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if coming from the east…fayetteville…200k plus, wilson-rocky mount, a bit over 120k?
faster growing and the state is the 11th largest in gdp…after all this stuff i find it odd that nc doesnt have MLB. unless something in the demographics doesnt lend to prefessional baseball? nc state has had some very good teams.
Minor league baseball has always been big in the state and the college teams have always been good to great (I personally hate how little NCSU has invested into the baseball program because it’s one of NCSU’s best sports even in light of the limited resources devoted). I don’t think it’s a lack of interest in baseball state-wide, but density of population thing around a particular city/area (something which neither Raleigh or Charlotte really offered until after the last round of expansion in 1998), having a motivated billionaire (something we didn’t have until Dundon), and having the potential to add a stadium somewhere and at what cost (still an unknown) - are all things that are natural questions about MLB in NC. But as Lou as pointed out - people have been working to address many of those questions.
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Informative thread. As a native Tennessean something that can not be overstated with regards to Nashville is how entrenched current baseball fandoms are in that city, specifically the Braves. I think someone who isn’t from the state would naturally assume fan adoption would be similar to the Titans or Preds but that will not be the case. NFL and NHL allegiances were never as concentrated on a single team like they are with the Braves and that fandom is deep and cultural.
Most folks you meet, at least in the middle and eastern part of the state, have families who have rooted for the Braves for generations. It will be much closer to a college football team expansion team trying to take fans from the University of Tennessee. It could take decades for them to overtake the braves.
In my experience Raleigh does not have this same dynamic as fandom is much more fragmented and surface level. I don’t know if anyone making this decision is even aware of this dynamic or if it even matters in the overall debate but I would bet large amounts of money that 5 years into either expansion Raleigh would have a significantly higher % of it’s population self identify as fans of the new team.
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Somehow I feel like I made this worse.
@dtraleigh, is there a feature where we can escort people to private rooms to work out their differences and they can come back to play with the rest of us once they’re done?
I’m gonna work with Claude on this as an add-on to Discourse. I’ll add the emoji reactions back into my big beautiful update as well.
Stay tuned.
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Wait what? Are you saying I should be reading this topic? 
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Probably an opinion that would unite both the pro-MLB and anti-MLB groups against me… 
I think I’d actually prefer a AAA minor league team. Especially if it meant a downtown stadium instead of whatever suburban site they choose? “Eastern Wake County”??
Cheaper tickets, more casual/relaxed/less seriousness, lower stadium costs/public funds, less traffic to suburban sites. Could also host a handful of NC State baseball games, ACC tournament, music festival/concerts, winter ice rink.
Wouldn’t it be more fun to compete with Durham, Charlotte, Norfolk, Nashville(?) anyway than the big MLB clubs?
So maybe I’m in the minority, but I’m not big on baseball and rather just look at it as a random fun outing to do with the fam.
Smaller minor league stadium could fit at the Wake County Smoky Hollow block. Add an elevated plaza over Capital Blvd for an outfield plaza for some more space.
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I love this Mike! I’m not sure if the 30 mile rule between minor league teams still exists. Since The Atlantic League is an independent league, they could have a Raleigh team. They are classified as a co- AA, AAA level because 40 % of the league players have playing time in MLB. High Point & Gastonia play in the Atlantic League. It is know as ALPB. Atlantic League of Professional Baseball.
Hey Mike, I’m with you - something like a AAA stadium would still be a great fit downtown, especially if it hosts other events. Even a small soccer stadium for NCFC or NC Courage would bring some real energy. That said, I feel like ideas like this have been floating around this forum for a while…
Also, did you include “The Wye Park” in this map? I’ve been hoping for something like that. It feels like the perfect spot for a micro park - any idea if there are real plans in motion?
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Love this idea. As someone who grew up playing baseball, it irks me to drive to Durham to see a game. I’d like to see a more ‘expandable’ location…just in case “MLB to 919” comes to fruition 
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Unfortuntely, MLB almost certainly wouldn’t allow a team to set up shop within the Bulls’ territory, and even if somehow they did, the Bulls would 100% fight it (and likely force and arbitration situation that would make any incoming team very hesitant to move forward).
The Bulls are one of the (if not THE) most protected brands in MiLB.
