It depends on what you define as competitive. If a team can’t expect to compete legitimately for championships then what’s the point? There are only a handful of teams with a legitimate shot at winning a World Series championship year in and year out and they all reside in big markets (and maybe St Louis which is fairly unique as a regional team)
A potential Raleigh/Triangle team is going to be hamstrung by several factors due to the market size attendance would be ok because of the novelty factor but I don’t see a tv deal that would generate enough revenue to allow them to be continuously competitive.
I’m a Pirates fan so I’ve watched the team flirt with being decent but never really having a legitimate chance at winning a championship while the owner pulls in decent profits thanks to revenue sharing.
Barring some sort of cap and floor system in Major League Baseball to level the playing field like in every other major North American sport small market teams will always be at a major disadvantage to the handful of mega markets.
Winning titles is awesome, no doubt. But, with all respect, the difficulty in winning championships shouldn’t be a reason to not pursue a franchise. Besides, the small-market Royals won the WS a few years ago. It can happen.
As someone who avidly follows MLB, the Pirates’ problems have very little to do with their market and everything to do with their ownership.
It’s a little bit of both but you can’t deny the economics of baseball aren’t fair.
It can happen and how did the Royals do last year. I’m all for a team coming but I’m not interested in subsidizing billionaires. If someone wants to come in and pay for everything and plop down the money then more power to them but that’s not how these things go.
I just can’t see 2 million people attending throughout a season (avg 25,000 over 81 games). Seems like a much better shot to get 340,000 to show up for MLS (20,000 over 17 games).
Counterpoint, most folks on this site are against DT land being used for stadiums that are empty most of the year. MLB guarantees (at least) 81 events. MLS, 17.
I think if we get a team, the most logical choice would be relocating the Rays here, essentially trading their AAA team in Durham for the major league team. In the short term, novelty and the fact that ~20 home games will be played against the Yankees and Red Sox, who have huge fan bases in the area, to sustain attendance. But in the long term, to be successful they’ll have to be good.
And that’s where the problems will start. Most of the competitive teams in MLB either can spend big, or go with a tank and rebuild model, which I don’t think economically can survive in the triangle unless you have an owner that’s willing to burn cash. Also, most of the economically successful teams have a big percentage of their revenue coming from large TV contracts with local sports networks. (Yankees with YES network, Dodgers with their $8.35B 25 year deal, etc). St. Louis is one of the top 10 payroll spenders (and basically perennial contenders) that rely more on attendance (3M+ a year), and even they have a 15 years $1B deal with Fox Regional. Not sure if Raleigh’s tv market landscape will warrant the type of contract.
Did you all see this?
Huge discussion of MLB Raleigh on Reddit:
Yahoo is reporting the movement too.
I support all billionaires who want to bring Professional sports to Raleigh, as long as they can do it without asking the taxpayers to foot the bill towards a stadium.
Any MLB team that wants to be competitive out of the gates would have to spend a lot of money up front. The Marlins won the WS 4 years after they started and the D-Backs did it in 3, but they did it with huge temporary payrolls and then firesales (or for the D-Backs, getting old very fast).
That model is pretty terrible for building a fanbase.
I agree that relocation is more likely than expansion at the moment. I think MLB is really leaning toward Mexico City, though. Honestly I wouldn’t mind seeing the Rays become the Diablos Rojas de Mexico.
Got to give props to the snazzy graphics at https://mlbraleigh.com. Is your operation affiliated with this, @wmgadd?
As far as the thing about Raleigh being a small market, the parameters here are pretty clear: Yes, Raleigh would be one of the smallest markets in baseball, but because of revenue sharing the team would have no trouble turning a profit. It’s extremely easy to make money running an MLB team if that’s your primary objective, and if the team becomes the local favorite throughout most of North Carolina (which I bet it would), the TV contract would probably be reasonably competitive because there are a lot of viewers in North Carolina. It’s not impossible for small-market teams to win championships the way Kansas City did, but they do have a much tougher slog than the large-market teams, and with only one championship a year and 30 (or 32) teams to begin with, world championships would most likely be rare, although that’s not necessarily the end-all-be-all.
I don’t want to wander beyond the remit of a Raleigh-centric blog, but I don’t think the Rays are going to ever leave north Florida. In fact, I think the Rays are a pretty good comparison for what a Raleigh franchise might look like. Everyone gets hung up on the Rays having terrible attendance (because their stadium is in a terrible location), but their TV ratings are actually league-average or better because there are a lot of TV viewers in north Florida who follow the Rays even if they don’t live close enough to attend games. That’s probably the dynamic you’d see with a team in Raleigh.
@ventureConsult It would all depend on whether people in Charlotte, and to a lesser extent the Triad, would adopt a Raleigh team as their new favorite team. If so, then that TV contract would look just fine. If not, yeah, that would be a major problem. I think you could do it and make it work, but I think it would be much easier to do it the other way around: Put a franchise in Charlotte, brand them as “Carolina” like the NFL did, and pick up fans in both states. I suspect that this is one of the main reasons why when Rob Manfred talks about expansion he always, always mentions Charlotte and never, ever mentions Raleigh.
Don’t get your hopes up. Looks like it’s just a grassroots campaign more than anything.
I believe the MLB uses a formula to determines viability, with factors like metro population, tv market, vicinity to other franchises, median disposable income, other local sports competition. But I’d imagine Charlotte would score better than Raleigh in a-lot of those metrics.
Revenue sharing in MLB is pretty convoluted. Essentially the largest TV market teams pay a percentage of their revenue into a pool, which is then distributed to the smallest TV market teams. However, the payment is not big ($5-10M a year I read somewhere, with rules around what they can spend the money on) . And of course you have outliers like St. Louis, one of the most profitable / revenue healthy teams in baseball getting revenue share for being in a “small” market. I I’m not complaining as I’m a huge Cardinals fan. But there are teams like Oakland who potentially should get revenue share don’t, due to their demographic / geographic make up. Of course if Raleigh were to get a team, we would most definitely benefit from the sharing rather than not.
Also, MLB’s current economical model is pretty much broken. The last 2 years of free agency stalls have all but guaranteed that a strike is coming. Teams have wised up about paying outlandish contracts to over-age-30 players. On the other side, players are still locked into minimum team controlled contracts for most of their productive years, and once they actually get a chance to make money, the teams are not paying anymore. If a prolonged strike happens, that can’t be good for any new market that’s already facing an uphill battle to win support and a fan base.
“Just what makes that little old ant
Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant
Anyone knows an ant, can’t
Move a rubber tree plant“
Would a baseball stadium or soccer stadium or hockey arena fit on the former DMV site? Looks like we’re going to have a large empty space there.
I’d rather we drop a new stadium on the prison… but I’m not sure how big the DMV site is… that would be an interesting location… not superwalkable from all of downtown but things would fill in around it and getting traffic in and out of there would be easier than something right in DT
A baseball stadium would take between 10 to 15 acres , depending on how parking is done . Cargill Site is 10 acres with a city owned lot touching the south part of Cargill . This lot is 5 acres .
With the DMV site being close to 6 acres, a baseball stadium should fit as most MLB stadiums average only 2.5 acres in field size, and then add surrounding seating and parking. I would think a hockey arena should fit as well.The state site that NCFC proposed to build on is about 13 acres, but that includes hotels, other buildings, etc. Something like a NFL team would most definitely not fit as those tend to be 13-14 acres for the stadium alone.