I would argue that just the fact of having an MLB team in the city will create diehard fans and spur the growth of youth baseball in the area. The same way the Canes did for youth hockey. The expansion of youth sports feed directly into ticket sales. The Durham Bulls will be a part of that. Raleigh-Durham can become synonymous with baseball. It will be huge for this area!
The Bulls changed the noncompete circumference specifically to keep Raleigh from getting a team and putting the team in Zebulon. The last thing we need to worry about is hurting their feelings.
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Please don’t twist my words to win an argument. I never said we would never discuss stadium funding. Go back and read, I said we had plans to discuss stadium funding via a content piece that explores what other teams have done and how they have fared. And as for that example of a MLB team moving 30 miles from a successful AAA team, like I said , the only situation you can find that would be identical is Seattle and both teams have been successful. So, as you just confirmed , after you do the research, if someone states the Bulls would be killed off or harmed, we show the only example of the only similar situation out there and it happens to dispute that.
Just because you don’t like what we’re saying or we aren’t discussing hypotheticals like stadium funding 3-5 years prior to expansion even taking place, does not mean we are not “meaningfully engaging” with people . We have answered tons of questions and had very good conversations with people over the past 4 months. You and I would have probably had the same had you asked questions about what our plans were before jumping to conclusions and criticizing aspects of the campaign publically. Putting us in a position to be forced to rebutt instead of discuss.
Despite that,I have taken a TON of time to explain things personally to you on here all to come right back to where we started. Unfortunately it seems like it hasn’t done much good.
I guess my advice to you would be that if you wanted to have a larger conversation with the areas baseball community and feel we aren’t doing the job, then feel free to take to social media or write and op-ed to voice your concerns and see if they get traction.
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Yes, it was very kind of you to “explain” things to me. 
BTW, although I too am getting tired of beating this horse, as I thought about, I remembered that there is another useful historical antecedent. Prior to 1961, the Minneapolis-St. Paul area had two AAA teams, one in Minneapolis and one in St. Paul. In 1961, the area got an MLB team, but the team was actually based in Bloomington, which is about 12 miles from Minneapolis and 20 miles from St. Paul. Both of the existing teams folded completely. Sure, the example is 58 years old, but the Seattle example is 42 years old, so it’s not that much older.
I’m actually glad you brought the Twin Cities up. Yes, they lost both their AAA teams, but now they have both an MLB and an independent league franchise, the St. Paul Saints. The Saints play in a very nice downtown park and regularly have large crowds. And that’s for an unaffiliated team.
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But, at least that I know of, those 2 AAA teams didn’t have any historical significance. The Bulls have so much significance here. We can’t just let them go. While it might be nice to think about, a new MLB team could completely fold our culture for baseball here if the Bulls end up moving out or fold completely. We can’t let that happen.
There’s a pretty rich tradition in baseball history of new MLB teams taking the names of historically significant minor league teams in the city. The Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Brewers, Los Angeles, and San Diego Padres all did it.
Obviously, this is a DTR site, and all of the renderings on the MLB to Raleigh website contemplate sites in DTR. But I think putting a baseball stadium in DTR would be a really bad idea, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for a DTR-themed message board to discuss.
As noted above, I also think that it would be a terrible idea for Raleigh and/or Wake County to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build a sports stadium. If a Raleigh-based team were perceived as a threat to the Bulls, you would get zero buy-in from Durham County, which would also make it well-nigh impossible to get any state funding (probably a long shot anyway), so Raleigh and/or Wake County would be on the hook for 100 percent of a massive bill.
But if a proposal to bring an MLB team to the Research Triangle had complete buy-in from Durham, it would ameliorate a lot of these issues. You could keep the Bulls’ name and history, get region-wide or statewide buy-in for the financing (to clarify, I think spending money on sports stadiums is always a bad idea, but the less Raleigh would have to shoulder, the better), and avoid the terrible land use decision of putting a baseball stadium in DTR.
The Research Triangle is different from most other candidates for pro sports franchises in that we don’t have one locus of population. To thrive, a team would definitely need to draw in fans from Raleigh, Durham, and Cary–which would make it difficult for the Bulls to continue to thrive. Putting a stadium in a location central to all three, as is the case with PNC Arena, would be a better land use choice than putting it in DTR and would almost certainly make it easier for a team to be successful.
Actually, glad you brought up that example.
