MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has created plenty of waves during his year-and-a half on the job, mainly because he never outright dismisses anything when it comes up in conversation. Banning the shift? Universal DH? Pitch clocks? The return of the Montreal Expos? All have been points of discussion for Manfred, and he hasn’t said “this isn’t happening” to any of them, resulting in baseball fans losing their minds.
On Tuesday, Manfred didn’t dismiss yet another idea, and it got people talking: the concept of Major League Baseball expanding to Las Vegas.
Manfred made the comments on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Kay Show, and everyone lost their minds when he called Las Vegas “a viable alternative” and said legalized gambling wouldn’t disqualify Las Vegas from having a team.
Las Vegas is a viable option for an MLB team.https://t.co/VRuQSoFUEX
— YES Network (@YESNetwork) June 21, 2016
This has led to way too many people jumping on the “MLB to Vegas” bandwagon without thinking rationally about it. Of course Manfred isn’t going to say “we’re not putting a team in Vegas, that’s stupid.” He wants to dangle that carrot, try to get another free stadium, and pressure markets that want teams or already have teams, but won’t build a new stadium. (Hello, Oakland and Tampa Bay.) Keeping Vegas on the table tightens the noose on those markets just a little bit more.
There are plenty of reasons why Vegas won’t work as an MLB market. First, there’s the fact that Las Vegas is barely even a Triple-A town, let alone a major league town. The Vegas media market ranks 40th in the country as of Jan. 1, which would make it the smallest market in baseball, overtaking 35th-ranked Milwaukee and 36th-ranked Cincinnati. The difference in market size between Cincinnati and Vegas (a hair under 100,000 households) is the difference between Vegas and 50th-ranked Memphis, another Triple-A city.
Staying on this topic, Vegas has an AAA team right now, the Las Vegas 51s. The franchise has been around since 1983, and was rebranded to the 51s from the Stars following the 2000 season. Baseball-Reference only has attendance data going back to the 2004 season, and during that time, the 51s have ranked in the top 10 in the PCL in attendance just once, back in 2008 when they drew 374,780 fans — or an average of just 5,205 per game (which is more than 1,000 below the league average of 6,316).
Attendance is obviously not the be-all and end-all, but this isn’t even a team that’s sitting in the top half of its league, let alone the top quarter, and several smaller markets (including fellow Nevada city Reno, the 106th-largest market in the country) rank higher each and every year.
The climate of Las Vegas isn’t conducive to a stadium without a retractable roof. (Or hell, just make it permanently closed and don’t bother with opening and closing it.) The average high temperature in June in the city is 99 degrees. In July, it’s 104. In August, 102. As a comparison, the averages for those three months in Phoenix are 104, 106, and 105, and in Arlington, the averages are 91, 96, and 96. That kind of heat makes a roof necessary, which will tack on another $200 million to a stadium project.
AS VEGAS, NEVADA – MAY 06: Canelo Alvarez and Amir Khan face off during their official weigh-in at T-Mobile Arena – Toshiba Plaza on May 6, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The two will meet in a WBC middleweight title fight on May 7 in Las Vegas. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
Speaking of a stadium project, would the city of Las Vegas want to gift Major League Baseball hundreds of millions (perhaps into the billions) for a stadium? The new T-Mobile Arena was privately funded, and the NFL stadium will be funded by a mixture of private funds and entertainment taxes, if approved. Private funding for an MLB ballpark doesn’t seem like much of a starter, given that more and more teams are looking to the public sector for handouts (hi, Braves and Rangers!) and that private ownership of the stadium wouldn’t exactly result in much outside business because of the presence of the T-Mobile Arena and, probably, the new NFL stadium.
This also may seem like small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but the lack of a regional sports network in Las Vegas would hurt, given how well MLB does locally in each of its markets. Getting an RSN off the ground would be difficult, especially as we’ve seen in Houston and Los Angeles, two larger, more established markets. There’s also the fact that six (yes, six) MLB teams already “claim” Las Vegas as their home television territory, and inserting an MLB team there would cause extended legal battles with those teams and RSNs. Just look at the mess going on in DC with the Nationals, who share their immediate market and RSN with just one team, the Baltimore Orioles.
So in short, the concept of an MLB team in Vegas is an enticing one. But in reality, it just doesn’t make sense. Getting a stadium built with the necessary specifications would be too unwieldy of a beast for the league. And once the stadium is built, there’s no guarantee people are even going to show up. Las Vegas is not a market the size of MLB’s last four expansion cities: Denver, Miami, Phoenix, and Tampa Bay. And hell, only two of those can really be deemed massive successes, as Miami and Tampa Bay continue to struggle for a variety of reasons. Expansion into Las Vegas would likely end up resembling the two expansions into Florida rather than the two prior expansions into the Rocky Mountain region.
