Some big changes could be coming to MLB in the next couple of years.
Drew Jordan/The Athletic
In an interview during ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” broadcast from the Little League Classic in Williamsport, Pa. on Sunday night, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred reiterated his perspective on the possibility of expanding the league to 32 teams and the likelihood of rearranging the various divisions based on location.
“I think if we expand, it provides us with an opportunity to geographically realign,” Manfred said during the broadcast, which featured the Seattle Mariners and New York Mets. “I think we could save a lot of wear and tear on our players in terms of travel. I think our postseason format would be even more appealing for entities like ESPN because you’d be playing out of the East, out of the West and that 10 o’clock where we sometimes get Boston-Anaheim would be two West Coast teams. That 10 o’clock slot that’s a problem for us sometimes becomes a real opportunity for our West Coast audience.”
Manfred has said he wants to have the locations of two new teams picked out by the time he retires in 2029, although the clubs won’t yet be playing. But Manfred has long said league expansion will follow after the Rays and the Athletics complete their long-running quests for new stadiums.
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While a recent USA Today story noted that MLB views Nashville and Salt Lake City as the two strongest potential expansion markets, Manfred refused to identify any potential cities when discussing the topic last month on CNBC.
“The cities that are out there almost exclusively have been cities that have self-reported. They’re coming to us saying we’d like to have (a team),” Manfred told the network, noting that the two cities would likely include one Eastern time zone-based market and one in the Mountain or Pacific time zone. “There’s a whole list of them and I don’t like to differentiate between them because we’re just not at that point yet in the process.”
While Manfred declined during that appearance to discuss a specific fee that a new expansion franchise would have to pay to join the league, he did suggest that it would “be a number that begins with a ‘B’.”
There’s been talk (and some action) about the next round of MLB expansion for awhile, with cities like Austin and San Antonio getting some mentions, as well as a more generic “Central Texas” entity. There’s also a case to be made for a second team in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, but we’ll put that aside for now. Wherever the next two franchises end up, there will be some form of realignment that apparently will focus on better geographical grouping, which makes sense from a number of perspectives.
Having eight divisions means two more than there are now, so that would be quite the shakeup. The Athletic takes a look at one possible way this could go. That depends to some extent on where the expansion teams are, but most of the likely possibilities work well with that idea. And don’t worry, there are plenty of others out there. There’s a dependency on the idiot owner of the A’s finally getting his Las Vegas stadium dreams off the ground, but one way or another this is the general direction we are heading. The Chron has more.