Another major U.S. city is looking to get a professional baseball team. According to ESPN, a Salt Lake City consortium led by the former owner of the Utah Jazz plans to pursue an MLB franchise in the coming years. Big League Utah, a group headed by former Jazz owner Gail Miller, will join Nashville’s Music City Baseball and the Portland Diamond Project in lobbying to join the current 30 teams in the league.
This comes as the Oakland Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays have talked about moving due to their struggles to secure new stadiums. ESPN says MLB doesn’t plan to expand until it figures out the futures of the Athletics and the Rays. But league commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN in July “I would love to get to 32 teams.”
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The Salt Lake City coalition includes the Larry H. Miller Company, and local business leaders and former major league players Dale Murphy and Jeremy Gutherie. The group is looking to build a stadium in the Rocky Mountain Power District, a 100-acre mixed-used zone located between the city’s new airport and it’s downtown core.
“Salt Lake City is a major league city,” said Steve Starks, CEO of the Miller Company. “We believe that as a top-30 media market in the fastest-growing state in the country with the youngest population, that’s where our attention should be — and that we could accomplish bringing a team to the Wasatch Front.”
“It would be, I think, a validation of everything that we’ve worked so hard to do,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told ESPN. “We’ve proven ourselves in a sports capacity with Olympics in 2002 and coming back in 2030 or, more likely, 2034. We’ve hosted two NBA All-Star Games. We know we can do this. It would just be meaningful for people who love this sport, who care deeply about it. We’re a baseball state.”
MLB hasn’t expanded since 1998 when the league added the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Rays. Five years before the Diamondbacks and Rays joined the league, MLB added the Colorado Rockies and Miami Marlins. The Jazz are the only team from the four top-level professional sports leagues in the country that represent the state of Utah.
