Expansion: A Quantitative Approach

Baseball has apparently decided to destroy all numerical elegance in the structuring of the leagues and the post-season, starting next year. That's a shame, because they could've decided to make the game considerably more elegant. I get that a recession probably isn't the best time for this, but for a good many decades the game of baseball had sixteen teams, eight in each league. The neat thing about this is that the entire league was on a power of two. Then we had fifty-or-so years of expansion, which took us from a sixteen-team world to... a thirty-team world. So close to thirty-two, the next power of two up, and yet so far. So, we have unequal leagues and awkward divisions, or at least we had those things until next year, when we'll have odd-numbered leagues and awkward playoffs. There are also certain teams that struggle mightily to attract attention and attendance in their current cities. So, which current teams seem to be most inopportunely located, and which cities lacking a team seem most like they could add one? Let's take a look!


The three largest metropolitan areas in the country, New York (19 million people), Los Angeles (13 million people), and Chicago (9.5 million people), each have two teams. That seems appropriate. The other metropolitan area with two teams, San Francisco/Oakland, has just 4.3 million people, and is just the 11th-largest in America. Dallas, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Boston are all bigger than the Bay Area in population. So is Toronto, up in Canada. The smallest metro area with an MLB franchise is, by far, Milwaukee. With just 1.55 million residents, Greater Milwaukee is nearly half-a-million people smaller than Kansas City. There are nine other cities smaller than Kansas City but bigger than Milwaukee, none of which have teams.

But before we hit that big gap between the second-smallest and the smallest baseball town, the number of baseball-vacant big metropolitan areas is fairly small. Riverside/San Bernardino/Ontario, California is the 13th-biggest metro area in the United States, with 4.2 million people, and lacks a team. Since it's such an aggregated concept, with no one city really sticking out, and since California already has five teams, I think that it's reasonable for there to be no team there. The next biggest metropolitan area in anglophone North America without a team is, uh, Montreal. I guess we know how putting a team there works out? Then we hit a quarter of cities between Pittsburgh (#22) and Cincinnati (#27): Portland, Sacramento, San Antonio, and Orlando. Then right after Cincinnati we find Vancouver, Canada. Then it's Cleveland, Kansas City, a whole bunch of cities, and Milwaukee.

Now, population is not the only variable that affects how feasible putting a baseball team in a given city is. Cities and regions also have different appetites for baseball. So let's look at total attendance that a city's team or teams drew to home games during the 2011 season divided by metropolitan population:

This chart shows attendance over population on the y-axis, with metropolitan population on the x-axis. A few things jump out at us immediately: There is an overall tendency for bigger metropolitan areas to have a smaller attendance/population ratio. This makes sense: baseball stadia vary in size much less than cities, from about 34,000 capacity to about 56,000 (Rays and Dodgers, respectively), and once you build a stadium with capacity X, you've imposed a hard cap on attendance for the season: 81*X. Even if bigger cities tend to have bigger stadia, and even if those bigger cities really, really want to support their baseball teams as enthusiastically as the smaller cities do, you won't run attendance above 81*X. We also see that the three biggest metro areas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, which have two teams each, suffer from this same trend, though they fall well above the trend line that is apparent among the smaller, one-team towns. Then we notice a few anomalies.

See that dot way the hell up in the top-left corner? That's Milwaukee. The smallest-market team in baseball was also the seventh-highest attendance team. For every resident of the Milwaukee MSA, the Brewers raked in 1.97 fans. That's right: the team's attendance was almost double the population of the entire city. There's also another dot that's just a little bit removed from the main sequence, up and to the right. It's got an attendance/population ratio a little over 1, and around 4.3 million residents. That's the Bay Area, the other two-team city. Note that it does fall above the main trend line, as do the other three two-team markets. So the Oakland Athletics' problem is not that they're in a city that doesn't want to support two baseball teams, it's that they're in a city that really, really wants to support the Giants, and not the Athletics. The Giants had well over twice the Athletics' attendance, with a stadium only 20% larger. If the two Bay Area franchises had managed to split their attendance evenly, they would've been ahead of the New York Mets in 2011 attendance. Even if the A's had drawn attendance proportional to the stadium differential with the Giants, they'd've ranked something like 17th or 18th in baseball last year, instead of dead last.

