One off-kilter aspect of MLB adding Mexico City is four places in Latin America have each supplied far more MLB players than Mexico, and are closer at least to the East Coast: Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Cuba.
Any Latin American MLB team would instantly gain a strong Latin following throughout the hemisphere, including in the US. It need not depend primarily on local retail ticket sales. In fact, it would be wise to fill the stands by keeping ticket prices low and count on advertising, television and corporate revenues.
Granted Venezuela and Cuba are likely impossible for political reasons, but Puerto Rico is actually easier politically than Mexico City. And none of the four locations has the altitude problems or terrible airport of Mexico City. I know taxes for professional athletes are complicated, but it's possible Puerto Rico could provide significant tax advantages for players.
I would love to see major sports expansion to Latin America, more for world peace advantages than improvements in sportstainment. And Mexico City is a logical place to start for a number of reasons. But for MLB, it does seem inconsistent with the sports' deep roots in the Caribbean.
I 100% agree with the NFL, but I think baseball in Mexico City would be a big stretch. For a sport with 162 games a year, overcoming both the travel realities and the altitude would be tough.
The current Rockies ownership is pretty old school and out of touch, but I think the Coors altitude adjustment hurts more than people think. The ball flight in the outfield is what people always focus on, but I think the ball flight of the pitch is way more important. Facing the same pitcher in Coors vs Dodger Stadium, for example, means facing two pretty dramatically different ball flights. And pitchers for the Rockies have to build a repertoire that will work both at altitude and at sea level, which is a lot to ask for a complex kinetic chain motion that is already one of the hardest to master and repeat precisely in sports. Mexico would have those problems turned up even higher plus a brutal travel schedule on top of it.
Seattle is worse than Mexico City for team travel and they have a baseball team. The altitude would be the biggest problem, not sure if a domed stadium with climate control could do anything about that.
Seattle also has a lot of disposable income, no language barrier, and no going through Customs. The first one is the most important.
You also can't pressurize a domed stadium to the point where it'd make any difference. First off, it'd have to be airtight - at stadium scale, the amount of air you'd need to pump in to maintain a sea level pressure would be impossible to continuously pump otherwise.
If you somehow solved that issue, you'd also have to engineer it to handle all that extra pressure without exploding. To be fair, withstanding the pressure would necessitate an airtight build, so I guess you can view airtightness as a bit of a freebie if you just focus on the pressure.
Saddest of all from a nerd perspective, even after all that engineering you wouldn't have to engineer a decompression chamber to prevent killing fans on their way out the door. The pressure differential is enough to be a total and absolute pain in the ass to engineer at stadium scale, but not enough to cause even a mild case of the bends.
For a sense of perspective, the pressure differential in "clean rooms" (which maintain said cleanliness in part by being higher-pressure than the rest of the building) is about 0.1 kPa above ambient. The pressure differential you'd need for "Mexico City but Chicago on the Inside" is a bit less than 25 kPa above ambient. 30 kPa or thereabouts is around the point where people start experiencing serious discomfort, 100 kPa is almost certainly fatal but it's only internal trauma - not something that really televises dramatically or anything. 800 kPa was enough to make mincemeat out of (one of) the Byford Dolphin divers but the meat-mincing was mostly from the trauma of being forced through a tiny opening under immense pressure. If you wanted a real Hollywood-style human red mist after every home game, you'd probably want at least a 1000 kPa differential and extremely-sturdy screen doors.
I don't think travel matters at all for the local fans, I'm talking about the stress it puts on the players. Travel matters for the away teams, and Seattle is more remote than Mexico City when you're going on a road trip.
In Colorado they control humidity to reduce the distance the ball travels, I just don't know how well that works and if it can be done effectively at higher altitude. They could potentially change the properties of the ball to reduce distance there too.
Yes, but I'm saying that the fact that residents of the Seattle metro area, who don't have to travel too far to the stadium since they are residents of the Seattle metro area, have more money to spend on tickets, concessions, and parking. That, in the context of whether to put a sports team in a particular location, more than offsets any travel difficulties for the millionaire ball-throwing employees.
I'm not sure why so many people in these comments (and in the OP) fail to grasp that 100,000 people who spend $100 each is more profitable than 200,000 people who spend $20 each. As I said elsewhere, the wealth that leagues are concerned with is expressed in terms of how many yachts you can buy, not in terms of what percentage of regional disposable income you get. x% of Seattle median disposable income is better than x% of Mexico City median disposable income for the same reason 1% of US GDP is better than 99% of Yemen GDP.
