On the surface, at least, this doesn’t seem like
a particularly good time to be talking about new locations for Major League
Baseball. We’ve just come to the end of a string of newly constructed stadiums
from Baltimore to Miami; today only 9 of the 30 teams play in ballparks built before
1992, and most of these parks (such as Wrigley Field and Dodger Stadium) have
aged well and are not considered candidates for replacement. Furthermore, the
economic downturn in the United States has probably ruled out another round of
expansion for the foreseeable future. But this does not mean we should rule out
the possibility of a new team completely.
Two teams have conspicuously been left out of
the recent ballpark-building spree and could certainly be considered candidates
for relocation. The Tampa Bay Rays have consistently had among the lowest
attendance in baseball since their creation despite fielding good teams in
recent years. Tropicana Field is widely despised, and its location in St. Petersburg
is a significant distance away from most Tampa Bay Area residents. Owner Stuart
Sternberg’s proposed new stadium in St. Petersburg was denied funding by the
city, and the Rays and MLB have been exploring other options (with MLB
commissioner Bud Selig recently calling the Rays’ low attendance
“inexcusable”). At least one member of the Rays front office has acknowledged
that, in general, “baseball hasn’t been very successful here in Florida.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the Oakland Athletics have found
themselves in a similar situation; the team plays in an outdated stadium (which
it has occupied since moving from Kansas City in 1968) and has become a
familiar presence at the bottom of the MLB’s attendance rankings. After
attempts to construct a new stadium in Oakland or nearby Fremont, owner Lew
Wolff is currently trying to gain approval to move the team to San Jose (a
considerably larger city than Oakland), but this depends on the San Francisco
Giants giving up their rights to the area, and it is unclear whether this will
happen. It still seems likely that the A’s will stay in Northern California—in
addition to San Jose, Oakland is making another push to keep the team, while
Sacramento is positioning itself as an alternative after being jilted by the
NBA’s Kings—but a move farther afield is not impossible. And an improved
economy could conceivably lead to expansion at some point in the future. Recent
changes such as the expansion of the playoffs and of interleague play appear
designed to excite and attract fans, and it’s possible that MLB could go so far
as to expand (in a hypothetical future in which the economy is solid) in order
to generate a buzz.
So as a thought experiment I plan to look at
potential future destinations for Major League Baseball. And to start with,
I’ll consider what may be the most intriguing possibility for baseball: moving
beyond North America.
South of the Border?
The advantages of placing a major league team in
Latin America are obvious. Baseball is wildly popular in several countries in
the region, and a large and increasing percentage of players and fans hail from
there. A team would help solidify MLB’s fan base in Latin America. Perhaps more
important would be the precedent a move to Latin America would send. No major
professional sports league in the United States has ever fielded a team outside
the U.S. and Canada. (As a side note, the AAA International League did include
a team in Cuba, the Havana Sugar Kings, during the 1950s; it would be
interesting to consider whether MLB might eventually have ended up in Havana if
the Cuban Revolution had not succeeded.) In a period when MLB has been steadily
losing ground to the NFL and NBA, such a risky move could help shake up
baseball’s aging fan base and, combined with other measures, get more people
excited about the game. Other leagues have also seen the possibilities that
could stem from a global presence; NBA commissioner David Stern, for one, has
spoken openly of his desire to place a team in London at some time in the
future. An effort to globalize baseball could be the very thing needed to place
the game on a stronger footing at home as well.
MLB has given Latin America serious
consideration in the past. In this post I will look at the three cities that
have been considered in the past: San Juan, Mexico City and Monterrey.
All are big markets. Mexico City’s estimated
city population of 8.9 million and metropolitan population of 19.5 million make
it the second-largest urban area in the Americas after São Paulo and one of the
largest in the world. Monterrey has over a million people in the city and over
four million in the metropolitan area, which would likely rank in the top 15 in
the United States (its exact ranking depends on how a metropolitan area is
defined). San Juan proper is quite a bit smaller, but its metropolitan area has
over two million people (more than half the population of Puerto Rico) and,
while not as large as Monterrey’s, would still be larger than several
metropolitan areas that host MLB teams (Kansas City, Cleveland, Cincinnati and
Milwaukee). San Juan would have an additional advantage in that, despite being
part of Latin America, it is also part of the U.S. (and may become a state in
the near future), which would enable MLB to avoid problems such as political
instability, visa issues and the Mexican peso while still reaching out to Latin
America. A San Juan team could also attempt to build up a fan base among the
Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, which is larger than the population of Puerto Rico itself (though doubtless many of these fans would remain loyal
to the Yankees or Mets).
