That was quite a bombshell baseball commissioner Rob Manfred dropped in the middle of MLB’s Little League Classic game in Williamsport last week, hinting in an ESPN interview that expansion to 32 teams is on the near horizon along with a massive geographical realignment.
The day after Manfred’s remarks, baseball scribes, pundits and podcasters everywhere rushed to propose their own hypothetical geographic four-team divisions in a new 32-team MLB structure. It was assumed Manfred was talking about eight four-team divisions rather than two eight team divisions in the east and west “conferences,” but whatever. And most proposals included Nashville as one of the most likely expansion teams. A lot of them also had the Mets and Yankees in the same division as well as the Cubs and White Sox, and Angels and Dodgers also together.
It all made for great baseball grist in the dog days of August, but it is important to understand none of this is ever going to happen.
Almost from the day he succeeded Bud Selig as commissioner in 2015, Manfred has talked wistfully of baseball expanding to a more evenly balanced 32 teams, just like the NFL — almost as if he’d like that to be his legacy achievement. In recent years, Manfred has said any talk of expansion had to be put aside until the stadium situations with the Rays in Tampa Bay and the A’s in Oakland were resolved. Yet even though neither of them have been, Manfred somehow chose last week to revive expansion talk as if it could be not that far away. Why?
Could it by chance have anything to do with the negotiations with the Players Association on a new bargaining agreement — in which the owners are said to be pushing hard for a salary cap? Would the players be amenable to softening their opposition to a cap by the prospect of adding 50 new jobs? That’s the strong suspicion behind Manfred’s motive last week. But if so, it’s a fruitless gesture and here’s why:
First of all, there is almost no appetite in baseball right now for expansion. As one senior baseball executive said: “There’s not enough good players — especially pitchers — to go around now. This is all we need — another 50-60 Triple-A caliber players masquerading as major leaguers. It’s hard to make the argument for more teams when right now you’ve got a dozen teams drawing under 30,000 a game.” That aside, I said, wouldn’t the owners still relish getting those expansion fees? To which he replied: “Think about it, in today’s baseball, two million dollars amount to about one player.”
As for geographical realignment, which Manfred maintained would save millions for the owners in travel costs at the same time being a benefit to the players — it would also likely mean the elimination of the American and National Leagues as we know them and totally dilute the uniqueness of natural rivalries like the Yankees and Mets. For instance they would now have to play in the same eastern conference or, God forbid, even the same four-team division, and instead of playing each other in two home-and-away three-game series, they would likely play each other twice as much, and they could never meet in a World Series.
But there’s more, much more.
No one in baseball, especially Manfred, is talking about this but the A’s-to-Las Vegas deal is probably not going to happen. On July 2, there was a devastating article in The Guardian detailing how the cost of construction on the proposed 33,000-seat ballpark in Vegas (which would be the smallest in baseball) have skyrocketed from the $1.5 billion announced six months ago to $1.75 billion and will likely soon surpass $2 billion. A’s owner John Fisher, whose family founded the Gap, has loans from Goldman-Sachs and Aramark along with public funds that total around $855 million, leaving a sizeable gap (pardon the pun) for the ballpark that’s going to have to come out of his pocket — and nobody believes he’s going to continue risking his family’s wealth on a project that makes little fiscal sense.
“Fisher has to realize he’s a dead man walking and he is sort of trying to play out the string to save as much face as he can,” JC Bradbury, an economist who studies the financing of sports venues was quoted in The Guardian article.
Indeed, since a phony groundbreaking ceremony for the new stadium with Manfred and a bunch of local Nevada politicians back in June, nothing has happened. From the beginning, moving from the 6th largest TV market in San Francisco/Oakland to the 40th in Las Vegas, was questioned by the MLB owners, who nevertheless approved the deal, but it comes at a time when also Las Vegas entertainment and gaming revenues are down substantially.
“They should’ve never approved this deal,” one former MLB owner told me. “To me, Las Vegas never made sense. It’s a transient town in a miniscule market with all sorts of competing entertainment venues and the A’s have no fan base — nobody’s ever heard of them — there.”
Meanwhile, when it comes to expansion there are serious issues with the potential city most speculated about — Nashville, the 26th ranked TV market. Both the Braves and Reds, who are respectively 250 and 273 miles from Nashville and are vehemently opposed to Nashville and it’s been pointed out that the Tennessee Titans consistently rank near the bottom in NFL attendance, leaving another MLB exec to opine: “What’s the incentive to expand there?”
IT’S A MADD, MADD WORLD
So much for Kyle Tucker following Juan Soto into the $600 million-plus stratosphere as next winter’s pre-eminent slugger in the free agent market. It had been baseball’s most confounding mystery — Tucker’s two-month slump in which his power stroke had disappeared to the point where manager Craig Counsell had to sit him down last week for a re-set. But only when that happened did Tucker reveal that he’s been playing with a hairline fracture in his right hand since June. It was commendable the 28-year-old Cubs right fielder has chosen to play through it amid speculation he was feeling the pressure of his impending free agency. All we know is Tucker is hitting .148 with a .381 OPS for August and hadn’t homered since July 19 and his market value has undoubtedly plummeted. Even the Yankees’ struggling Anthony Volpe had as many homers (18) and three more RBI than Tucker as of Friday. Tucker’s ground ball rate in August was up 50% as opposed to 33.8% in July so it would appear his problems may lie in his stroke, but for some reason he’s been unable to adjust. “There’s no question that when you look at his numbers it’s had an impact on him,” said Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer. “He just hasn’t slugged in quite a while. He hasn’t put a lot of balls in the air and the exit velos aren’t high. I do think a lot of it’s mechanical. I think when you look at his swing early in the year versus now, it’s less connected and, therefore, less powerful. … The Orioles locking up top catching prospect Samuel Basallo to an eight-year, $67 million contract extension just days after promoting him to the big leagues signals their admission that Adley Rutschman has not become the franchise player they envisioned him being when they took him over Bobby Witt Jr. as the No. 1 overall pick in the 2019 draft. Though he finished second in the 2022 Rookie of the Year voting and was an All-Star selection in ’23 and ’24, Rutschman’s offensive numbers have been ordinary and he’s hitting only .227 this year while also being slowed by injuries. … It was gratifying to see Graig Nettles, who celebrated his 81st birthday last Wednesday, back at Yankees Old-Timers’ Day after an absence of few years. When I talked to him last year Nettles said he was at a loss as to why the Yankees hadn’t been inviting him back, but now that they have, hopefully they’ll take it a step further by honoring him with a deserving plaque in Monument Park. A five-time Yankee All-Star, Nettles is without question the all-time greatest (clean) Yankee third baseman with both his power and elite defense and ranks 11th on their all-time home run list with 250. He is also the only former Yankee captain (since Lou Gehrig) not enshrined in Monument Park. Note to Hal Steinbrenner: You need to give this great Yankee his due before it’s too late for him to appreciate it. It was not an accident Nettles got one of the loudest ovations of the Old-Timers’ Day introductions.
