There should be professional baseball everywhere

Part 1 of "Toward a Better Baseball"

During MLB’s offseason, I will post a series of essays titled “Toward a Better Baseball.” The goal of the series is to articulate a vision for the sport for when MLB loses its monopoly power. This is Part 1.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

Troy, New York, has suffered decades of industrial decline, its population is smaller today than it was in the 1880s, and Major League Baseball loves picking on it. A fledgling National League folded the hometown Trojans in 1882 to establish a new team down the Hudson River. (Lucky you, Giants fans.) Almost 150 years later, MLB conducted a hostile takeover of the minor leagues and flicked Troy’s Single-A team, the Tri-City Valleycats, out of affiliated baseball like they were lint on a designer suit. 

MLB was able to do this because it owns the sport in the United States and it owns the sport in the United States because in 1922 the Supreme Court said they do. This unique monopoly has allowed the league to skirt labor laws, impose television blackouts, and bilk taxpayers. Like the broader economy, MLB’s modus operandi is to exploit and then abandon communities across America with impunity. 

The banished Valleycats sued over this power, known as MLB’s antitrust exemption, as did outfielder Curt Flood fifty years before them. Fans are fed up with it, and so are liberal House Democrats and insurrectionist Senate Republicans alike. The legal and political battles through the years obscure the question that they are meant to answer: how should professional baseball exist in the United States?

It should allow for ball clubs anywhere. It should broadcast its games as widely and cheaply as possible. It should let teams rise (and fall) through the professional ranks based on performance. And it should fairly compensate labor. It shouldn’t do this just because nerds like me take umbrage with the century-old Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc. v. National League. By orienting the sport toward accessibility and competition, we can enliven and enrich communities across the country and let the residents and workers of Troy and cities and towns everywhere wrest control from billionaires and monopolists.

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MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred (Photo by Julio Aguilar/Getty Images)

The location of MLB teams roughly tracks with the country’s largest media markets, which makes sense on its face. Larger metro areas have more existing and potential fans, and a relatively even distribution of teams ensures most people have access to the highest level of the sport. And that access has largely been consistent. The Montreal Expos were the first team to relocate in over thirty years when they moved to Washington D.C and became the Nationals in 2004. No team has relocated since. 

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred attributes MLB’s geographic stability to its antitrust exemption because it allows the league, through its team owners, to control where teams are based. In the 2010s, MLB barred the Oakland Athletics from moving to San Jose because the owner of the San Francisco Giants had called dibs on the market in Santa Clara County, and two decades before that the owners prevented those same Giants from moving across the country to St. Petersburg, Florida. 

To grow its business and at the same time protect the turf of incumbent owners, MLB has relied on expansion, whereby the league invents a new team for a metro area without a ball club. The owners didn’t let the Giants move to the stadium now called Tropicana Field in 1992, but only a few years later created the team now called the Tampa Bay Rays to play there. About MLB’s ability to control team location, Manfred told the Los Angeles Times that it’s “a fan-friendly doctrine in the law.” If petty clashes among rich white dudes keep teams in place, then technically he’s correct.

The NFL argued the same in the 1980s when it tried to prevent Al Davis from moving his Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles. The Rams already played in the area and preserving their exclusive territory supposedly “promoted regional balance, aided financial stability, ensured parity in the league, and fostered fan loyalty.” The courts said “cool,” then reminded the NFL that they couldn’t suppress free competition, set monopoly prices, or prevent venues from attracting teams—they don’t possess MLB’s sweetheart legal status. (This is in part why MLB has never had a USFL-like threat to its supremacy.)

MLB’s contention that restricting team movement is “fan-friendly” rests on two assumptions: that the fans living near the thirty big league clubs and the 120 minor league teams between Single- and Triple-A are the only fans that exist, and those fans are completely satisfied with what they are offered. Put another way, if baseball was ice cream, then there can only be 150 ice cream shops in the country, and the people deciding where they go and what they serve are the people who own the single entity allowed to make ice cream. 

Any way you slice it (or, er, scoop it), these assumptions are plainly false, which Manfred’s own bosses prove. In response to Cincinnati Reds fans decrying the lack of investment in the team’s roster, Reds’ co-owner and president Phil Castellini dismissed their concerns and told them “Where you gonna go?” It was a rude comment to his customers, but also an accurate one. The closest MLB team to Cincinnati is over 200 miles away in Cleveland and Cincinnatians may not be able to watch Guardians games due to exclusive broadcast rights (more on this in a future post). 

For his part, Manfred knows that keeping baseball and its fans in this vise is the whole game. “I can’t think of a place where the [antitrust] exemption is really meaningful, other than franchise relocation,” he acknowledged last year. MLB’s monopolistic control of where baseball is played is not about fans. It never was and it never will be. It’s about rationing baseball into artificial scarcity.

To get in on the baseball action, media companies outbid each other for broadcast rights, cities outbid each other with stadium subsidies, and prospective owners outbid each other over franchise fees. A couple years ago, Manfred said the fees paid to the league for a new big league team could exceed $2.2 billion, and just thirteen months after preaching MLB’s “fan-friendly” relocation policy the A’s announced their impending move to Las Vegas. Nevada simply pledged more financial support and flexibility than California did. Of course, the team and government will ultimately pass those costs onto us normies through taxes, ticket sales, and so on. MLB teams aren’t in the thirty largest markets because of regional balance. They are there because that’s where the most wealth can be extracted. Mid-sized cities like Troy simply cannot compete in a market of MLB’s making.