Agree completely that it would be an extremely difficult sell for MLB to do this. Comments I have seen from Manfred (who appears to be treating expansion to 32 teams as his final big project before he retires), it seems extremely unlikely that MLB will add teams that extend the footprint to anything that lies outside a quadrilateral whose 4 corners are San Diego, Seattle, Boston, and Miami.
As many replies have stated, Seattle is already an outlier geographically, but the issue is not whether the new teams are less of a geographical outlier than existing teams, but whether -- when they are compared to other options for expansion -- they are more optimal (geographically, demographically, etc.).
Given what we know based on Manfred's comments on the subject of expansion, we know that he intends to realign the league to being geographic (think NBA style east-west) and that he intends to have one expansion team in the eastern time zone and one in the mountain or pacific time zones (Mexico City is in the central time zone, so that's already a problem).
So if you begin to construct divisions (likely 8 divisions, each with 4-teams), Among current teams you have a pretty geographically tight division with Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Anaheim in the extreme southwest. Then you could have Seattle, San Francisco, Vegas, and Denver as another division (if you don't do that, things get messy quickly, I think) So then, if Mexico City is in the mix, I think you'd have to put it in the same division as the Rangers and Astros, but a 3rd team to put in that group is less clear (Kansas City?). Of course, you could do a division that is the 4 CA teams, then another that is AZ, TX, HOU, and MX City. Those two seem pretty good, but this approach leaves you with a division that includes Seattle, Las Vegas, Denver and either Kansas City or Minneapolis -- not great!
I just don't see it working out given what we have been told by Manfred about his intentions vis a vis expansion (not to mention I'm not aware of any group that is organizing to make expansion into Mexico City feasible, something these other cities also have going for them).
The NBA did expand recently. It took a while to get off the ground, but the WNBA has recently gained respectable live and video audiences. They do need to decide whether women's pro basketball should be more closely modeled after college basketball or after roller derby, but you can't have everything. Similarly, while the US has the NFL, it also has had multiple professional women's football teams.
"Still, in the NBA, for instance, there’s nearly a one-to-one correspondence between metro-area GDP and franchise value"
Bit of a stretch! Washington's GDP is 5.6x bigger than Milwaukee's and their NBA teams are worth almost exactly the same, and there are many other such examples.
I was squinting at that scatter plot, too... I'd be curious to see that "Metro GDP strongly predicts franchise values" regression run without those three big outliers of LA, NY, and SF.
Also, just as a math person... That's not the way a mathematician would use the phrase "a one-to-one correspondence."
I'm not sure if statisticians just use it to mean "highly significant relationship?"
+1 on Mexico City / NFL - quickly followed by 1 of the majors in Austin, despite close proximity to Dallas / Houston. If San Antonio can have an NBA franchise with similar proximity considerations, Austin can definitely take on NFL or MLB. With a number of zillionaire tech bros now here, one of them can easily afford it
San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas are in a roughly equilateral triangle with Austin fairly close to San Antonio. I think the league best demographically suited to expand to Austin might be the NBA but they have a San Antonio franchise already.
Does the chart have a typo because I'm pretty sure those GDP numbers should be in the billions. If it were millions NY would have a GDP per capita of around $120
If you add two teams, you may as well add two more so that we get up to 36. That’s a way more even number to divide the league up into three divisions per conference with 6 teams each.
Regarding the intersection of population and GDP - also consider that, much like the Blue Jays, a Mexico City-based pro sports team would likely have a nationwide fanbase, which would drive up the numbers at least a little bit further.
I'm glad you got to it in the third half of the show, but if I had multiple and various suitors offering to pay me millions or tens of millions of dollars, I flat out would not live in Mexico. ~ fin ~
While I generally agree, I think you under weight the altitude effect, which I expect is convex, meaning much more than 50% greater magnitude in Mexico than Denver. It would probably be a huge problem for visiting defensive lineman. The home team could make it even bigger by running an up temp offense.
One off-kilter aspect of MLB adding Mexico City is four places in Latin America have each supplied far more MLB players than Mexico, and are closer at least to the East Coast: Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Cuba.