Baseball previously considered San Juan as a
destination in 2004, when the Montreal Expos were looking for a new home; the
team played a fraction of its “home” games in 2003 and 2004 at San Juan’s
Estadio Hiram Bithorn, where they drew more fans than in Montreal (though this
admittedly says much more about Montreal than about San Juan) and inspired a
push by Puerto Rico to lure the team there permanently. While this effort was
not successful, MLB did return to San Juan in 2010 with a highly anticipated
series between the Mets and the Marlins. Mexico City and Monterrey haven’t
hosted MLB games, but both have large, enthusiastic fan bases and have been
considered as destinations for baseball teams in the past.
Despite all these pros, a move to Latin America
in the near future seems unlikely. The main problem is simply one of money.
For a Mexican team this is not quite as glaring
an issue as many Americans would assume; Mexico City and Monterrey are the two
richest cities in Mexico. Based on the Human Development Index, generally used
as an indicator of quality of life in a country, both Mexico City and Nuevo
Leon (the state that contains Monterrey) are at levels of human development
equivalent to many European countries, and many people have high levels of
disposable income. However, these statistics obscure the high levels of income
inequality in Mexico; while wealthy Mexicans would likely be able to afford tickets,
most people do not make enough money to be able to easily afford to attend
games at major league prices. Mexico’s Gini coefficient, a measure of the
extent to which income equality in a country deviates from a perfect equality
(higher means less equal) is considerably higher than that of the United
States, and over a third of people in Mexico City itself (which, again, is one
of the richest parts of the country) live below the poverty line. Considering
its huge population Mexico City could conceivably have enough wealthy citizens
to form a fan base capable of paying for major league tickets, but having a
team that can only hope to draw a minority of the population even in a
best-case scenario seems like a losing proposition. (The same goes for Monterrey,
only more so due to the city’s smaller size.) And that doesn’t even take into
account other problems, including finding or building an MLB-quality ballpark
in either location, Mexico City’s high altitude (it would be the highest in the
majors) and low air quality, and the ongoing Mexican drug war, which has turned
once-safe Monterrey into a hotbed of violence and would undoubtedly loom over
any effort to find investors for a Mexican venture.
San Juan doesn’t have the last two problems,
though it would likely need a new ballpark (Estadio Hiram Bithorn has a
capacity of only 20,000), but the wealth problem would still likely cripple a
team based there. An estimate of Puerto Rico’s median income in 2009 placed it
at only $18,654, around half that of the poorest U.S. state, Mississippi (and
considerably lower than Mexico City as well), which would likely make it
impossible to consistently draw fans without setting ticket prices at
unsustainably low levels. MLB games in San Juan have been priced at levels similar
to games in the U.S. (in the 2010 series, while bleacher seats could be had for
$13, other seats sold for $34 and up), which would make it very difficult for
most Puerto Ricans to attend more than a few games per year, but lower ticket
prices would make it harder to pay operating costs (as will be explored in my
next post, MLB teams cost quite a lot to operate). I can’t think of a realistic
means of solving this problem. (Incidentally, this is also why a team in a more
exotic locale such as Caracas and Santo Domingo, where interest in baseball is
high but the standard of living is low, would also be a losing proposition.)
One way a team in San Juan might try to keep itself viable would be securing a
lucrative television contract in order to appeal to Puerto Ricans on the
mainland (who now outnumber Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico itself), but
success in this would seem to be improbabe at best. Besides the challenge of
getting people to watch, teams can’t survive on TV alone. Without a fan base
able to regularly attend games, a team cannot survive. The same factors that
prevent teams in excessively small markets from thriving would likely doom a
team in San Juan.
As tempting as the idea is, then, movement into
Latin America does not seem like a realistic idea at present. It is possible
that in the coming decades conditions will change enough to make this
work—Mexico’s economy has been projected to expand even further, and the
possibility of statehood for Puerto Rico might ultimately change the economic and
social conditions there. For now, however, if MLB wants to make a change, it
will have to start at home. This will be the subject of my next post.
Two words
ReplyDeleteport
land
Yeah, DF is actually a much better place to put a basketball team (or a football team) than a baseball team. Right now in urban Mexico basketball really is the game of choice for teens and young people--i.e., your long-term market of fans--and for rich Mexicans (American) football has a weird status thing going on. (Witness the Tec de Monterrey's collegiate teams, for example.)
ReplyDeleteAlso, Lew Wolff didn't really try to put a stadium in Oakland--the city was for the Jack London Square stadium--and the Fremont, CA stadium violated the development compact of Bay Area cities in about 900 ways (e.g., massive car-centered development when building car infrastructure is unpopular with planners, etc), which looked to me like it was *always* a fake-out to try and go to San Jose. YMMV.
Florida was less successful ie; the Marlins because the business who were building a franchise, sold off their winning team in the face of a loyal new fan base. After that they started dwindling in attendance, but then they put together, somehow another winner, only to get cheap again. Actually the TV and Radio fan base for the Marlins is quite good.
ReplyDeleteMove the Rays to Alabama. There is a big baseball contingent down there and Florida is over saturated.
ReplyDeleteOakland to Portland