Justin Timberlake Joins Effort to Bring Major League Baseball to Nashville

Justin Timberlake is looking to get a Major League Baseball team in Nashville. According to The Tennessean, the 10-time Grammy Award winner “cast his lot” with Music City Baseball, which is the group looking to bring baseball to the community. The team’s name will be the Nashville Stars, and getting Timberlake is significant, considering he became a minority owner of the Memphis Grizzlies in 2012.

“I am thrilled to be involved in the movement to bring Major League Baseball to the great state of Tennessee,” Timberlake said in a statement. “I believe in Music City Baseball’s vision of linking baseball and music in a unique way to unite and entertain people, and I am excited to help generate awareness throughout the community as we share our vision for bringing MLB to Music City.” Dave Dombrowski, former president of baseball operations for the Boston Red Sox, has joined the group as an investor and understands how important having Timberlake involved is for their future of baseball in Nashville.

“For us this is huge,” Dombrowski said, who won two World Series in his career. “I mean (Timberlake) is somebody that’s world-known, huge in the area and the region and the state. He supports baseball and all of the other things that we stand for. Having someone like that involved speaks a lot for his interest in making this work and also gives us support in talking to other individuals of this ilk. It’s extremely important to us.”

There have been rumblings about MLB expansion for the last few years since the last time teams were added to the league was in 1998 with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (now just Rays) and the Arizona Diamondbacks. In an interview in 2018, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred mentioned Nashville as a possible location for an expansion team.

“I hope I’m around long enough to see us expand. I think 32 (teams) would be great for our sport,” Manfred said. “Portland, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Nashville in the United States. Certainly Montreal — maybe Vancouver — in Canada. We think there’s places in Mexico we could go over the long haul.” Adding a team in Nashville would make things interesting as it would be the third team to be located in the southeast, with the other two being the Rays and Atlanta Braves.