There were 2 minor league teams in Minnesota. When the Twins came into town neither team folded. They both decided to move. That old Saint Paul Saints became the Omaha Dodgers and the Minneapolis Millers became the Seattle Rainiers.
The Old Met (where the Twins played at first) was THE location that the Miller’s played at the time (they had moved there in the late 50’s) and the St. Paul Saints played at Midway Park which was about 15 miles from this location.
At that time, the Old Met had a capacity of nearly 50k and was used to house both the Twins (MLB) and Vikings (NFL).
For context, Minneapolis had a population of 483,000+ and St. Paul had a population of 313,000+ in the early 1960.
No matter what, the Millers would have to move because their stadium was being taken over. Could the Saints have stayed and been successful? No one will ever know since they didn’t give it a try.
•••••••••
However, 30 years later in 1993 The Saints actually returned as an independent baseball team and play in the new Midway Stadium. At this point, the Twins were playing at the Metrodome and the new Midway Stadium was only 4 miles away.
There was a lot of fighting at the time. A lot of Minneapolis didn’t want the Saints to come back. They felt like it would fail and/or eat away at the Twins attendance.
For context, St. Paul had a population of 272,000+ and Minneapolis had a population of 368,000+ in the early 90s.
••••••••••
The Saint Paul Saints introduction in 1993 started a little rocky, only averaging 4,000 fans per game in season one, however by season 10 they had grown attendance to averaging about 6,700 fans per game. That same year, the Minnesota Twins ranked 20th out of 30 team in attendance (24k).
For context at this time (2003) St Paul’s population was at about 290,000+ and Minneapolis was at about 385,000+.
Today, the two teams still coexist and both do very well. In fact, the St. Paul Saints have moved to CHS Field and the Twins have moved into Target Field. This put them 15 miles apart (instead of the original 4 miles). The Saints are now setting records in attendance. Last year they averaged over 8,000 fans per game as an independent league team. As for the Twins, last year they were back at 20th (out of 30) in attendance at 24k. Not bad for a smaller market that shares two baseball teams within 15 miles.
For context in 2018 St. Paul’s Population was 307,695, while Minneapolis came in at 425,403. (total between the two cities = 733,098)
At the same time, Raleigh’s population last year was at 469,298, and Durhams was at 267,743. (total between the two cities = 737,041)
••••••••
Disclaimer: If you start counting the greater Metro area the Twin Cities is larger in population at this point. While it’s hard to get a one to one comparison, their ‘metro area’ comes in at about 3,600,0618 but counts 7,637 square miles.
Meanwhile the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill CSA comes in at about 2,199,459, but only counts the surrounding 5,510 square miles.
So density per square mile puts Twin Cities at right near 470 and The Triangle at just about 400.
So we didn’t include this example because we did not feel it was a very good one-to-one comparison either in scenario or in current market size. But yea, you can look at it and see that actually, this is another scenario where multiple levels of baseball are coexisting in a region with 2 population points.
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But it wouldn’t feel or be the same. Sure, we could keep the name and history, but it wouldn’t be right putting the Durham Bulls in Raleigh. The Bulls have always been an MiLB team. Suddenly elevating them changes the atmosphere they’ve had for so long.
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Honestly, I really don’t know. There’s pros and cons to everything.
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Well, I think the only way you get buy in from Durham is to put the team in Durham County. Downtown Durham is also not really a realistic candidate for an MLB team, but you could look for sites near the Wake/Durham line near the intersection of 540 and 40, which would be a good central location for the region.
There really are pros and cons to everything! As I’ve said, I have a really heavy heart about this. I love baseball and I love Raleigh, so the idea of having an MLB team in the area is very, very appealing to me. And branding that team as the Durham Bulls would be a best of all worlds scenario for me personally. But I’m very, very cognizant of what the cost would be to the public purse, and I can’t justify spending vast amounts of public money for something that I personally would enjoy when we have other needs that are way, way more important.
Token Chapel Hill/Durham resident here. I’m honestly not too sure if this is true?
Whenever I talk about things going on in Raleigh, I find that people in Durham genuinely have no idea about what’s going on. Whether it’s all the restaurant options on Fayetteville St., the new developments in the Warehouse Districts, or even Cameron Village, Durham residents don’t seem to even pay attention to them out of inconvenience.
I mean, if you’re not used to not having to drive more than half an hour to get to a good nightlife destination, why wouldn’t you automatically think of Raleigh as something too far to regularly take seriously? And if it’s that far away, inconvenient etc., why would you get emotionally invested?
