Nationals Arm Race

MLB’s commissioner has long been on the record saying that, once the league resolved the two big stadium issues it has had (Oakland and Tampa Bay), that they’d pursue expansion. He’s been saying this for years, and as recently as mid-2023 intimated the same. In fact, I wrote a big chunk of this article in February of 2024, the last time Manfred really went off on this topic. However, His most recent comments on the topic, made this week at the LLWS, included another hyper-parsed comment related to expansion giving the league a chance to “geographically realign,” code-word for “big time changes” that has the industry buzzing … and not in a good way.

With Tampa Bay now having a $1.3B plan for a new stadium in St. Petersburg, and with Oakland’s move to Las Vegas approved and a $1.5b stadium approved, we’re getting really close to the point where all 30 existing teams play in “acceptable” stadiums (ignoring for the moment the fact that Kansas City and the White Sox are now both clamoring for new stadiums). Manfred just stated that he wants to retire in 2029 AND have expansion plans in place before he retires … so we kind of have a roadmap for expansion.

So lets talk about MLB expansion. The league has sat at 30 teams for decades, which has lead to weird divisional alignments for all this time, for unbalanced schedules where there’s interleague play every day, and for odd wild-card scenarios. The NFL has 32 teams and a very neat eight division structure that MLB seems to want to emulate. Furthermore, Manfred’s latest claims, coupled with some recent Media landscape changes, has another interesting wrinkle: the possible alteration of the league structure of Baseball to move more towards an “Eastern” and “Western” league structure. This is how the NBA and NHL do things, and it cuts down on cross-country travel significantly for teams. So, we’re now talking about the possible death of the American and National leagues, which have been around for 120+ and 140+ years respectively. This is no light talking point.

Why does a geographically balanced schedule appeal to Manfred and the owners? Well, it certainly could cut down on travel costs. Here’s a quick example of an NBA team’s schedule: They play 82 games a year (which you could neatly double to see what an MLB team might look like):

• You play the four teams in your division four times each: 16 games
• You play the other ten teams in your conference at least three times each 30 games
• You play a select few conferences teams one additional time: 6 more games.
• You play the opposite conference two times each: 30 games

So, out of the 82 games, teams only travel across the Mississippi river 15 times, and many of those trips are planned out so that teams hit multiple non-conference opponents in a row. For example, when looking at the Washington Wizards 2025-26 schedule, you’ll see trips like what they take between March 25th-March 30th, where they play at, in order, Utah, Golden State, Portland, and Los Angeles. On another trip in Jan 2026, they’ll play in order at Phoenix, at LA, at Sacramento, and at Denver in a row. That’s basically every West Coast game done in two 6-day trips. MLB would LOVE to be able to do this, instead of forcing the Nats to do what they do now: a 4-game trip just to Denver then home, then a week in Seattle & Arizona, then 9 days in California in June, then 3 days in San Francisco in August, etc.

I looked at the topic of expansion more than a decade ago in this space, noting that adding 2 teams made more sense than mass realignment. At the time, I noted that the two biggest markets without baseball were Portland and San Antonio/Austin, while pointing out the challenges that Montreal/Vancouver would face, and kind of passing over Charlotte/Research Triangle.

So, a decade later, who are the leading candidate cities? Things have changed. We now have some familiar names from consideration and a couple new ones. ESPN just did a very nice deep-dive into all these areas that’s worth reading, if you want to really hear the pros and cons of each market.

Here’s the list, in likely order of getting a team (Note: in a first draft of this article done several years ago, las Vegas was the #1 option … now they’ve gotten a team, so we’ve moved to the next two.

• Nashville
• Salt Lake City
• (seemingly a gap)
• Portland
• Austin/San Antonio
• Charlotte
• Raleigh/Durham
• Montreal
• Vancouver
• Orlando
• Sacramento
• San Jose
• Mexico City

So here’s some thoughts on each:

