part of Canada and the USA is assigned to one or more teams, no matter how far from an MLB team. If you live on the shores of Yellowstone Lake in northwestern Wyoming, congratulations, you as a TV viewer belong to the Rockies.
Salt Lake City isn’t really that small and I suspect there’s be a very strong regional following; there’s a reason Utah Jazz have been so successful. You’d draw from Ogden to Provo, which has to be two million people. SLC isn’t really close to any other MLB team.
I’m just assuming MLB doesn’t want to do this but personally I think it’s a great idea.
While the Salt Lake City Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) has only about 1.2 million people in it, the bigger Salt Lake City-Provo-Ogden Combined Statistical Area (CSA) has about 2.5 million.