I had this headline saved as a draft going way back to mid-October, but hadn’t had a chance to fill it out. The gist of my thinking was pretty self-explanatory, though, given that Major League Baseball has long had an interest in expanding to 32 teams once the stadium situations in Tampa and Oakland were resolved. With the pandemic crushing revenues this year, I wondered if MLB might hasten their interest in expanding.
Ken Rosenthal gave me a jumpstart today with an article ostensibly about Dave Dombrowski not having an interest in returning to a front office gig any time soon, because he’d rather stick with his commitment to the group trying to bring an MLB team to Nashville. If they get a team within the next four years, he’s likely to become its President. Fine. That’s news enough at a time of various front office openings around baseball.
What jumped out at me, though, was the explicit connection between the pace of expansion and the 2020 pandemic season:
Yet [Dombrowski] seems energized by the possibilities in Nashville, citing 42 cranes doing construction downtown, saying the city is major-league caliber and still growing. He previously has spoken of building a ballpark along the Cumberland River and giving the team a Negro Leagues name.
Adding two expansion teams at fees of say, $1 billion each, would be an easy way for MLB to infuse cash after a season in which it played a shortened 60-game schedule without fans and suffered operating losses of approximately $3 billion, according to commissioner Rob Manfred. But relocations also are possible with several franchises facing continued financial uncertainty.
$2 billion divided by 30 teams comes out to almost $67 million per organization, which would go a long way toward defraying the $100 million losses averaged by the 30 teams in 2020 (according to MLB). It’s inconceivable to me that, if the losses were as bad as the teams claim, and if more losses are expected in 2021, they wouldn’t consider moving up expansion to something approximating “ASAP.” Given the enormous sales price on the Mets (more than $2.4 billion), it’s clear that MLB teams are still viewed as exceptional long-term assets. Heck, a $1 billion expansion fee might be light!
The reason expansion has been tied to Tampa and Oakland – following those stadium issues, I mean – is because MLB has wanted to be able to hold leverage over those cities in the stadium talks (or any other clubs that face what they believe to be untenable stadium situations in the near-term, and want to threat to relocate in order to extract more public money to stay).
If MLB were instead to jump the gun on expansion, well, they’d necessarily foreclose two of their alternative city options that they could have otherwise held over Tampa and Oakland (think something like this: “Hey, if you don’t help the Rays figure this thing out, we’ve got a setup ready to go in Montreal, and the Rays owners are ready to move.”). All else equal, MLB would rather get those two situations fully and completely resolved, and then move on to expansion.
But the pandemic has probably made things not “all else equal,” and has made the urgency to get those expansion fees probably a little more acute than optimizing the results for the Rays and the A’s. Plus, each team has made some progress (at last check) in getting a good stadium situation on the horizon – the A’s have plans in place for a new site, and the Rays have had talks about splitting their season between Tampa and Montreal.
We’ll see if this picks up any traction this offseason. It was coming at some point this decade in any case, but again, I’d just be shocked if it’s not accelerated now. With expansion will necessarily come an expansion draft, divisional realignment, schedule changes, and a change in the postseason. Some of that stuff is on the docket already (a long-term rethinking of playoff structure, for example), so there may be some efficiencies gained by teeing it all up right now.
If you were wondering, when MLB last expanded and had a draft in 1997, the rules looked like this:
• All players in an organization were eligible to be drafted, except those with no prior big league experience who had less than three years service if signed at age 19 or older, or had less than four years of service if signed at age 18 or younger.
• There were three rounds, where the expansion teams alternated 28 picks in each of the first two rounds, and then another 14 total picks in the third round.
• Each existing organization could lose no more and no less than one player in each of the first and second rounds, and no more than one player in the third round.
• Each organization could protect 15 players in the first round, add three more players in the second round, and three more players in the third round. Players with no-trade rights had to be protected.
That year, the Cubs lost infielder Miguel Cairo to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays with the 8th overall pick (first round), lefty Ramon Tatis to the Devil Rays with the 42nd overall pick (second round), and pitcher/outfielder Brooks Kieschnick to the Devil Rays with the 64th overall pick (third round).