• It seems like the front runners are Nashville for sure and either Portland or Salt Lake City right now, altogether for a bunch of independent reasons. One in the East, one in the West. One in the kind-of-underserved NC/TN middle Atlantic area to serve the fan base between DC and Atlanta, and one in an underserved sports market Portland/SLC. Jeff Passan’s recent analysis gives a deep dive into why SLC is in the mix suddenly. Nashville and Salt Lake City are both ranked in the 20s in terms of MSA and TV markets, which makes them “small markets” if they get teams … but there are no big cities anymore.
• Portland could be the #1 alternative to SLC as the ‘west coast’ selection, and would solve a bunch of issues in that city … but there are ownership group concerns. It also barely has baseball now; it doens’t have a minor league team in the city itself, and the area only supports a High-A team and some wood-bat summer teams.
• Salt Lake, it should be noted, is smaller than Milwaukee, the current 30th ranked team in the sport. Would that be a factor?
• The San Antonio/Austin would seem like a shoe-in, given that its a huge market and in a baseball hotbed, but seems too close to Houston. Plus … is it in San Antonio or in Austin? You can’t stick a team in some dinky town like New Braunfels or San Marcos and cater to both markets … no a stadium has to be center-city to take advantage of the downtown culture in order to be successful in the modern game.
• Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham are great choices but seem to be “behind” Nashville for whatever reason. Charlotte has the NFL and NBA, has Nascar, has a ton of money. It’s also the biggest US market w/o baseball by population. Nobody would be surprised if it supplanted Nashville as the “east coast” expansion team.
• Montreal, for reasons I don’t really understand, continues to be thrown about as a possible location despite reams of evidence that it can’t/won’t support baseball. However, it remains in the discussion b/c it is, by far, the largest population market in the US or Canada without MLB baseball.
• Vancouver doesn’t really seem to be in the discussion right now but are listed as an option in some places. I’ve seen people push back on Portland in Quora answers … and every argument anti-Portland people make works for Vancouver as well.
• Tampa and Miami barely draw, and Orlando is primarily a tourist town, so i’m not sure who would want to put another team there.
• I just can’t imagine Sacramento supporting a team; California’s government has proven to be very anti-public stadium funding, and they’d have to build something out of scratch in a market that basically exists to support the state government. It is on this list though b/c Sacramento is the largest market by DMA (tv rankings) w/o the sport.
• San Jose is completely blocked by San Francisco’s territory rights, as the Supreme Court told us a decade ago before it got even more conservative in the last presidential term. Nevermind that downtown San Jose is more than 55 miles away from Oracle Park in Downtown San Francisco along a corridor that’s amongst the heaviest traveled in the US. Distance from Downtown Baltimore to Nats stadium? 38.3 miles.
• Lastly I laugh at anyone who thinks that Mexico City could support a team, given that the median income in Mexico is a 6th of what it is here (somehow I don’t think MLB players in Mexico are going to accept being paid in pesos).

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So, some navel gazing; what would 32 team divisions look like with two new teams in Nashville and Salt Lake City? It’d look pretty cool I think, if you’re not blowing up the leagues.

Current AL Divisional makeup:

• AL East: Boston, Toronto, New York, Baltimore, Tampa
• AL Central: Minnesota, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City
• AL West: Houston, Texas, Seattle, Los Angeles, Oakland/Las Vegas

So, you have to pull a team out of the East to make an “AL Southwest” division to go with Nashville. The obvious choice is Tampa. But, you also have two teams in the AL West that are in Texas while the rest are on the coast. That seems to imply that they’d make more sense to pair with this new group while Portland heads into a division with Seattle for rivalry purposes. But that leaves too many teams in the AL.

Meanwhile, here’s current NL Divisions:

• NL East: Philly, Atlanta, Washington, New York, Miami
• NL Central: Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis
• NL West: LA, Arizona, San Diego, San Francisco, Colorado

Atlanta and Miami are kind of isolated from the Northeast corridor teams and make sense to yank out. Pittsburgh could move to create an in-division rivalry with fellow Pennsylvania state. But how do you balance this out?

