I think MLB is a possibility here. CLT has a new AAA Stadium, seems landlocked, We live in an area between ATL & DC, with +20 million without a MLB team. We have the developers, we need a buyer. Raleigh Blue Jays. Dream big.
Been a slow couple of months on the MLB to Raleigh front, so I figured I’d post this news story, although some folks may have have already seen it:
City and team officials agreed, he wrote, to “abide by the existing use agreement” that would keep the [Tampa Bay Rays] at Tropicana Field through the 2027 season, when it would be free to play games elsewhere.
The news here is not really that newsy, honestly, since the “sister city” plan was always mind-bogglingly dumb, and the Rays already had an ironclad use agreement that binds them to the Trop through 2027. But the Rays have begun to take a pretty aggressive posture that they’re going to consider leaving the Tampa market as early as 2028. Rob Manfred has said pretty forcefully that MLB is not going to expand until the Rays have their situation resolved, so if MLB sticks to that commitment, which I’m pretty confident they will, it seems very, very unlikely that the league will expand before 2028, and I’d be shocked if any teams relocate between now and then.
On the other hand, hey, it looks the Rays are going to start actively start looking for other places to play in 2028. Raleigh would still be kind of a long shot, candidly. Montreal remains the overwhelming favorite to land the next available franchise, while moving the Rays to Orlando would have the decided advantage of keeping the team connected to its existing fan base. But, hey, this is little tidbit near the end of the Post’s story was kind of interesting:
MLB has a number of active expansion bids in the South, including in Raleigh, N.C., and Orlando, where Pat Williams, co-founder of the NBA’s Orlando Magic, has already pitched the team name “Orlando Dreamers.”
Raleigh, N.C. has reached the eyes of the Washington Post.
Side-note: “Orlando Dreamers” has to be the CHEEEEESIEST team name I’ve ever heard. And I am well aware Nola is home to the Pelicans. 
Are any of Raleigh area billionaires baseball fans? James?
Actually, I like the Pelicans name. The pelican is featured on Louisiana’s flag and state seal, and one of Louisiana’s nicknames is “The Pelican State.” The bird has been a symbol of Louisiana since the arrival of early European settlers, who were impressed with the Pelican’s generous and nurturing attitude toward their young.
But, yeah, this shows you the power of having a name picked out and having a former big-time sports executive running your effort. The Orlando effort is really just one guy, it just happens to be a guy with some very good connections among sportswriters, so it’s getting press coverage as if it’s this very serious thing, which it’s not. (I’m sure Pat Williams is wealthier than your average person, but he’s not even close to being wealthy enough to be the principal owner of an MLB team.)
Possibly, but the nice thing about sports owners is they don’t have to be local. All they need is the cash and a market that’s primed for the product, viable by MLB’s standards, and won’t infringe too closely on another existing market.
Not Goodnight. He’d just put in Chatham County and nobody got time for that.
2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Stadium at the Penmarc Site (Downtown South)
Maybe some Bay Area tech $$$ looking to escape will get a wild hair!!
15 posts were merged into an existing topic: Stadium at the Penmarc Site (Downtown South)
Rays staying in Tampa sounding less and less likely
“If the sharing plan [with Montreal] can’t be worked out, Sternberg said he would either then start looking for a new home elsewhere or, more likely, sell the team to someone who would move it.”
Anybody got Goodmon’s/Dundon’s/Kane’s digits???
Sternberg already has a very close working relationship with Stephen Bronfman’s group. If Sternberg does decide to sell the Rays, most likely he sells the team to the Bronfman group, and they move the team to Montreal full-time and rechristen them as the Expos. MLB would then likely solicit bids for two more expansion franchises, but the top priority would be finding an ownership group in Florida to fill the void left by the Rays’ departure, because the market itself is a great market.
Is Montreal getting a new ball park or are they proposing to play in that aging relic, Olympic Park?
It is MUCH tougher to get public money for stadiums than it here.
I just don’t think of Montreal as a major league ball town, I don’t recall a lot of support or attendance for their last version of the Expos.
Sternberg didn’t seem to think Montreal made a good full-time franchise, and said he’d be looking to sell elsewhere. Whether that is a bargaining tool, I do not know.
I’m sure this is almost entirely a ploy in negotiations. But if Sternberg were to sell the team then it would no longer matter what he thinks of Montreal. The Bronfmans are quite adamant that they believe Montreal can support an MLB team full-time. FWIW, 1. I agree with Bronfman; Montreal is a perfectly viable market. 2. The “sister city” plan that Sternberg is floating is just mind-bogglingly stupid, and even if the owners approved it (which I doubt they would), the players’ union would never go for it in a million years, so I don’t know why Sternberg keeps talking about it. Wherever the Rays play, they will play there full-time.
@pBeez The Montreal group seems pretty confident that they can get a new stadium done, notwithstanding the fact that Canadians are indeed generally much less keen on public stadium subsidies than Americans are. MLB would never let a team move back to Olympic Stadium (except on a very short-term basis as a new stadium is being built), so if the stadium plan falls through, the bid for an MLB team in Montreal falls through.
I think an MLB team in Montreal would do just fine this time around. MLB is in much better financial shape than it was in the 1990s, and a new stadium would probably help, but the biggest issue with the old Expos was that then-owner Jeffrey Loria absolutely sabotaged the relationship between the team and the city, just as he later did with the Miami Marlins. (It also didn’t help that the original Expos were generally pretty terrible.)