That is a better chance of getting MLB than there is of Raleigh getting minor league baseball at this point (my opinion).
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(Hey, DT Raleigh, bear with me. I’m not doing a back-and-forth debate here. I’m looking to understand perspective and David has a perspective that I, personally, can’t wrap my head around. Instead of going back and forth, maybe we can find common ground if we understand each other’s motivations and beliefs. I’ll start…)
Hey @daviddonovan ,
I was just in a meeting where I was told, by a third party who deals in this world, that there is absolutely no way that any market gets MLB without a public/private partnership. MLB is a stakeholder, the ownership group would be a stakeholder, and the league wants to make sure the local/state government is also a stakeholder at some level. This is how they believe they can limit the constant ‘relocation’ threats and instability of current markets.
Also, we’re told it’s very unlikely owners will vote for a market that has an ownership group that is completely privately funding their project. They believe it sets the wrong precedent and agrees with MLB that it creates constant instability.
I don’t know that is 1000% factual, but it’s the opinion of someone who knows more than any of us.
Your criticism of this project has mostly been about the eventual conversation about taxes. I am hoping to learn your perspective on that front. This is not bait, I swear.
Are you for or against the work that our city/county/state’s economic development team does? Meaning, are you against the recruitment of businesses by using tax breaks, building incentives, etc?
Because it seems like that is just par for the course nationally. You don’t land big business expansions/relocations/HQs without that part of things. These companies are being recruited hard by nearly every major market.
If you look at some of the Canes main sponsors, those companies even being in state are thanks to these packages. The growth of Raleigh in general has been partly thanks to these type of packages. Heck, getting the Hurricanes was only thanks to the stadium that was being built by the government, and Hartford having nowhere else to go. Had there been no stadium built here, there would be no Hurricanes.
To me, there is a trade-off happening. If you want growth and you want jobs, you need to land these companies or commit to these type of economic driving projects.
I want to understand how you view bringing an MLB team here as any different?
One reason Raleigh misses on some of these projects is that there is a perception that there is nothing to do here. Its hard to recruit here because of that. We lose money on tourism becasue we can’t bring people to the city. Even the residents are spending their ‘entertainment spend’ outside of the city…going to the mountains, to the beach, even to Charlotte to catch a game.
Landing MLB seems to solve a lot of that. It puts Raleigh on the map, makes them a big league city, it makes Raleigh a destination 81 times per year. It brings 2.4 million people (avg attendance x 81 home games) to the city over the course of a season. That is ALMOST as many people as NFL/NBA/NHL/MLS combined.
If you do it right and build hotels and an entertainment district around the ballpartk you have people renting rooms, going out to eat and drink, and going to a ballgame.
The Battery in Atlanta had 8.7 million visitors last year. Those numbers are certainly worth being dubbed ‘a destination’.
Building this in Raleigh creates a destination. It keeps locals spending in town. It brings tourism from out of town, it helps sell Raleigh as a big league city to potential businesses who are not familiar with the area.
I’d argue that this one move, changes the Raleigh/Charlotte dynamic. It gives Raleigh a signiture attraction and it raises massive tourism tax money if done correctly.
So I’d like to understand how you view this any differently than that, and what type of tax package you’d get behind? Obviously, you wouldn’t want an increase in property taxes… but what about funding using taxes created by the project itself. What about something like Portland did with the Jock tax (taxing players from other teams for doing work in the state when playing here).
Is there a unique tax strategy you’d be able to get behind? Or are you just full-stop against this type of recruitment across the board?
Honestly, trying to understand your perspective on this issue.
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Personally, I will only support MLB to Raleigh if the stadium is built somewhere within the core of the city. I don’t see how how these self contained entertainment districts out in the middle of nowhere do much good Raleigh much less downtown Raleigh. I think DT South is the best option of the locations I’m aware of, the Arena district makes sense I guess, but if they put that shit on top of some corn field in Zebulon you’ll see me actively rooting against this.
Also, If the State/City (hypothetically) said - we have this billion dollars available and we can either spend it on this baseball stadium or we can use it to build out a kick ass transit system, or fully fund Dix Park with a gondola, or connect our hodge podge network of sidewalks, or even build a billion dollar fountain on Fayetteville street then I’m not voting for a baseball ball stadium.
