- Vancouver wants to attract an ownership group to land an MLB expansion team.
- The Canadian city could stiffen the competition with Salt Lake City and Portland.
- Commissioner Rob Manfred wants one new team in the West and one in the East.
Another city in the West is making a pitch for a Major League Baseball team, but it isn’t in the United States.
Vancouver is looking to land a franchise for the Canadian city.
Mayor Ken Sim intends to bring a motion to the Vancouver City Council next week that directs its staff to initiate a process that attracts potential ownership groups interested in pursuing an expansion team, per Business in Vancouver. He said no taxpayer money is contemplated in the process.
“I can tell you, our council, the councillors in my party are very excited about it,” Sim told Sportsnet. “But there is a lot of excitement.
“You look at what happened last year with the magical run that the Jays had, you could tell there’s a huge appetite (for baseball) right across this country, and specifically in Vancouver,” he said, referring to the Toronto Blue Jays making the World Series last year.
“Vancouver’s right, and we want to make that when this opportunity comes up, we’re not flat-footed. We’re being proactive as a city council to make sure that … we have our ducks in a row, that we’re not the bottleneck that stops a team from coming to Vancouver.”
Who are the frontrunners for MLB expansion?
Salt Lake City and Nashville are widely considered the frontrunners to land an MLB expansion team. Commissioner Rob Manfred favors one new team in the East and one in the West when baseball starts looking at expansion no earlier than 2029. Nashville is the leading contender in the East, while many observers see Salt Lake City as the top prospect in the West.
If Vancouver emerges as a serious contender, it would have to compete not only with Salt Lake City but with Portland.
A February story in The Athletic called Salt Lake City the frontrunner in the West. But fans in its MLB fans survey didn’t quite see it that way. The publication limited the choices to the six cities that have expansion efforts underway — Austin, Nashville, Orlando, Portland, Raleigh and Salt Lake City. Survey respondents were asked to choose two.
While Nashville was the runaway winner at 73%, Portland was second at 47% and Salt Lake City further back at 30%.
The Rose City has a head start on the Beehive State, with a group of investors, including NFL quarterback Russell Wilson and his singer/songwriter wife Ciara, launching the Portland Diamond Project in 2017.
A coalition of prominent Utahns led by the Larry H. Miller Company, which had owned the Utah Jazz for decades, created Big League Utah in 2023 to pursue an MLB team for the state.
Sim pointed to Vancouver’s geography as an asset.
“We’re the gateway to Asia, and so we could actually be quite strategic for Major League Baseball as they’re looking at expanding in other markets digitally,” he said per Sportsnet. “We’re unique in Vancouver. (We have) a lot of (things) the other cities that are looking for expansion teams just don’t have.”
Additionally, Manfred said in an interview with Sportsnet last October that “another city in Canada clearly could work for us,” when he was asked about the possibility of expansion to Vancouver.
Pro baseball has been played in Vancouver since 1905. It currently has the Vancouver Canadians, the High-A affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays in the Northwest League.
