The baseball landscape has been stable since the Montreal Expos moved to Washington, DC.
Baseball also has 30 franchises, which is the same as the NBA and NHL and two behind the NFL who has 32. There is also the MLS as a fast growing league, which has 19 franchises growing to 21 in 2015.
There are three cities, two in the United States who have been on record recently wanting an MLB team: Montreal, Portland and San Jose/Fremont.
Out of the three only San Jose/Fremont has a real chance of happening since the move for the Athletics would be 50 miles at most and they wouldn’t be abandoning their market too much. This would be equivalent to the Baltimore Bullets moving to DC, if there was another NBA team just outside of Baltimore (representing the Giants in this analogy).
Anyway, there was an article recently on MLB.com that suggests Portland is ready for an MLB team to the point that they have plans for a 35,000 seat stadium and a market ready for entertainment. Montreal has been vocal over the last few seasons about wanting another franchise and there has been some slight criticism about the MLB being too American now.
So the question then becomes, where do these two teams come from? Does the MLB expand? Only if its economically viable. On a baseball side, expanding to 32 teams would cause a further dilution in talent, and would interfere with the 5 member divisions that have finally been equalized (AL West having 4 previously and NL Central with 6). For those reasons, but really more of the economic reasons, I would lean towards the MLB not expanding.
On the other side, expanding into Montreal and Portland would not interfere with current MLB markets.
As for internal moves, who moves? The Marlins would be a natural choice with limited attendance, but they just built a new ballpark, so that’s not going to happen, plus moving to Montreal would not necessarily increase attendance.
This would make Portland the most likely city for a team to move to (ignoring the Fremont/San Jose/Oakland situation), but who moves to Portland?
