First Horizon Park, Nashville (AAA #19 - The Next Major League City?)

 

 

 

Will Nashville have a major league baseball team within five years? At the moment, that seems a real possibility.

There are currently 30 MLB teams, divided into two leagues, each of which has three divisions with five teams in it. The distinction between leagues and divisions, once significant, is now arbitrary. The current commissioner of baseball Rob Manfred, has been quoted as saying that he would like to have plans in place by 2029 to expand to 32 teams, so that there would eight divisions of four teams each.

I found good articles by FOX Sports and ESPN that discuss the rationale and the leading candidate cities. The most recent article I could find was from this spring from the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, giving the local take on a survey by The Athletic (it’s behind a paywall, so I won’t link that story).

There are several cities that have official efforts to bring in major league baseball, complete with websites, baseball celebrity endorsements and so on. I was going to link Nashville’s, but when I click on the link to their website, I get:

 

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So maybe they’re not ready for the majors yet, at least in terms of their marketing.

In any case, the FOX article lists (in alphabetical order) Charlotte, Mexico City, Montreal, Nashville, Oakland, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City and San Antonio. ESPN puts in Raleigh, San Jose and Austin, the first in addition to Charlotte, the other two instead of Oakland and Austin. I won’t try to analyze all of them, although I can’t imagine putting another team in Florida, where neither of the two existing franchises have finished about 27^th of the 30 MLB teams in attendance for at least a decade, or in Mexico City, where the visa problems would be horrendous. But Nashville is clearly a leading contender, from all accounts. So how does it stack up against its competitors?

Nashville is the 34^th largest Metropolitan Statistical Area in the U.S., placing it ahead of two areas with MLB teams, Cleveland (by less than 1%) and Milwaukee, but behind the other 28 metro areas with teams. It is also behind most of the most serious competitors, including Orlando, Charlotte, San Antonio, Austin, and Portland. Montreal and Mexico City aren’t on this list because they’re not US MSAs, but they both have larger populations than Nashville (far larger, in the case of Mexico City), as well. Incidentally, the largest U.S. metro area without a team is unlikely to get one – it’s the “Inland Empire” region of southern California (think Riverside and San Bernardino). With the Dodgers, Angels and Padres already competing for southern California fans, I’d be surprised to see a team go there.

Maybe it’s the TV market, rather than people in the seats, that matters. Here Nashville fares better. It’s the 26^th largest “Designated Market Area,” according to Neilsen. That’s larger than six with MLB teams (seven, if you count Las Vegas), but still smaller than Orlando, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Portland.

Incidentally, Sacramento, where the Athletics are currently playing, has both a larger population and a larger TV market than Nashville. It’s also larger in both senses than Las Vegas, where the Athletics are moving! However, Las Vegas definitely has more money floating around than Sacramento.  

Going to a game in Nashville feels a little bit closer to the majors than some parks. Kerry agrees, although we can’t fully say why. It still has minor league touches like a mini-golf course, an inflatable slide, and a place to play cornhole.

But it looks a little more professional than many AAA parks. On the back of the batter’s eye (the large plain green panel in centerfield to allow the batters to see the pitches clearly) is a large acknowledgment that the field is on the site of a field that was used professionally for nearly a century. There are luxury apartments overlooking the left field fence, with skyscrapers in the background.

The team works hard to promote the link to the city’s music. The team name, the Sounds. The scoreboard is shaped like a guitar (see the picture). The mid-game “race”, with people dressed up in outsized costumes (Milwaukee has hot dogs, Washington has the Mt. Rushmore presidents, Texas has dots, Arizona has players from their 2001 team) has country music stars like Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton. And there are lots of other music-themed touches in the concessions stands, the promos, and so on. So that’s big league.

The group trying to bring an MLB team to Nashville wants it to be named the Stars, after a Negro League team (which once played on the site of the current stadium). Will they promote the Negro Leagues tie as well as they do the music tie? Will they promote it as well as Kansas City does?

If Nashville does get a team, though, the fans should be prepared to lose more games than they win. More than 60 years after MLB’s first expansion, and almost 30 years since its most recent, only one of the 14 expansion teams had an all-time winning record as of the end of last season, Houston (Toronto was only one game under .500). On the other hand, 11 of the 16 pre-expansion teams have winning records all-time. There’s a zero-sum aspect to this, of course – the established teams have fattened up on the newer teams. Incidentally, of all the expansion teams, Houston and Toronto are the two cities with the largest populations that have a single team, which came through expansion. So a new team in a small market, like Nashville, is likely to have some competitive difficulties, year-in and year-out.

Also, it will make a quest like ours just a little harder, because then there will be 32 each of major league and AAA ballparks….

The game: Charlotte 9, Nashville 3

The park felt big league, but the game felt, well, minor league. There were 17 hits, which can happen in a major league game when a pitcher just can’t miss any bats. But there were also 14 walks, four batters hit by pitch, three runners caught stealing, and two runners picked off bases.

Two players, though, had outstanding games.

Charlotte’s starting pitcher, 6-foot-10 Noah Schultz, was spectacular. In five innings, he gave up only two hits and one walk. In two starts for Charlotte this season, he’s given up one run (on a home run tonight) in nine innings, much better than the 18 runs he gave up in a total of 16 innings in five starts at that level last year. Given that he’s in the minors for the Chicago White Sox, one of the worst teams in the majors, he’ll be pitching there soon if he keeps this up.

For Nashville, one player, Luis Lara, had a great game. After seven innings, Lara had three hits in three at-bats (including a home run), and the rest of the team had zero hits.

Bat boys

When you go to enough minor league baseball games, you become a connoisseur of the little things, like who teams use as bat boys. Usually, it’s some teenaged boy (on rare occasions, a girl). But in Salt Lake City, they had a bat “boy” who must have been in his 80s, if not 90s. Then there was Rochester, where the star of the game, from the audience point of view, was Bruce the Bat Dog, a golden retriever. Tonight, the bat boy had a mustache. All a part of the game.