I guess we won’t know unless somebody tries it, but I think that’s pretty gettable in terms of a fan base. The issue isn’t so much the roads, because at that distance you’re mostly looking to turn on televisions rather than sell in-person tickets. (And the tickets you would sell wouldn’t be people making a special trip to Charlotte to see a game; it would largely be people catching a game while they were already in Charlotte for some other reason.) It wouldn’t be much different than a Raleigh franchise trying to win over fans in Winston-Salem, which I also think would be doable. Even one or two in-person games a season would be enough to convert a serious baseball fan into a fan of the new local team who then watches them a lot on TV.
BTW, @OakCityDylan, the comparison I was trying to draw wasn’t whether Fayetteville is more of a Raleigh place or a Charlotte place. If a team came to Raleigh, that team would absolutely dominate the Fayetteville market. But if MLB put a team in Charlotte instead, that team would probably do okay in Fayetteville. Conversely, there’s nothing in the Charlotte TV market that would be fertile ground for a Raleigh team.
All of these different cities and areas that we’re talking about as being important places to build a fan base, though, kind of suggest that whether an MLB team gets added in Raleigh or Charlotte, it would probably brand itself as “Carolina” [team name] to try to catch as much of the area as possible. It’s hard to imagine an MLB team choosing to brand itself as the “Raleigh” [team name].
If we aren’t looking at ticket sales or military ties, I really don’t think Charlotte would bother with Fayetteville. The Triangle is the same distance and has more TV sets.
I think teams will bother with just about any place where they can make money, but here we get into the really interesting question: Could a Charlotte-based team capture the Raleigh market? Could a Raleigh-based team capture the Charlotte market?
As @Boltman pointed out, this was the thinking behind floating the idea of relocating the Minnesota Twins to the Triad in the late 1990s: the thought was from there you could capture all three markets. I suspect that idea would have been a disaster, but we’ll never know, and I’m not sure that the Twins were really serious about moving anyway, or whether it was just an empty bluff to shake down more stadium subsidies.
On their own, Charlotte is an okay-enough market, and Raleigh is a marginally but probably okay market, but if a team could really capture both markets and everything in between and around them, that would be a very lucrative market.
I’m not sure it can actually be done for baseball. The Panthers have done it, but the NFL is very different from MLB. The Hornets definitely haven’t done it, and the Hurricanes are invisible even in much of the Raleigh TV market. But any team that could do it would be fantastically successful.
I don’t know if they could, but Charlotte would absolutely reach out for Durham and Raleigh before Fayetteville. That wouldn’t even be on their radar. Raleigh could monetize Fayetteville. Charlotte could not.
We’ll see. There’s a decent chance one of these two theories gets tested in the real world in the not-too-distant future. I’m sure a Charlotte team would try to develop a fan base in Raleigh and Durham (or vice versa), but “reaching out” only gets you so far. You put the games on TV across the state, and if a meaningful number of people in Cumberland County tune in, congrats, you’ve monetized it.
I guess I’m not being clear. Raleigh could use Fayetteville as a season ticket base. Charlotte simply can’t. As a tv market, Charlotte could go after Cumberland County. But being in the same tv market as Raleigh, I imagine the energy would be spent there and not with Fayettenam. It would be a rounding error for Charlotte, but a core business piece for Raleigh.
I guess I’m thinking about this more as a range of plausible outcomes. Whether a team is going to do well in these sorts of marginal constituencies is tough to predict because a lot of it depends on how well the team does on the field, which is not knowable in advance. But the better the team does, wherever it is, the more people are going to jump on the bandwagon. If they put a team in Charlotte and it stinks, then yeah, it’s not going to pick up many fans in Raleigh or Durham or Fayetteville. Heck, if a team in either city was truly terrible, it might even struggle to hold onto fans in the Triad. But if the team does very well, then, yeah, I could totally see the team earning a lot of fans in those areas.
Looking at it from MLB’s perspective, the upside of a Charlotte franchise is, I think, a lot higher. It’s hard to imagine a Raleigh franchise ever winning many fans in South Carolina or out by Asheville, no matter how well it does. But if a Charlotte team did well on the field, I could see it encroaching onto Raleigh’s turf quite a bit. And, again, to clarify, my point was never that Fayetteville was more of a Charlotte place than a Raleigh place. My point was that it’s harder to point to anything in Charlotte’s TV market that’s fertile ground for a Raleigh team, unless you could crack Charlotte itself, which strikes me as being difficult.
I also think Charlotte might have a slightly easier time winning over Raleigh fans than vice versa because of the presence of the Atlanta Braves. There are a lot of Braves fans in Charlotte. Would they change allegiances in favor of a Raleigh team? Maybe, but I’m guessing mostly not. There are not as many Braves fans in Raleigh as there are in Charlotte, but the ones that are here are probably more gettable for a Charlotte franchise that would now be by far the closest team. (But that hypothesis can’t really ever be tested because, at most, only one city is going to get a team any time in the next few decades.)
