MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has targeted MLB expansion as a legacy to his tenure. (Photo by Michael Chisholm/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
In the not-too-distant future, Major League Baseball will officially begin the process of expanding the league to 32 teams. Beyond market analysis, each of the major groups was contacted for this report to provide details on their current status and what remains to be done. Here is the list, the methodology, the findings, and the timeline for when the league could not only expand, but re-align.
As the league moves past the early stages of the 2026 regular season, expansion remains at no official stage. Manfred began discussing the expansion of the league in October of 2015, and for over a decade, he has repeatedly said that MLB was a “growth industry” with the target of 32 teams and regional realignment in the future.
Key to any expansion would be to have an agreement with the MLB Players Association on the topic as part of collective bargaining. With the current agreement set to expire on December 1 of this year, it would seem that the next labor agreement for 2027 would be the first step toward a formal process. While the MLB Players Association does not have a say in actual expansion, it does have a say in any impacts on players, such as travel. But conceptually, the union would be amenable to expansion, given that two additional teams would provide jobs for more players, not only on MLB rosters but also for affiliated minor league teams.
With the A’s well underway with ballpark construction in Las Vegas, all eyes are now on the Tampa Bay Rays and the new ownership’s ability to get a new ballpark funded and shovels in the ground. Once that process is underway, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred could then go forward to the owners to seek a formal Expansion Committee.
Once the Expansion Committee was in place, then contenders over pretenders would begin to bubble to the surface. Key to that would be funding not just for a ballpark but also for the expansion fee, which could range from $2 to $2.5 billion per market.
Rob Manfred has said that he plans to retire at the end of his current term in January of 2029. Based upon that, and the amount of time it takes to build ballparks, Manfred could announce who is being awarded expansion franchises, but those ballparks would open under his successor's tenure in the 2032 or 2033 timeframe.
Manfred has said that he envisions an additional club in the west and one in the east. But if a market somewhere in the middle of the country stepped forward with the funding and other considerations met, it would be hard for the league to ignore. That means where we are now could potentially change.
“The fact that many cities and regions aspire to have a Major League club is flattering to our sport and a symbol of this terrific current era for Major League Baseball,” Manfred has said. “Over the long haul, I fully expect the game’s continued growth to afford us attractive options in terms of potential expansion. From a scheduling standpoint, there also would be clear benefits to a 32-team structure in the future. I hope that we will accomplish enough in the near future to bring ideas like these even closer to reality.”
For this study, I leaned on the process used for potential relocation candidates for the Montreal Expos. Before I was a journalist, I was involved in a market study by baseball boosters and the Mayor’s Office in Portland, OR, from 2003 to 2005, to present the market to MLB as an option for relocation or expansion. Below shows the data points used for each market:
Population projected growth from 2020-2024 (based on census)
Existing pro sports franchises, as well as any minor league baseball clubs in the area
Population base per franchise (divide the metro population by the number of pro clubs)
TV DMA size to show the television market footprint
Large corporations in the area for possible sponsorships, suites, and blocks of ticket sales
Whether the market has any local, regional, or state support
The population base per franchise and corporate listing are important for looking at dilution of potential ticket sales, and sponsors in a given market.
On top of this methodology, many of the baseball efforts underway in more mature markets at this stage provided additional information for context.
A key factor with each market is where the efforts are in not only determining site location(s) for a ballpark, but where the group stands in terms of their capital stack to meet the billions of dollars in funding for the ballpark and expansion fee.
In the case of Canadian markets, DMA information and population growth were omitted.