Any Latin American MLB team would instantly gain a strong Latin following throughout the hemisphere, including in the US. It need not depend primarily on local retail ticket sales. In fact, it would be wise to fill the stands by keeping ticket prices low and count on advertising, television and corporate revenues.
Granted Venezuela and Cuba are likely impossible for political reasons, but Puerto Rico is actually easier politically than Mexico City. And none of the four locations has the altitude problems or terrible airport of Mexico City. I know taxes for professional athletes are complicated, but it's possible Puerto Rico could provide significant tax advantages for players.
I would love to see major sports expansion to Latin America, more for world peace advantages than improvements in sportstainment. And Mexico City is a logical place to start for a number of reasons. But for MLB, it does seem inconsistent with the sports' deep roots in the Caribbean.
I 100% agree with the NFL, but I think baseball in Mexico City would be a big stretch. For a sport with 162 games a year, overcoming both the travel realities and the altitude would be tough.
The current Rockies ownership is pretty old school and out of touch, but I think the Coors altitude adjustment hurts more than people think. The ball flight in the outfield is what people always focus on, but I think the ball flight of the pitch is way more important. Facing the same pitcher in Coors vs Dodger Stadium, for example, means facing two pretty dramatically different ball flights. And pitchers for the Rockies have to build a repertoire that will work both at altitude and at sea level, which is a lot to ask for a complex kinetic chain motion that is already one of the hardest to master and repeat precisely in sports. Mexico would have those problems turned up even higher plus a brutal travel schedule on top of it.
Seattle is worse than Mexico City for team travel and they have a baseball team. The altitude would be the biggest problem, not sure if a domed stadium with climate control could do anything about that.
Seattle also has a lot of disposable income, no language barrier, and no going through Customs. The first one is the most important.
You also can't pressurize a domed stadium to the point where it'd make any difference. First off, it'd have to be airtight - at stadium scale, the amount of air you'd need to pump in to maintain a sea level pressure would be impossible to continuously pump otherwise.
If you somehow solved that issue, you'd also have to engineer it to handle all that extra pressure without exploding. To be fair, withstanding the pressure would necessitate an airtight build, so I guess you can view airtightness as a bit of a freebie if you just focus on the pressure.
Saddest of all from a nerd perspective, even after all that engineering you wouldn't have to engineer a decompression chamber to prevent killing fans on their way out the door. The pressure differential is enough to be a total and absolute pain in the ass to engineer at stadium scale, but not enough to cause even a mild case of the bends.
For a sense of perspective, the pressure differential in "clean rooms" (which maintain said cleanliness in part by being higher-pressure than the rest of the building) is about 0.1 kPa above ambient. The pressure differential you'd need for "Mexico City but Chicago on the Inside" is a bit less than 25 kPa above ambient. 30 kPa or thereabouts is around the point where people start experiencing serious discomfort, 100 kPa is almost certainly fatal but it's only internal trauma - not something that really televises dramatically or anything. 800 kPa was enough to make mincemeat out of (one of) the Byford Dolphin divers but the meat-mincing was mostly from the trauma of being forced through a tiny opening under immense pressure. If you wanted a real Hollywood-style human red mist after every home game, you'd probably want at least a 1000 kPa differential and extremely-sturdy screen doors.
I don't think travel matters at all for the local fans, I'm talking about the stress it puts on the players. Travel matters for the away teams, and Seattle is more remote than Mexico City when you're going on a road trip.
In Colorado they control humidity to reduce the distance the ball travels, I just don't know how well that works and if it can be done effectively at higher altitude. They could potentially change the properties of the ball to reduce distance there too.
Yes, but I'm saying that the fact that residents of the Seattle metro area, who don't have to travel too far to the stadium since they are residents of the Seattle metro area, have more money to spend on tickets, concessions, and parking. That, in the context of whether to put a sports team in a particular location, more than offsets any travel difficulties for the millionaire ball-throwing employees.
I'm not sure why so many people in these comments (and in the OP) fail to grasp that 100,000 people who spend $100 each is more profitable than 200,000 people who spend $20 each. As I said elsewhere, the wealth that leagues are concerned with is expressed in terms of how many yachts you can buy, not in terms of what percentage of regional disposable income you get. x% of Seattle median disposable income is better than x% of Mexico City median disposable income for the same reason 1% of US GDP is better than 99% of Yemen GDP.