By ignoring these five anomalous cities, four with two teams and one that just looks like an outlier, we can try to get a handle on which cities most over- or under-perform the apparent trend between city size and attendance ratios. The simple trend line of the 'main sequence' appears to be something like 1.0 minus one times the city's population measured in ten-millions. Fitting all 26 MLB cities to that line, we see that the five most over-performing cities are, in order, New York, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. No surprises there. Here are the cities that underperform their expected attendance numbers by more than 0.1 ratio points, in ascending order of badness: Arizona, Washington, Baltimore, Seattle, Toronto, Miami, and, of course, Tampa Bay. So it really, really is true that the Tampa Bay Rays deserve a lot more fans than they receive, as do the Marlins. Other teams that do damn well but aren't in our group of five anomalies are Colorado, St. Louis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia, with Boston the next one on the list but just below my cutoff. If Fenway were bigger, they'd have qualified easily; the Red Sox have sold out every game for the last many years.

So, what does all of this suggest about which teams to move and where to expand? Well, I think it's genuinely questionable to have two teams in the Bay Area; it just seems weird to give a second team to the biggest, second-biggest, third-biggest, and... eleventh biggest metropolitan areas. I'm not honestly sure where to put another team: Dallas is in a state that already has two teams, Philadelphia is incredibly close to the teams in New York, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, Washington and Miami are having trouble supporting their one team, and while Atlanta supports the Braves just fine, it doesn't appear to have very much surplus appetite. Milwaukee seems to justify its existence in the smallest baseball market by being easily the most strongly supported team. Any team in Kansas City is consigned to small-market-dom, but the Royals aren't doing too much worse than they ought to. The two Ohio teams are also doing just fine, especially the Reds. Above that, the cities that have teams are just the x largest metropolitan areas, minus Montreal and the strange mid-California conglomerate. But since the two Florida teams get the worst level of support compared to what you might expect, it seems reasonable to want to shake that situation up. (That could change as the Marlins get a new stadium and hope to improve their fortunes.)

So what would I do? I'm pretty certain I'd want to move the Tampa Bay Rays. I would also consider moving the Oakland Athletics or the Kansas City Royals. (Incidentally, the only reason the Royals exist is that when the Athletics moved out of Kansas City, one of Missouri's Senators threatened to attack MLB's anti-trust exemption if they didn't restore baseball to Kansas City. You can argue that the Royals shouldn't have existed in the first place.) That means I want between three and five locations for new franchises to accommodate those moves and the two expansion teams. Riverside/San Bernardino/Ontario is right out. So, too, is Montreal, I'd say; that experience seemed to work out rather badly. The next largest city lacking a team on the list is Portland, Oregon. This seems like a logical location, since there's a pretty big stretch of the West Coast without a team. Maybe the Athletics could move to Portland. Seattle appears to have a bit of trouble drawing interest right now, though, which is a bit of a cautionary factor, although it could just be a product of their being a really lousy team right now.

By the same logic that said the Riverside area shouldn't get a team, I'd say the Sacramento area shouldn't get one, either. Riverside is basically a suburb of Los Angeles, and while Sacramento is its own city, it's right next to a city we're trying to move teams away from. San Antonio, the next largest on the list, is a possibility: Texas is very big, and appears to be kind of getting into baseball right now, and is easily large enough to sustain a third team. But I'm not sure that adding that team is very high on the list. The same logic applies to Austin, though San Antonio is bigger and you'd think would get the third Texas team.