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How many MLB teams today have the sort of public-private partnership in place that is being described here?
Would the arrangement be infrastructure and tax funding for the stadium in exchange for equity in the franchise for the county/city?
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Someone correct me if I’m wrong but since 1970, only SF Giants and Florida Marlins privately built their stadium. Even the new Yankee stadium was a public/private partnership when built in 2009. The Marlins new stadium was 100% publicly funded.
The team is going to cost $2 billion and that’s will have to be fully paid for by an owner. It’s the stadium and infrastructure portion that usually has public funding involved.
And no, the city/state doesn’t get a part of the team, they are building it to attract tourism, get people to spend money in Raleigh, stay at hotels and eat at restaurants 81 nights per year. That’s massive tax revenue. It’s the same reason they built a convention center, which everyone seemed pretty on-board with.
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As for building a stadium in a cornfield, won’t happen. MLB wants an entertainment district or downtown around their stadiums now. The winning bids will have this incorporated.
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One last point, I’d argue that it’s districts like north hills full build out and the new entertainment and sports district at Lenovo that will finally spur true transit.
In a perfect world this wouldn’t be the case, but look around. It’s how it’s worked almost everywhere. Major destinations created the demand that put transit over the hump.
When did Charlotte get the light rail? 2007. Discussion about it started in the late 80s.
Note that the Hornets came on the scene in ‘88 and the Panthers in 1995.
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Hey, @Loup20. I’m happy to talk about this, and also try to take down the temperature a bit. I was rude to you in some of my previous posts, and I shouldn’t have been, and I apologize for that.
I’m sure your source is right. Any expansion city will need to publicly subsidize a stadium. And that’s been my stance from the jump. I say I’m unopposed to a privately financed stadium to clarify what I’m against, not because I have any illusion it could happen. Yes, it’s a precedent MLB doesn’t want to set. (FYI from you last post, only SF was privately financed. Miami was heavily subsidized.)
Yes, I oppose public incentives for businesses in general, too. I had some lengthy debates about this in 2017-2018 about Amazon’s HQ2. I was dead set against bidding and thrilled we didn’t “win,” and ultimately Amazon secured $750 million to move to northern Virginia, which always seemed like the best spot for HQ2 to begin with. I know I bore sometimes with the academic literature, but economists have long known that these incentives don’t pay off for the governments handing them out. Either the benefits fail to materialize at all, or the cost per job created is astronomical. Some the research is older because this has been known for a long time, but a 2004 study in Southern Economic Journal, “Do Economic Effects Justify the Use of Fiscal Incentives?” found that the answer was a clear no, and “large firms fail to produce significant benefits for their host communities, calling into question the high-stakes bidding war over firms and investments.” (Not to be confused with a different 2004 study finding the same thing.) Richard Florida, writing in CityLab in 2012 on “The Uselessness of Economic Development Incentives,” found that “States, cities and counties give away $80 billion per year, but that doesn’t seem to create stronger economies or lower unemployment.” As with HQ2, companies play cities off one another, and then usually locate where they wanted to anyway. I could go on and on with more studies, like this review of studies on incentive programs in New York, or research by the Mackinac Center in Michigan, but I’m already running long. But, yes, I’m against this too, and it’s a bad deal for taxpayers, too.
Sports-specific subsidies are, if anything, worse, in part because you have to build the expensive stadium. I know, I know, no one is going to click through to the links for all these academic studies, so I’ll skip to the money quote. This is from a 2022 study, “The Impact of Professional Sports Franchises and Venues on Local Economies: A Comprehensive Survey,” co-authored by J.C. Bradbury, who is the current president of the North American Association of Sports Economists:
“Though findings have become more nuanced, recent analyses continue to confirm the decades-old consensus of very limited economic impacts of professional sports teams and stadiums. Even with added non-pecuniary social benefits from quality-of-life externalities and civic pride, welfare improvements from hosting teams tend to fall well short of covering public outlays. Thus, the large subsidies commonly devoted to constructing professional sports venues are not justified as worthwhile public investments. We also investigate the paradox of local governments continuing to subsidize sports facilities despite overwhelming evidence of their economic impotence.”
