Chaos Reigns Supreme In Manfred’s World Of “Expansion”

For a commissioner who wants to preside over 32 MLB teams, Rob Manfred sure is having difficulty getting beyond 28. Which is quite a feat considering he inherited 30 teams.

The A’s

The A’s situation is well chronicled here but let’s bring the absurdity to the forefront with a few observations. First, Manfred’s 30th team no longer has even a city attached to its name, and is set to play for several years in a minor league ballpark with 10,000 seats.

Meanwhile, Manfred’s mouth says “Vegas is full steam ahead, 100%!” and yet the only tangible progress is the absence of a structure, i.e., the demolition of Bally’s Casino which would have happened if baseball had never been discussed on the Tropicana site.

Fisher has been desperately seeking suckers, I mean investors, and has come up with zilch but it’s all good because he didn’t really need them anyway. His family will just foot the entire bill, which the A’s claim will be $1.5B total even though the Sphere was budgeted at $1.3B but actually cost $2.3B.

Sounds like the finances fit about as well as a stadium fits on a 9 acre parcel. Vital Vegas, which knows more about the truth in Vegas than anyone else I’ve heard, calls all the “good news” about the A’s stadium in Vegas “hooey” and flatly predicts the A’s will never build a stadium there.

“The Fishers Will Pay For it.” O Rly?

Because that’s what the facts say, even if it’s not what Manfred’s mouth is saying. Let’s not be too quick to conflate “can” and “will”. Could the Fishers invest $1B in the stadium? Where I most certainly could not even if I wanted to, the Fishers have the ability to scrounge up $1B — if they wanted to sell a ton of their valuable Gap stock, dip into personal wealth, and so on.

When you’re a billionaire, you can fritter away $1M in a way we mere mortals cannot, but you still tend not to fritter away money by the billions. And for the Fishers to invest $1B towards the stadium would be to bet on a combination of bad odds and impossible math.

The A’s originally announced plans to build a 30,000 seat stadium, to which most experts replied with skepticism that it would fit. When the A’s said they would pay for the stadium by drawing 2.5M fans each season for several seasons, mathematicians scratched their collective heads. It wasn’t dandruff, it was the simple calculation that selling out each and every game would still only add up to 2.43M.

So the A’s magically changed the capacity from 30,000 to 33,000. Now the Fishers would just need to rely on the A’s averaging 31,000 fans for several years...in a stadium that is now 10% bigger than the one that wasn’t going to fit.

If you’re thinking about investing $1B into a project that isn’t even yours, you see that the return depends on impossible math and non-existent buzz and excitement, and your investment peers won’t touch the project with a 10 foot pole...Maybe you could find the money, but will you? You probably didn’t become a billionaire by answering “yes”.

The Rays

So how goes things for MLB’s 29th team? Well, not so good it seems.

Speaking of all things Tropicana, that term has not been kind to MLB of late. The home of the Rays, known by that same name, has a leaky roof to put it mildly.

Earlier this week came news that the Pinellas County Commission had postponed a vote on its share of bonds for a new stadium, leaving the project in a place with which the A’s are all too familiar: the town of Limbo.

Today comes news that the St. Petersburg City Council has reversed course and decided not to spend the $23M+ required to repair the roof of Tropicana Dome. So the Rays, already banished in 2025 to the Yankees’ spring training home of roughly 11,000 seats, have no home assured even for 2026.

Expansion? Really?

Right now just “status quo” would look awfully good. It’s hard to worry about how or where teams #31 and #32 might pop up when 2 of your 30 teams can’t even draw a crowd of 15,000 for the Yankees or Dodgers or Fireworks show.

I suppose we could kill two birds with one stone (or if that upsets the Audubon Society, we could just overcome two problems with one solution). The Rays suddenly need a brand new stadium and there’s a parcel on the Las Vegas strip that’s approved not for the A’s but rather for any team that wants to build a stadium there, be it the A’s, an expansion team, or — I don’t know — some other team that rhymes with A’s? The Rays? The Marvin Gayes? The Itsjusta Phay’s?

All I know is that it’s a bit premature to ponder a brand new team in Nashville or Salt Lake City when 2 of your existing teams are a traveling farce that render a whopping 6.7% of MLB’s residents officially “homeless”.

What Next For Tampa?

The A’s situation has been much discussed over the last couple years, but the Rays’ problem is fresh. Only in the last month has their existing stadium been ravaged by hurricane, a new stadium proposal put back into financial purgatory, and repairs to the roof put on indefinite hold.

Are the Rays suddenly looking at playing in a tiny non-MLB stadium for years too? Or is a move out of Tampa on the table where it hasn’t really been talked about before? Is Salt Lake City taking an “If we build it, you will come” approach knowing that there are multiple teams with players, coaches, uniforms, and logos but no home to click their heels 3 times and return to?

30 + 2 = 30

Welcome to MLB Math, aka Manthfred. You seek expansion and yet somehow the A’s could move into a new stadium they built in Las Vegas and the Rays could move into a new stadium in Salt Lake City and you would have yourself two new cities and ... 30 teams.

And you waived the relocation fee so there’s not even that! Oops. MLB’s 28 other owners might be wondering why they rubber stamped plans that may wind up benefiting no one and hurting everyone, or perhaps they won’t have any epiphanies until a solid dozen of the major league teams are playing in minor league or spring training facilities and marketing themselves strictly as nomads.

I know this: when 6.7% of your teams can’t bring 15,000 fans to pay admission, buy concessions, or buy merchandise for any of 81 home games it’s not ideal for revenue, not for the home teams, not for the visiting teams, not for anyone.

Oh well. It will probably all work out.