Then we hit Orlando, and, relatedly, Jacksonville. Florida is clearly a big enough state to have two teams (other multi-state teams are New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri (kinda), Texas, and California). But the two Florida teams both seem to do incredibly poorly. Particularly if the Marlins' new stadium makes their team more successful, I think one might consider moving the Rays to another Florida city. Orlando is the bigger of the two, and Jacksonville apparently has a reputation as a city uniquely unwilling to support sports teams. The new stadium in Orlando would probably have to be really nice and would, of course, require a retractable roof. But I think Orlando's a possibility.

Next on the list is Vancouver. I would tend to rule this out, just because it's so near to Seattle and Seattle doesn't need the competition. Then we enter the stretch of cities between Kansas City and Milwaukee: Las Vegas, San Jose, Columbus, Charlotte, Indianapolis, Austin, Norfolk, Providence, and Nashville. I already discussed Austin and San Jose falls under the same category as other California cities. Ohio doesn't need another team. I feel like putting a sports team in Las Vegas would be weird; indeed, it doesn't have any major-league sports teams right now. That leaves Charlotte, Indianapolis, Norfolk, Providence, and Nashville. Four of these are cities more or less in the South, and I don't think that's a mistake. The entire South, excluding Texas and South Florida, has all of one baseball team, the Atlanta Braves. It's a big part of the country: the states I'm including have almost 20% of the nation's people, but just 3% of its baseball teams.

At this point I'll also list all the other American cities with at least 1 million people, though I won't discuss all of them: Jacksonville, Memphis, Louisville, Richmond, Oklahoma City, Hartford, New Orleans, Buffalo, Raleigh, Birmingham, and Salt Lake City. I've already discussed Jacksonville. Memphis, Louisville, Richmond, New Orleans, Raleigh, and Birmingham are also Southern cities. Hartford joins Providence up in New England. Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City are both kind of in the middle of nowhere out west. And Buffalo, well, I think it's too cold to put a Major League baseball team there that will aspire to play postseason games in late October.

So I think that we ought to add one Southern city to the mix. Charlotte, NC is clearly the largest. Norfolk, Virginia is the least-southern. New Orleans is the biggest cultural center, and I believe has a reputation as a good sports town. Memphis or Nashville would be the only choices in the inland South. I might be inclined to choose Richmond, Virginia, for the following reasons: the South has a reputation as not liking baseball all that much, and Virginia's becoming less culturally Southern every day; unlike Norfolk, Richmond is on I-95; and it's near enough to both the Virginia Beach area and to the populated areas of North Carolina that it might draw from them. I might also consider New Orleans as a potential second Southern addition.

The other thing I think is that New England deserves a second baseball team. The place is clearly baseball-crazy. The Red Sox sell out literally every game in their miniscule stadium. Boston is bigger than San Francisco, baseball's current anomalous two-city team. And you wouldn't even need to put two teams in the same city: just stick a team in Providence. We're also on I-95, and close enough to Boston that we would kind of feel like a second Boston team, without actually being one. That would probably need to be a National League team.

So what I've come up with is Portland, Providence, Richmond, and either New Orleans or Orlando as new destinations. But those are just from among the options within the United States. Going a little south of the border, two intriguing options appear. Puerto Rico is a U.S. jurisdiction, and has a rich baseball tradition. The San Juan metropolitan area has 2.6 million people, which would rank it 21st among U.S. cities, ahead of Denver, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Milwaukee among baseball towns. You'd need to tear down Hiram Bithorn Stadium, an astroturf house of horrors that derailed Jose Reyes' and the Mets' season when they were forced to play the Marlins in a three-game series there, and build somewhere a little more respectable, but I think Puerto Rico might be an intriguing place to stick a baseball team.

The other interesting idea is the largest metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere: Mexico City. As with Puerto Rico, Mexico is a fairly baseball-liking culture, and Mexico City could easily support one measly team. Now, I'm not sure how the logistics of crossing national borders would work out, or whether the Mexican League would be okay with that change. And honestly, both of these locations have weather problems: Puerto Rico is hot and wet throughout the summer, and while Mexico City has a nice moderate temperature year-round, it also appears to have a monsoon season of sorts in the late summer.