Again, I have lots more links to studies like this, but I’ll stop. So how can this be true when MLB teams sell around 2+ million tickets per year? It’s because almost all the fans are locals (go to any MLB game and look around), and if I spend $50, or whatever, on a ticket, that’s not $50 that was magically created. It’s $50 I don’t have left to spend on other local businesses. Sports teams don’t create economic activity, they just shift it around.
Very, very few fans at MLB games are true tourists. I can use my own experience as an example. I’m a huge baseball fan. I’ve been to 10 current MLB stadiums. But with one exception (the Pirates made the playoffs, truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience), I’ve never traveled for an MLB game. I’ve been to Minneapolis (work trip), Denver (wife’s best friend lived there), Seattle (bucket list vacation), St. Pete (friend’s wedding), New York (Yankees) (friend’s birthday), D.C. (countless times), Philly (I’m from there). All of those trips were happening whether the MLB team was in town or not. Minneapolis and Denver I went to multiple times for the same reasons, usually when the team was out of town. So not only were those not new trips, the MLB team was competition with other businesses. When the Twins and Rockies weren’t in town, I just spent that money going to other restaurants, bar, attractions, etc. When the teams were in town, they got my money, but they didn’t generate new spending. They just changed what I spent it on. There was less money of mine for everyone else.
I hear it said that pro sports teams attract businesses to move here, but it’s hard to find any examples of companies citing this as a reason for relocation, either to the press or to investors. Montreal lost a team in 2005, and there was no discernible impact on the local economy, tourism, companies moving in or away, nothing. Oakland will certainly be an interesting test case in the coming years. Will Oakland lose much or any tourism business? Will companies move away? The evidence suggests they won’t.
There’s no tax package I personally would get behind, no. Jock taxes don’t nearly make up the difference in the cost of the subsidy. I’ll concede that it would be better for Raleigh if the state paid all the cost of a stadium and the city/county paid nothing, but I’m a state taxpayer too, and you still have the moral argument that it is deeply immoral to take hundreds of millions collected from regular people’s taxes and, effectively, give it away to some of the richest people in the world.
One thing that may help explain my perspective: 20+ years ago, I used to support sports stadiums subsidies, too. (I used to design my own stadiums as a kid, too. I own several excellent books about past and present MLB stadiums.) But then I went looking for evidence that would support this position, and I tried to dig into the evidence with an open mind, and I found that all of the evidence was on the other side, and it persuaded me to change my position as a result. I still love baseball. But the zeal of the converted may help explain why I’m so vocal about this and so nerdy about the data and I know about all these academic studies.
There are some things that we’ll never agree about, but I do genuinely hope that we can disagree agreeably, and people here can read both of our posts and find both sides informative. I know I didn’t do a good job of that last week, and I regret that.
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I totally understand your perspective, but we will just agree to disagree.
I will read through your links tonight, but I too have done a lot of digging looking for answers one way or another, and almost all of the literature I’ve found focused too heavily on NFL stadiums, which are honestly, a bad deal. 8 games per season at around 70k, bring about 550k fans to the stadium per year.
I’d like to find some new research that focused on MLB stadiums that have been intentionally built within an entertainment district. For instance, I’m extremely interested to see what the Battery (Atlanta) is bringing in over the long term.
So far, it’s been better than advertised…
…and this is the model that Raleigh wants to follow.
81 games at 27k per game is 2.3 million people. NFL fans can cling to their ‘attendance per game’ number all they want, but the truth is, the more people, the more economic activity, the more tax money.
I also believe there is an immeasurable aspect to landing a super high profile business. Adding Apple was huge, not just for the investment, but for the optics. Same goes for being a finalist for Amazon. I believe landing things like this begins to create an identity/brand, two things we we desperately need here in Raleigh.
Also, we’ve been informed that there is an economic impact study in the works, being done by NC State economist Michael Walden. Apparently he’s well respected and builds economic forecasts/impact studies without bias and has been the go-to guy in the region for this for some time. When we reached out, he told us his goal is to answer whether MLB is feasible in NC and whether it makes more sense in Raleigh or Charlotte. Apparently it will take into account things you are talking about, like ‘creating vs shifting around entertainment spend’, estimated tourists it’d bring, and how much revenue it would bring the city/county/state and federal government.
So people can hear our back-and-forth opinions for now, but eventually it will be weighed in on by a professional economist.
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