That’s really the determining factor. I’m enjoying this thought exercise as much as anybody, but it’s going to hinge on how well they do. There’s a reason the Panthers have made inroads in the Triangle (aside from the lower commitment level of 8 home games, all on weekends, vs. 81) and it’s because they’ve been consistently competitive over the past 20 years. The Hornets/Bobcats have not, and therefore are a complete nonentity here. As for the Canes, it helps that they have their farm team in Charlotte, so while they don’t register much on the scene there during off years, I remember reading about how the Charlotte market was delivering pretty decent ratings during the Canes’ run last season.
This may be a situation where having a team like the Rays move here would work better than an expansion team, because the Rays management has proven that they can consistently put a winner on the field even under ridiculous levels of austerity from their ownership.
It could be a major sticking point, yes. If an ownership group went to the local government asking for public stadium subsidies, the city or county might blanch because of the investment they made in the AAA stadium. If somebody wanted to privately finance a new stadium, I don’t think the AAA stadium would get in the way, but it’s extremely unlikely that any rich dude is going to want to pay his own money to build a stadium.
As has been noted in several other threads, though, never underestimate the willingness to plow huge money into megaprojects in Charlotte. And if MLB doesn’t expand until 2028, at that point the city might be willing to rationalize getting rid of the AAA stadium.
I think it’s also important to consider the extent to which existing franchises would fight to block a team in Charlotte vs. Raleigh. The Braves host “road show” fan events in Charlotte, Birmingham, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Greenville, SC…not here. We don’t get anything like this from the Nats/O’s either.
That may seem trivial, but I think it’s telling in the sense that Atlanta considers Charlotte to be “Braves Country” and would certainly have something to say when existing owners are deciding who gets to join their club.
There’s a real limit to what teams can do to block the relocation of a team to an area that’s not in their territorial rights. (No team has territorial rights, which are very different from TV territories, to any part of North Carolina.)
It takes a three-quarters vote of team owners to approve an expansion or relocation. If the Braves don’t want a team in Charlotte, they can vote no, but unless they can get seven other teams to also vote no, they’re just out of luck.
There’s no way Rob Manfred would publicly throw out the name of a city if there was any chance that city wouldn’t have the support of the owners. He’s talked about Charlotte a lot, so I’m quite sure the votes to approve a Charlotte franchise are there. Even if the Braves wanted to stop it, they wouldn’t be able to.
I’d put very little stock in that list of cities he rattled off in the ASG interview a couple years back. He obviously doesn’t want to create any expectations or get anyone’s hopes up. He didn’t even want to list anything, but was pressed. That list also included other unlikely sites such as Vancouver and “somewhere in Mexico.”
He’s publicly mentioned Charlotte as a possibly at least twice that I know of, once at the 2017 ASG, and once during a TV interview in 2018.
That’s not to say that Charlotte is definitely going to get a team or anything. But given that 1. Manfred keeps mentioning them and 2. There is no mechanism by which the Braves could unilaterally block an expansion or relocation there, I think it’s quite safe to say that if one of the two best bids came from Charlotte, it would easily get the owners’ approval. (I’m sure this would be true of Raleigh as well.)
Vancouver would present some tough issues with finding a place to build a stadium (it would have to be out in the suburbs, and this is the very reason why Vancouver doesn’t have a AAA team), but if you could resolve that issue, Vancouver would be a fantastic expansion candidate. Large market, wealthy, growing fast, and a ton of Blue Jays fans (and quite a few Mariners fans) that you could win over to the local team very easily. That’s a very attractive proposition.
Yeah, MLB definitely wants to get into Mexico someday, but everyone accepts that this is multiple decades away from even being feasible, so that’s why nobody’s in a hurry to obsess over the details.
But anyway, to get back to the original question. North Carolina might get a team or we might not, and Atlanta might like that or they might not, but there’s absolutely nothing they can do to stop it from happening.
I never said Atlanta—or any team—could unilaterally block an expansion bid, just that they’d have something to say when the time came. Would a Raleigh bid run up against the same resistance? Impossible to say for sure, but I doubt it.
Explorer Web Page Browser has a article on 21 cities that would be good potential for MLB & Raleigh-Durham is high on the list . Raleigh is scored 6 out of 10 chances . Charlotte is also high on the list .
I think this is the article they are discussing. Not a bad write-up, but it is one of those annoying articles where you have to click through each city on a separate page.
FYI, Raleigh/Durham is listed as the #5 candidate. A few other cities of note: Orlando was #1, Charlotte was #3, and Nashville was #8.
