The largest North American metro areas without a baseball team, not counting “metro” areas that are in fact part of another one, like Riverside-Ontario or San Jose;
- Montreal, 3,800,000
- Vancouver, 2,300,000
- Portland, 2,200,000
- Sacramento, 2,100,000
- San Antonio, 2,100,000
- Orlando, 2,100,000
- Las Vegas, 1,900,000
- Columbus, OH, 1,800,000
- Charlotte, Indianapolis, and Austin, all around 1,700,000
Even if you found a happy owner with stadim money a lot of these are problematic as a relocation spot. Montreal is the only one above the MLB average and, for obvious reasons, that market was poisoned by experience and wouldn’t give a nickel for a new stadium, so forget it. Vancouver or Portland might be a go, they’re big enough with the right owner.
What’s striking about looking at population numbers, though, is how obvious it is that the best spot for a relocated team is New York City. The baseball teams should go to where the baseball fans are. New York is just so enormous, it’s rich, and it’s got baseball on the brain; even with the market dominance of the Yankees and Mets, there’s no a doubt in my mind a third team would do well there. The New Jersey or Brooklyn A’s would, I believe, do just fine.
I realize people are sometimes like “well, New York already has baseball, screw them.” But that’s not how it works. There are EIGHTEEN MILLION people in that metro area, more than all but 3 entire states, excluding NY itself. The fans are there, and they’re underserved; as it is it’s hard to get decent, affordable tickets to a Yankees game. Moving the A’s to New York City would make sense for precisely the same reason moving the Phoenix Coyotes to Toronto would make sense; while you have fewer city names in your league, you’re actually serving more fans.
I mean, the Japanese League has five of 12 teams in the Tokyo-Yokohama metroplex, because it just makes sense. That’s where the baseball fans are and where the corporate cash is. They don’t have a team on Skokaku out of a sense of geographical fairness because there’s just not enough people there to merit it, and as it is the one team on Hokkaido is perpetually short of money; it’s sort of the Montreal Expos of NPB. (They’re the ones who sold Yu Darvish; they simply needed the money.) The English Premier LEagues has five teams in London, because that’s where the fans are.
It might seem “unfair” to cities to have no team in Oakland but three teams in New York, but cities don’t support teams. Fans do, and you’ve got to find the fans.
Who knows; a deep pocketed owner could make a team work in Portland, Vancouver, or Austin, I dunno. I know I’d be likelier to invest in NYC.
Conversely, SF-Oakland is a questionable location for two teams; it’s certainly not small, but it’s not a huge metro area. Even if you account for the wealth there, and include San Jose, it’s no bigger a market than Toronto or Houston, two cities nobody thinks need a second team.