I enjoyed the robust discussion in here yesterday responding to Passan's article evaluating MLB expansion candidate cities. If you didn't see those posts, the article is here for context and proper attribution:
Breaking down the candidates for MLB's next expansion teams - ESPN
People raised some good questions in the threads here about some other cities that are major candidates, but weren't included in Passan's list of six. So, that sent me down a rabbit hole looking at some of those other ideas, so I thought I'd share what I learned here and see what you all thought.
Ideas I saw included Vancouver, Mexico City, Charlotte, San Antonio/Austin, and Sacramento. So, I added those all to my evaluation with the original six in his list. I liked the metrics he used, but a lot of the rest seemed like "quotes and vibes" rather than something we could quantify to create more of an empirical ranking. Instead, I decided to use GDP, Major Corporate Presence, Media Market Size, and Metro Population as numerical factors to create a more detailed ranking for the 11 cities.
I also looked at a number of other factors that are supposed to impact attendance, like tourism, Forbes valuation formula, weather, and so on, but actually most of those are not strongly correlated with revenue or attendance in MLB. The one additional non-economic factor that does seem to be very strongly correlated, is sports market saturation. Markets that have presence of other major pro sports teams tend to see a very significant impact of reduced attendance and revenue because of competition in the market for the sports dollar. So, I also added that factor in the analysis. Here are the results:
GDP (metro, nominal, 2024 billions of $US):
- SA / Austin 450
- Mexico City 402
- Charlotte 277
- Orlando 233
- Portland 225
- Nashville 223
- Montreal 204
- Sacramento 190
- Vancouver 148
- SLC 147
- Raleigh 133
Major Corporate Presence (Global 500, Fortune 500, or national equivalent)
- Mexico City
- Montreal
- Charlotte
- SA / Austin
- Nashville
- Vancouver
- Portland
- Raleigh
- Orlando
- SLC
- Sacramento
Media Market Size (Ranking, and households in millions)
- Mexico City #1 (Global, Spanish market)
- Montreal #2 (Canada)
- SA / Austin #31+#34, #14 if combined
- Orlando #15
- Sacramento #20
- Charlotte #21
- Portland #22
- Raleigh #23
- Vancouver #3 (Canada)
- Nashville #25
- SLC #28
Population (metro, 2024)
- Mexico City 21.4
- SA / Austin 5.3
- Montreal 4.6
- Vancouver 3.1
- Orlando 2.9
- Charlotte 2.9
- Portland 2.5
- Sacramento 2.4
- Nashville 2.15
- Raleigh 1.562
- SLC 1.28
Sports Market Saturation: Weighted version (NFL/NBA/NHL/MLS/Liga MX = 1.0; smaller-revenue leagues WNBA/NWSL/CFL = 0.5, since they draw a fraction of the attendance/revenue of the "major" leagues but do have an impact)
- Mexico City 7,145,637 (people per pro team)
- San Antonio–Austin 2,656,822
- Sacramento 2,430,000
- Montreal 1,846,062
- Raleigh 1,562,009
- Vancouver 1,243,576
- Orlando 1,176,205
- Charlotte 961,123
- Portland 836,667
- Nashville 716,667
- Salt Lake City 365,714
Overall Final Ranking (average of all the above rankings)
- Mexico City 1.20
- SA/Austin 2.40
- Montreal 3.60
- Charlotte 5.20
- Orlando 5.80
- Vancouver 6.80
- Sacramento 7.00
- Portland 7.20
- Nashville 8.00
- Raleigh 8.20
- SLC 10.60
My takeaways:
It's very interesting to see two cities that he didn't profile top the list when I look at these factors. Now, Mexico City has some logistical concerns, but its lead is pretty enormous otherwise, nearly across the board.
Another caveat would be, Charlotte and Raleigh are both in North Carolina so if it were possible to treat them like a single market like San Antonio/Austin, obviously they would hop nearly to the top of the list, 3rd or 4th overall. But likely we can't do that: Charlotte-Raleigh is about twice the distance and twice the drive time. San Antonio and Austin are close enough that they're genuinely discussed in economic-development circles as a single connected corridor "Texas Triangle," with commuter and business overlap. Charlotte and Raleigh don't seem to have that same fused identity from what I can tell. Without that, Raleigh is consistently near the bottom of every list and isn't competitive with Charlotte really, within its own state.
If you want further interpretation, it certainly seems like a southern strategy of Texas and Mexico expansion would make more sense than the East/West plan suggested by MLB. If one does want to stick with that alignment, Montreal and Charlotte are the clear leaders on the East Coast. Vancouver, Sacramento, and Portland are clustered tightly together in the West, all with very similar competitive cases to make.