With a new local ownership, a new stadium, MLB’s improved health, a Montreal team would probably draw as well or better than any other candidate city would. It’s attractive to MLB for a lot of reasons: It’s by far the biggest market of the viable candidates, there’s a rich pool of local corporate support, and it’s only candidate that wouldn’t cannibalize existing U.S. TV markets. (Montreal’s natural market would, of course, be French-speaking Quebec.)
If MLB ever expands to 32 teams, which will likely happen at some point, Plan A for MLB is definitely a team in the Tampa-Orlando corridor + reviving the Montreal Expos + one more team, and it sure sounds like MLB would like to add another team in the Pacific Time Zone. There’s no guarantee that Plan A is going to happen, but that certainly looks like the perfect arrangement from MLB’s perspective.
Yeah they blamed it on the stadium and the ownership group, but that’s par for the course when a franchise is failing. At the end of the day, Montreal just didn’t support baseball despite being a massive market.
@daviddonovan Sternberg said he doesn’t view Montreal as a full-time option. Take that for what i’s worth, but it’s right there in the article. It’s a ton to unpack because he needs to make it clear he will move/sell if they don’t build him a new stadium, and at the same time he needs to do his best to not throw his current fans/city under the bus so much that they show up even LESS.
I think in our view, whether you like how it came about or not, this is working itself to be the perfect storm for Raleigh to get MLB.
Don’t take that as me saying the odds are great that Raleigh does get MLB, but for it to happen you have to have the perfect storm. Many things would have to line up and we are far, far away from anything really happening, the dominoes that have fallen have fallen in the right direction.
What I mean is…
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Grassroots effort is less than a year in and has been extremely successful. There is an obvious passion for the game here and there are very few markets that have the community-led movement that we do.
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Population still growing fast (Wake should eclipse Mecklenberg in the near future), business climate growing and new city council put into office.
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MLS choosing to go to Charlotte. Now, it’s not like MLB and MLS couldn’t coexist (they do many other places), but the fact that the MLS push got the ball rolling on stadium logistics, opened up govt conversation on stadium funding does lay a little groundwork should an investor come forward on MLB. It also ends up being one less mouth to feed when you talk about corporate sponsorship. Now, again, based on market size and growth trajectory, both could have always happened, but landing MLS would obviously have decreased odds on an investor coming into the MLB fold.
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Rays potentially being up for sale. Of all the outcomes possible for Raleigh to get an MLB team, moving the Rays here was always the option with the least amount of hurdles. Team could stay in AL East and avoid realignment, no expansion fees, parent club of successful minor league team only 20 miles away. The one hold up was Rays ownership being involved . Now if we take him at his word and he WERE to sell, then you’d have an interesting situation.
Again, yes we do realize Raleigh is a longer shot candidate to land a franchise, but 6-8 years is a long time, and what we are doing is laying a foundation and organizing the community to put Raleigh in the best position we can and show that money-aside, this market is a baseball market, despite what some outsiders may think.
Yeah, a relocation is, in some ways, easier than an expansion bid. (But you’ve still got the stadium funding issue either way.)
So here’s the thing about Wake’s population vis a vis Mecklenburg … look, I’m an urbanist who loves baseball, and so naturally I love the intersection of urbanism and baseball. But in today’s sports landscape, where so much of the revenue comes from TV contracts, teams’ financial fortunes are largely dependent on what kind of support they can draw from the suburbs and the exurbs.
For better or for worse, the success of an MLB team in the Triangle would turn on the ability to turn on televisions in places like Johnston County. Even after Wake County narrowly eclipses Mecklenburg County in population, Charlotte’s still going to be very well situated because of its favorable location relative to where the televisions are.
But that matters only up to a certain point because of the stadium funding issue. MLB is going to put teams in cities that have a good (which is to say, taxpayer-funded) stadium plan in place. If Tampa/Orlando or Montreal or Portland can’t offer a stadium on terms generous for MLB to accept, MLB is going to look for other cities that can.
(Edit: @Loup20 FWIW, from the inception of the franchise until attendance cratered very suddenly in 1998, Montreal’s attendance was usually pretty middle-of-the-pack, despite the team’s on-the-field struggles. For a few years they were even one of the best-attended teams in baseball. I don’t have any good data on TV ratings, but for almost 30 years, that was a well-supported franchise in terms of in-person attendance, and it could certainly be one again. Ultimately, though, what matters is what MLB thinks, and MLB clearly seems to think baseball would be viable in Montreal.)
The 1994 Expos were well on their way to the best record in baseball and a potential World Series berth when the strike happened. The team then traded most of their stars in a cost-cutting move before the next year even started, including Canadian native Larry Walker. It’s a very unique situation compared to other franchises that have struggled. By the time the team was even close to watchable again after 1994, the club had traded the last star of the 1994 team (Pedro Martinez), ended English-language radio and TV broadcasts of games, was placed into the receivership of MLB, threatened with contraction, and scheduled 18 home games a year in Puerto Rico. Can you blame the people of Montreal for telling them to go kick rocks?
Anyway, I’m supporting the MLB to Raleigh movement as much as anyone, but we don’t need to tear down other cities to make our case. That, ironically, is the definition of bush league.
Fair enough. I’m actually basing that comment off a conversation with the guy who interviewed us from CBS Sports. We spoke a lot about Montreal actually (bc it was one of the cities he was focusing on) and he said that the fan’s take was that the stadium and the ownership group sunk their ship and he said he’s wasn’t really sure how true that was.
However, looking at attendance figures, you’re right, Montreal didn’t do bad, so that was probably my bias speaking and jumping to conclusions. My apologies.