So here's what I'd do, more or less. Assuming the Astros really move to the American League, I would have National League teams in Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. That's sixteen teams. If I were to make four divisions out of this, they'd be the East (PVD, NYM, PHI, PIT), Central (CIN, CHC, MIL, COL), West (SFG, LAD, SDP, ARI), and South (MIA, ATL, WSH, STL). More realistically, making two divisions, you'd get East (PVD, NYM, PHI, WSN, ATL, MIA, PIT, CIN) and West (CHC, MIL, STL, COL, ARI, SDP, LAD, SFG). Then you could have two wild-cards, which makes an eight-team division somewhat more tolerable. Providence is new, obviously, and all other teams are their usual selves.

In the American League, I'd have teams in Toronto, Boston, New York, Baltimore, Richmond, Orlando (or New Orleans), Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles/Anaheim, Portland, Seattle, and San Juan or Mexico City. There's a lot more uncertainty here, because two of the spots are options between one city or another. Obviously all teams in cities currently having teams would be their own selves. The Athletics would move to Portland. Then there are four possibilities regarding the location of the two teams with alternative cities: Orlando/San Juan, Orlando/Mexico City, New Orleans/San Juan, and New Orleans/Mexico City. In the first case, I think the Rays would go to Orlando, the Royals to Richmond, and San Juan would get the new team. In the second, the Rays would still go to Orlando. The Royals would go to Mexico City unless Mexico City wanted to get a new team rather than a cast-off, in which case they'd go back to Richmond again. In the third case, the Rays would go to San Juan, the Royals to New Orleans, and the new team to Richmond. In the fourth case, the Rays would go to New Orleans, and the Royals and the new team would be in the same situation as Case #2. Honestly, the divisions are too hard to try to work out given the uncertainty about which teams are where.

As far as names for the new teams go, the old Providence team was called the Grays, but that's sort of a weak name. I associate our city with the word 'Bruin,' which is both the name of all things Brown-related and of the AHL team in the city. Incidentally, the word 'bear' is etymologically connected to the word 'brown;' it means "the brown one." The word 'arctic' also appears to come from the Greek for bear, arktos. You could call the team the Providence Bears, or the Providence Bruins, though I'm not sure what the Cubs would think about that. Maybe Providence Browns? It's kind of a play on Greys, it ties in to the whole bear thing, and we've already got the Reds, as well as two teams named by the colors of their socks.

Presumably the Athletics would keep the name Athletics on moving to Portland. The Royals could move to either New Orleans, Mexico City, or Richmond. I'd find it a little weird to put a team called the Royals in Richmond, a big spot in the revolution. Colonials? I couldn't find any great names from Richmond sports teams, 'cause there aren't a lot of them. Names associated with New Orleans are obvious the Saints, the Hornets, and the Zephyrs, a Marlins affiliate. Former baseball teams include the Pelicans. Honestly I think you could keep the name Royals here. Team names that I find associated with Mexico City include the Red Devils, Blue Cross, and Pumas. Not really seeing a theme? You could probably keep Royals, though I'm not sure what you'd do with a new team there. I guess there's room in the league for a devil-named team, after the Rays exorcized him from their name and stopped sucking. (Boy I wish that hadn't been such a neat sequence of events...) If the Rays moved to Orlando, perhaps they could keep their name. Lots of Florida teams have aquatic names, even if not on the water, and hell, the name of the biggest team in Orlando is the Magic. C'mon. If they moved to New Orleans, I'm not sure that would work as well, but perhaps they could pick out some sea creature that's more native to the New Orleans area.

Anyway, those are my conclusions from looking at which big cities appear to lack for a baseball team. I hope that Major League Baseball eventually realizes that odd-numbered leagues and weirdly-structured playoffs are a mistake, and decide to expand up to 32 teams and make things nice again. If they do, Providence, Richmond, Orlando, New Orleans, San Juan, Mexico City, and Portland are places they should be looking at to put new franchises or more struggling current team to.