Auctioning off new teams is also a useful political ploy. When elected officials get too cranky about the league’s antitrust exemption, the stars magically align for MLB to award new franchises. St. Petersburg built Tropicana Field on spec—an example of the arms race carefully cultivated by MLB—and after the Giants’ relocation fell through in 1992, a Florida senator and Tampa-area congressman initiated an investigation into the league’s antitrust exemption. The Rays were created a couple years later. In fact, a congressional inquiry or lawsuit precedes almost every franchise creation or relocation in modern MLB history. A new team in Nashville has been rumored for years. I’m not quite sure what the congressional delegation from Tennessee is waiting on.

Threatening relocation is another favored tactic, regardless of what Manfred says. Whenever a team wants better lease terms or ballpark upgrades or even a new stadium, you can be sure the specter of relocation hangs over negotiations. Milwaukee Brewers fans are the latest victims of this time-honored tradition. To everyday people, this is known as extortion. To MLB, it’s standard operating procedure. 

Unfortunately, the most recent threat to MLB’s monopoly fizzled out earlier this month. The Tri-City Valleycats and their fellow plaintiffs appealed their case to the Supreme Court, and theirs was widely considered the best-constructed in decades to challenge MLB’s exemption. MLB settled the case, such is their gatekeeping power.

MLB losing its monopoly would deprive them of a valuable cudgel, but it would likely make team relocations easier. To be clear, I am not arguing for team relocations. The Baltimore Colts’ midnight run to Indianapolis and Oklahoma City’s theft of the Supersonics are some of the sleaziest episodes in American sports history, and I would no longer have a personality if the Phillies left Philadelphia. I’m also not arguing that every community wants or cares about baseball.

I am arguing that if an intrepid businessperson wants to start or run a professional baseball team in Troy or any other city, even those with a team already, then that should be that: a sole decision by an entrepreneur on whether a business is viable and real choice among customers on whether that business is worth supporting. Football in England illustrates this.

London has thirteen teams in the top four divisions of England’s football system this season. (That changes year-to-year, but more on promotion and relegation in a future post.) Seven of the clubs are in the Premier League, England’s top division and the best league in all of football, like how MLB is the best in its sport. As someone obsessed with both sports and London, I weighed my options judiciously and chose correctly—Tottenham till I die. 

New York City is almost as big as London and is the historical home of baseball, yet it has only three professional teams in baseball’s top four divisions. Just two are in the majors, or one-and-a-half depending on your opinion of the Mets. There used to be a fourth team in the upper ranks until the Staten Island Yankees, a Single-A affiliate of the New York Yankees, received the same treatment as the Tri-City Valleycats. They now play as the Staten Island FerryHawks in the independent leagues, a baseball purgatory that MLB allows to exist so it can experiment new rules with underpaid labor. 

I dream of a Tri-State Baseball League in which each of New York City’s boroughs has at least one top-flight pro team. Across the river in my native New Jersey there could be several more—Hoboken was one of the earliest hotbeds of the sport—and Connecticut, Long Island, and Westchester County can have teams, too. The Premier League has its London Derbies and the NBA started an in-season tournament this year; rather than a few games between the Yankees and Mets, the Subway Series could be an in-season tournament to crown the best baseball team in New York. As it once was, the World Series could be a playoff among the best teams of distinct major leagues.

In this fantasy world, I would buy property in San Diego’s North Park neighborhood, Ted Williams’ childhood stomping grounds, and build a modest ballpark. I would call my team the North Park Splendid Splinters. Instead of bleachers in the outfield, I would build a grassy knoll so people can stretch out and kids can run around. Tickets would be cheap. Concessions would be cheaper. I have no idea if I’d be good at running a ball club, but I do know people love walking to cool, affordable places to hangout with their neighbors, friends, and family. In any event, this is impossible. MLB (and NIMBYs) would never let this vision come to fruition, which is the shame of it all.

On June 5, the San Diego Padres hosted the Chicago Cubs in front of a sellout crowd of 43,629. Another 60,000 caught the 5-0 victory on TV. Assuming they were all San Diegans, 7.4% of the city watched a midsummer game on a random Monday. Thousands more listened on the radio, and an untold number of workers at Petco Park and bars and restaurants throughout San Diego played their part. The same math applies in Chicago and all other places that have baseball, including Troy, New York. The record attendance at Joseph L. Bruno Stadium, the home of the Valleycats, represents almost 14% of the city’s current population.

On an interpersonal level, one of my favorite parts of the Phillies’ 2023 playoff run was a text thread with a cousin I had lost touch with. Her optimism was a salve, even in the face of our team’s ignominious defeat in the NLCS. “Still love my Phillies,” she said, using red hearts as punctuation. “Phanatic forever.” I can’t wait to pick up on the convo next year.

With all due respect to street fairs and farmers’ markets, nothing in American cities brings more people together more often than baseball. The sport’s schedule is one of the most important civic linchpins, bringing people together nearly every day from March through October. Even if someone doesn’t care about it, baseball is there for a lot of us, like a connective tissue that ensures we never get too estranged from one another. I hate that MLB can unilaterally control where baseball is played because monopolies are bad, but I hate it most because it prevents more people from connecting with one another.