Agree completely that it would be an extremely difficult sell for MLB to do this. Comments I have seen from Manfred (who appears to be treating expansion to 32 teams as his final big project before he retires), it seems extremely unlikely that MLB will add teams that extend the footprint to anything that lies outside a quadrilateral whose 4 corners are San Diego, Seattle, Boston, and Miami.
As many replies have stated, Seattle is already an outlier geographically, but the issue is not whether the new teams are less of a geographical outlier than existing teams, but whether -- when they are compared to other options for expansion -- they are more optimal (geographically, demographically, etc.).
Given what we know based on Manfred's comments on the subject of expansion, we know that he intends to realign the league to being geographic (think NBA style east-west) and that he intends to have one expansion team in the eastern time zone and one in the mountain or pacific time zones (Mexico City is in the central time zone, so that's already a problem).
So if you begin to construct divisions (likely 8 divisions, each with 4-teams), Among current teams you have a pretty geographically tight division with Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Anaheim in the extreme southwest. Then you could have Seattle, San Francisco, Vegas, and Denver as another division (if you don't do that, things get messy quickly, I think) So then, if Mexico City is in the mix, I think you'd have to put it in the same division as the Rangers and Astros, but a 3rd team to put in that group is less clear (Kansas City?). Of course, you could do a division that is the 4 CA teams, then another that is AZ, TX, HOU, and MX City. Those two seem pretty good, but this approach leaves you with a division that includes Seattle, Las Vegas, Denver and either Kansas City or Minneapolis -- not great!
I just don't see it working out given what we have been told by Manfred about his intentions vis a vis expansion (not to mention I'm not aware of any group that is organizing to make expansion into Mexico City feasible, something these other cities also have going for them).
The NBA did expand recently. It took a while to get off the ground, but the WNBA has recently gained respectable live and video audiences. They do need to decide whether women's pro basketball should be more closely modeled after college basketball or after roller derby, but you can't have everything. Similarly, while the US has the NFL, it also has had multiple professional women's football teams.
If you seriously believe that's the same thing, I have several sports stadiums to sell you.
"Still, in the NBA, for instance, there’s nearly a one-to-one correspondence between metro-area GDP and franchise value"
Bit of a stretch! Washington's GDP is 5.6x bigger than Milwaukee's and their NBA teams are worth almost exactly the same, and there are many other such examples.
I was squinting at that scatter plot, too... I'd be curious to see that "Metro GDP strongly predicts franchise values" regression run without those three big outliers of LA, NY, and SF.
Also, just as a math person... That's not the way a mathematician would use the phrase "a one-to-one correspondence."
I'm not sure if statisticians just use it to mean "highly significant relationship?"
+1 on Mexico City / NFL - quickly followed by 1 of the majors in Austin, despite close proximity to Dallas / Houston. If San Antonio can have an NBA franchise with similar proximity considerations, Austin can definitely take on NFL or MLB. With a number of zillionaire tech bros now here, one of them can easily afford it
San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas are in a roughly equilateral triangle with Austin fairly close to San Antonio. I think the league best demographically suited to expand to Austin might be the NBA but they have a San Antonio franchise already.
If we can get Dean Spanos out of the country in exchange for moving the Chargers to Mexico City, everyone wins!
Does the chart have a typo because I'm pretty sure those GDP numbers should be in the billions. If it were millions NY would have a GDP per capita of around $120
If you add two teams, you may as well add two more so that we get up to 36. That’s a way more even number to divide the league up into three divisions per conference with 6 teams each.
Now I just want to know more about how one becomes a consultant for a G League team in Mexico City
Regarding the intersection of population and GDP - also consider that, much like the Blue Jays, a Mexico City-based pro sports team would likely have a nationwide fanbase, which would drive up the numbers at least a little bit further.
I'm glad you got to it in the third half of the show, but if I had multiple and various suitors offering to pay me millions or tens of millions of dollars, I flat out would not live in Mexico. ~ fin ~
I wouldn't want to be in the crowd at 7,350 feet altitude. I'd watch the game on TV though.
Only 1 problem Mr. Silver: no one watches sports anymore
While I generally agree, I think you under weight the altitude effect, which I expect is convex, meaning much more than 50% greater magnitude in Mexico than Denver. It would probably be a huge problem for visiting defensive lineman. The home team could make it even bigger by running an up temp offense.
Thanks for the diversion. The spray hose of news and sports can be exhausting. This was fun.
Are there other cities in Mexico with more fitting climate that would meet the economic requirements?