Divisional Scenario #1: Here’s some proposed eight team divisions that prevents any teams from having to move from AL to NL:

• New AL East: Boston, Toronto, New York, Baltimore. Classic rivalries maintained, little impact.
• New AL Southeast: Tampa, Kansas City, Houston, Texas. You move KC to be closer to the Texas teams. Tampa the outlier, but this is least impact to the existing AL.
• New AL Central: Minnesota, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago. Minimal impact.
• New AL West: Seattle, Salt Lake City, LA Angels, Oakland/Las Vegas. You have your new Northwest rivalry and all the teams are in the same time-zone, which you can’t say now.
• New NL East: Philly, Pittsburgh, New York, Washington: you move Pittsburgh to create a new cool rivalry with Philadelphia and these teams can all take the train to play each other.
• New NL Central: Milwaukee, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis; minimal impact, keep century-old rivalries alive.
• New NL Southeast: Atlanta, Miami, Nashville, Colorado; this would be perfect except for Colorado, which is difficult to place anywhere.
• New NL West: LA, Arizona, San Diego, San Francisco; all four now in the correct time zone

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Divisional Scenario #2: Now, if you weren’t opposed to having some AL->NL movement, you could put both new teams in the AL, move some teams to the NL, and create some better geographic divisions like this:

• New AL East: Boston, Toronto, New York, Baltimore.
• New AL Central: Minnesota, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago
• New AL Southwest: Kansas City, Colorado, Houston, Texas. Colorado is forced to move to the AL, but gets the best ever regional travel schedule its ever had.
• New AL West: Seattle, Salt Lake City, LA, Oakland/Las Vegas
• New NL East: Philly, Pittsburgh, New York, Washington
• New NL Southeast: Miami, Tampa, Nashville, Atlanta. Tampa is forced to move to the NL, but you get a division where all four teams are on the same Interstate (I-75).
• New NL Central: Milwaukee, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis
• New NL West: LA, Arizona, San Diego, San Francisco

I love this second scenario honestly. Minimal teams changing leagues (just two newer teams in Tampa and Colorado having to move leagues) and a ton of improvements in geographic rivalries.

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Divisional Scenario #3: Manfred’s East/West conference layout, destroying current leagues, may look something like the following. First, we squint at the map of the teams to figure out the 16 teams in each conference:

• Eastern Conference: Boston, Toronto, NYY, Baltimore, Philly, Pittsburgh, NYM, Washington, Detroit, Cleveland, Miami, Tampa, Nashville, Atlanta, Cincy, Milwaukee
• Western Conference: LAA, LAD, Arizona, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Salt Lake, Oakland/Las Vegas, Colorado, Houston, Texas, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minnesota, Chicago, Chicago

So, right off the bat, you have an issue here: The two Chicago teams in the “Western conference” seems silly. But, if you look at the distribution of teams geographically … you have to draw the line at Chicago. And, if you were giving up on leagues, might as well give up on divisional splits too:

• New Eastern Division 1: New York, New York, Boston, Toronto
• New Eastern Division 2: Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Philly
• New Eastern Division 3: Miami, Tampa, Atlanta, Nashville
• New Eastern Division 4: Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cincinnati
• New Western Division 1: Houston, Texas, Colorado, Kansas City
• New Western Division 2: LA, LA, San Diego, Arizona
• New Western Division 3: SF, Oakland/Las Vegas, Seattle, Salt Lake City
• New Western Division 4: St. Louis, Minnesota, Chicago, Chicago

Can you imagine the two New York teams, or the two Chicago teams, playing each other 18 times a year? Can you imagine us playing Baltimore 18 times a year? Can you imagine having both NY teams, Boston, and Toronto in one division, ensuring that the likelihood of two of them missing the playoffs every year is high? Does this alignment ensure Atlanta wins the next 20 divisional titles out of that group?

A final thought; when MLB introduced simple rule changes to improve the sport’s presence on TV, purists lost their minds. Imagine the fight baseball will have with the soul of its purist fanbase if/when they push to eliminate divisions or leagues? I just can’t imagine the damage they’ll do to the fan base if they decided to blow up 140 years of history so the owners can save a few bucks on airline fuel.

Conclusions: Do I “want” expansion? Sure. Two more teams means more MLB opportunities for players plus another dozen minor league teams, which turns into hundreds more jobs for players. It also opens the door for new markets, more fans, better reach, etc. I have a whole detailed analysis of how we’d come up with two new sets of minor league teams for two expansion clubs that will wait until we’re closer to it.

Do I want the elimination of leagues to do “geographic realignment?” Of course not. We live in 2025, not 1925; these players travel on private jets, not coal-fired overnight trains. But I do think my #2 scenario above makes the most sense (moving Colorado and Tampa leagues and adding two new teams) is the best.