Major League Baseball is due for an expansion.
And Salt Lake City could be on deck for a big swing at a new franchise, according to USA Today columnist Bob Nightengale.
“Major League Baseball believes the strongest two expansion markets remain Salt Lake City, Utah, and Nashville,” Nightengale reported this week.
Helping Salt Lake’s cause, MLB reportedly has “no plans to put an expansion franchise back into Oakland.”
Larry H. Miller Co. was the first to move on talks of bringing big league baseball to Salt Lake City. In 2023, LHM created the “Big League Utah” coalition, aiming to bring a team to the state.
(LHM Company) The Larry H. Miller Company released new renderings for its plans for the Power District development on Salt Lake City’s west side on Feb. 15, 2024. The 100-acre site along North Temple is where the Miller’s proposed Major League Baseball stadium would be built.
With the Miller family’s backing alongside nearly $1 billion in public funding to build a new stadium and development along North Temple, Salt Lake City was considered to be an early frontrunner to land an expansion team.
In recent months, however, the competition has gotten stiffer, with groups in Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas, getting serious about their own expansion bids.
When the league might make a decision remains unknown. Due to MLB’s collective bargaining agreement expiring in 2026, the league is reportedly unlikely to add any other teams before then.
Expansion talks won’t likely happen until 2027 or 2028, according to ESPN. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has said he wants to add to the league before his tenure is up at the end of 2028.
“The timeline that I’ve articulated is to have an expansion decision made before I leave in four years,” he said in 2024.
Manfred also stated last December: “I think it’s pretty clear that we need a team in the Eastern time zone and one in the Western (or) Mountain time zone to make our formats work.”
If a team were to come to Salt Lake City, it likely wouldn’t debut until 2031.
The last time the MLB expanded was in 1998 when it added the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Rays, putting the league’s total number of teams to 30.