Major League Baseball’s delayed Opening Day is fast approaching, and the Owners can begin to watch the turnstiles churn and the cash registers ring once again. But don’t think for one second they’re going to be content with just that.
Fresh off another collective bargaining win over the Player’s Union, they have dollar signs in their eyes. There’s still more out there waiting to be collected. This group of savvy businessmen aren’t going to let the next five years go by leaving anything on the table.
Prediction: After the 2022 season is complete, we’ll begin to hear about MLB plans to expand into two new markets.
The two lucky cities: Las Vegas and Nashville. Big league markets in other sports that are just waiting for MLB to send them the invite.
Two brand new expansion franchises – we’ll call them the Nashville “Sounds” and the Las Vegas “Stars” (former minor league nicknames) for purposes here – would raise the number of teams to a nice even 32. It would be another financial windfall for the owners, who would collect billions from the two new ownership groups for allowing entry into their exclusive club.
This has been in the works for a while now, according to published reports centered on the potential relocation of the Tampa Bay Rays franchise. The Rays ownership would like to move to Nashville, but the rest of the MLB owners have made it clear they aren’t going to give away lucrative territory that easily. And Las Vegas is a no brainer now that sports betting and MLB are business partners.
Expansion has pluses and minuses.
From the Player’s perspective, it means 52 new big league jobs. That makes it an easy sell to the Player’s Union. It will also make further playoff expansion more realistic, and the owners have already made it very clear that they consider that a priority.
On the downside, these owners aren’t the least bit concerned about diluting the talent pool and weakening the quality of play. Whenever there’s been expansion in any professional sport, it has historically weakened the on field product across the board. That apparently doesn’t matter.
They players will get more jobs, and the owners will collect millions each and likely get more lucrative postseason games for TV.
So if this is going to happen, what will it look like?
Having 32 teams makes it easy to form eight four-team divisions. It will require some shuffling divisions of not just teams within leagues, but also team changing leagues. Tradition will matter some – the Mets and Yankees aren’t leaving the East for instance – but when the owners moved the Houston Astros to the American League after 51 years as members of the NL, and the Milwaukee Brewers to the NL after almost three decades in the AL. In doing so, they showed that some of the less revered “long standing traditions” won’t stand in the way of dollars, err…progress.
Prediction: The Arizona Diamondbacks and Miami Marlins will move to the American League. Houston will return to the NL, along with Kansas City and Minnesota.
The new realigned MLB will look like this:
American League:
East: New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Baltimore Orioles, Toronto Blue Jays
Central: Texas Rangers, Cleveland Guardians, Detroit Tigers, Chicago White Sox
South: Miami Marlins, Atlanta Braves, Tampa Bay Rays, Nashville Sounds
West: Seattle Mariners, Oakland A’s, Anaheim Angels, Arizona Diamondbacks
National League:
East: New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, Washington Nationals, Pittsburgh Pirates
Central: Chicago Cubs, Milwaukee Brewers, St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds
Midwest: Colorado Rockies, Kansas City Royals, Minnesota Twins, Houston Astros
West: San Francisco Giants, Las Vegas Stars, San Diego Padres, Los Angeles Dodgers
There are MLB rivalries – Dodgers-Giants, Yankees-Red Sox, etc. that will not be altered at all by this. And there are some natural rivalries that should exist – Royals-Rockies, Marlins-Rays – that can be born of this new arrangement.
It’s really kind of hard to see how there will be any real resistance to this round of expansion. Which is exactly what the money-first MLB owners are banking on.
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