(Also: this is why I tend to comment a lot on transit-related threads here. I feel like there’s a weird psychological-logistical barrier between Durham and Raleigh that’s not as cultural as people here think. …and it shouldn’t be a reason to ignore Durham as a potential market for local initiatives)
It’s why things like the sunflower events at Dix Park or Offline Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill are popular: because people on our half of the Triangle don’t even think of having those options.
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If ( maybe when) the train is more frequent and reliable there will be more travel between the two cities. I would love to head over to Durham more often just for dinner and some beers but you need to plan things out exactly because of how infrequent the trips are.
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Hey Will , I forgot to mention this during our comments concerning maybe a future NC State baseball stadium . We were sitting in front of Will Wilson’s future father-in-law at the ACC Tournament in Durham . He said also that a new stadium was going to happen .
Our own @Loup20 got a very nice write-up on cbssports.com as part of a long, long, long story about MLB expansion. The writer is pretty bearish about Raleigh’s chances of actually landing an MLB franchise, but has a lot of very nice things to say about Lou and MLB to Raleigh. (There’s also a paragraph on why stadiums are a terrible public investment that reads like it could have been cut and pasted from posts on this forum.)
Here’s the story. The Raleigh stuff is at the bottom of a very, very deep dive into the economics of MLB expansion, but even at that, it is indeed the most I’ve ever seen a major publication talk about Raleigh as an MLB expansion market.
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Whew! What a fascinating write-up. I really had no idea that Raleigh was so high up in the running for an MLB spot.
The approach taken by the #RaleighOnDeck group is interesting as they are investing in getting the area fired up about the sport. They are staging rallies and selling promotional merchandise.
“All the profits that we’re making off this are going back into the community to help fix up baseball fields and to help promote baseball in underserved areas of our community”
It’s an organic approach to building the momentum to land a pro team.
“If for some reason it doesn’t work out, then we’ve helped promote the game in our community,” That’s what works, that’s what we’ve been talking about since Day 1: This is a baseball market. This is a baseball town."
Their MLBraleigh site is great to nerd out on. (Posted by @loup20 while back). Loaded with demographics and analytic analysis of the Triangle area (could be useful for the MLS effort also). Be sure to visit the Stadium link to see some cool hosting concepts, like this dope render of the Southern Gateway proposal.
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@KenAA and @daviddonovan Thanks for posting this. I actually hadn’t seen the article until David shared it above.
It’s pretty much spot on and kind of got at the heart of what we’re attempting. I guess the one part that doesn’t come through is that the ‘not involving investors’ is only phase 1. We know good and well that big money has got to get involved if MLB were ever to come here. At the same time, we just wanted to create a passionate and authentic grassroots army that could prove to be a valuable asset to an investor, if and when one was to step up. We also wanted to use the opportunity to shine a little light on our region and it’s growth (using baseball as the vehicle.)
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@Loup20 crushed as always. This movement is just in its infancy. MLB expansion is a long way off; hopefully, the long-game/community-first approach will prove fruitful.
Thanks for posting and the kind words @daviddonovan and @KenAA !!
#RaleighOnDeck
(Sidebar, I retired “OakCityBaseball” on social channels, so I figured I’d retire that handle on this board as well, in case of any confusion).
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Mark your calendars!
This should be a pretty fun event even if you aren’t on the baseball bandwagon. I kind of hinted at this idea a long time ago on the 'Branding Raleigh to the world" thread.
We partnered with some of the best designers in the Triangle to come up with a team concept for a Raleigh MLB team. We told them to not get too caught up in the ‘MLB’ part of things, meaning we wanted them to feel free to push the limits design wise even if it meant doing something that probably wouldn’t end up being MLB approved. What we have is pretty cool.
Each designer has chosen a ‘theme’ that they feel best represents Raleigh or the state, and they’ve turned it into a baseball team concept, with logo, wordmark, jersey design and a short summary of how it connects.
We then took their logos and printed them on New Era fitted caps that will be displayed next to an artboard with the rest of the stuff. We have 12 really good concepts (one of which is from @wmgadd himself).
Little City is literally emptying out their entire bar to make room for this gallery-style showing. Beer will be on tap and Virgil’s Tacos will pull up their food truck as well.
Hope to see some of you out there!
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And the beer at Little City is excellent!!
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