A Modest Proposal to Merge Two MLB Teams
If you can correctly guess which two, then we should probably do it
In 2004, the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Orix BlueWave of Nippon Professional Baseball’s Pacific League were in dire financial circumstances. The Buffaloes were owned by a railroad company that was billions of dollars (trillions of yen) in debt and the BlueWave were struggling with attendance in the aftermath of Ichiro Suzuki’s departure to MLB. Neither team was profitable. The entire Japanese economy had been staggering for over a decade since their post-war “Economic Miracle,” with the current phase known as the substantially less-optimistic “Lost Decade(s),” and there were few companies with the resources or interest to invest in baseball.
Instead of pursuing an outside sale, Kintetsu and Orix made the decision in June to merge their two franchises for the start of next season. Everybody hated this plan, and it’s not hard to figure out why. Since both the Buffaloes and Blue Wave were in the Pacific League, a merger would leave NPB with a 6-team Central League and a 5-team Pacific League, creating an imbalance that would complicate scheduling. Fans and players of both teams immediately spoke out against the merger, with the Japanese Professional Baseball Players Association joining in the opposition and eventually producing the first ever players’ strike in Japanese baseball. Nevertheless, NPB team finances appeared so strained that executives were focused on the potential for a second Pacific League merger (between the Chiba Lotte Marines and the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks) instead of giving any thought to stopping the first.
The strike led to something of a compromise on all sides. The second merger was mooted after Daiei sold its interest in the Hawks to SoftBank for approximately 3 billion yen ($27.5 million), while the merger of the Buffaloes and BlueWave was allowed to proceed, creating the Orix Buffaloes. The Buffaloes play most of their home games at the Kyocera Dome in Osaka (home of the Kintetsu Buffaloes), which is about an hour and a half by train from their secondary home stadium of Hotto Motto Field in Kobe (home of the Orix BlueWave). To placate players and the union, NPB immediately allowed e-commerce company Rakuten to launch the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles as an expansion team, filling the vacant spot in the Pacific League. The two teams distributed players from the Buffaloes and BlueWave rosters, with Orix retaining priority to select the first 25 players for protection. But the tumult of the merger process caused such scars that star pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma protested his protection and adamantly refused to play for the post-merger team, resulting in his departure to the Golden Eagles.
I’m proposing a merger between two sports teams, mostly for entertainment and discussion purposes. A merger would seem to be wholly unnecessary in North American sports, where franchise values have comprehensively boomed in the 20 years since the Buffaloes/BlueWave merger. But companies will regularly merge with each other even if not strictly necessary, particularly in pursuit of the “realized synergies” that can occur from integrating two companies. More frequently, the synergies are a happy byproduct and a merger occurs because there aren’t viable alternatives.
There are precisely two teams in North American sports that could realize synergies from combining, both of which arguably need a merger in order to have a sustainable long-term future. Fortunately, both of these teams play the same sport. Even more fortunately, both are in the same state.
The Tampa Bay Rays
The Rays began play in 1998 as one of two new expansion teams (along with the Arizona Diamondbacks) that brought MLB to its current 30 teams. Then known as the Devil Rays, the team was lousy for its first decade of existence, with a relative peak coming in 2004’s 70-91 season (the only year where the team finished in 4th instead of 5th place in the AL East). In 2005, Stu Sternberg bought a controlling interest in the team and began reshaping the organization, hiring Andrew Friedman as general manager and Joe Maddon as manager. In 2008, the Devil Rays rebranded to become the Rays and had the first good season in franchise history, winning their first AL East title and advancing to the World Series.
Since then, the Rays have carved out an identity that’s something of a good news / bad news situation for fans of the team. The good news is that the Rays are the smartest team in baseball by reputation. Even as their front office has been consistently raided by other teams hiring away their bright baseball minds, the Rays have a reputation for savviness and winning every trade they make. The frequency of their trading means that fans don’t have the luxury of getting attached to their favorite players for long, but they can take solace in the fact that the transactions usually work out in their favor.
The bad news is that most of this intellectual energy is devoted to keeping payroll as low as possible. Since Sternberg took over, the Rays have never had a player payroll that ranks higher than 22nd among the 30 MLB teams. Their most frequent placement is 28th (seven times), but they’ve been dead last more than once. This miserdom has taken place in a division that includes the high-dollar New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, along with the regularly competitive Toronto Blue Jays and Baltimore Orioles, and has inhibited a team that often found itself coming up just short. Besides their 2007 and 2020 runs to the World Series, the Rays have played in six other playoff series and lost all of them. Twice, they’ve finished 92-70 and still missed the playoffs.
The classic culprit for this lack of spending is the stadium. The Rays have played at Tropicana Field (“the Trop”) since their first year in 1998 and ranked 7th out of 14 AL teams in attendance that season, but fell to last place by 2001 and finished 14th or lower in 18 of the 23 seasons since then. The Trop was proposed in 1983 and opened in 1990 as a tool that the city of St. Petersburg hoped would bring an MLB team to town. After nearly luring the San Francisco Giants, the Trop became home to the Rays in 1998 and almost immediately drew criticism. The main local objection is to location, with St. Petersburg located at the tip of a peninsula and separated from the larger population base in Tampa by a large body of water. The other main objection is that the Trop generally sucks. The interior is depressing and play is marred by catwalks that extend from the ceiling and occasionally interfere with batted balls.
It took two years for Stu Sternberg to start proposing plans for a new ballpark after taking control of the Rays. Initial plans in St. Petersburg were scrapped after outcry from fans, then discussions with Tampa or neighboring cities were scrapped after outcry from St. Petersburg officials. The most audacious proposal was a “split-city” concept that would see the Rays play the first half of their home games in Tampa Bay before moving north later in the summer to finish the season at home in Montreal. After MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred shut this talk down, the Rays eventually reached a deal with St. Petersburg for construction of a new stadium in September of 2023. The Rays were “here to stay,” with plans to play at Tropicana Field until the new ballpark was ready for the 2028 season.
This plan hit snags in October of 2024. Hurricane Milton hit Tampa Bay and the fiberglass roof of the Trop was ripped apart by roaring winds. The St. Petersburg City Council approved $6.5 million in funding to repair the Trop, but subsequent analysis showed that a repair would cost upwards of $55 million and could not be completed in time for the 2025 season. A repaired Trop would be used for two seasons before its scheduled demolition, creating substantial reluctance on the part of an already cheap ownership group to spend for repairs. The team and local government quickly descended into a quagmire. The City Council authorized $23 million in funding for stadium repairs, then voted to reverse that decision a few hours later. The Pinellas County Commission delayed its vote to approve funding for the new stadium, leading the Rays to make threatening communications that claimed it was now impossible for the new stadium to be completed “by the 2028 season, if at all.” County Commissioner Brian Scott, a longtime supporter of the stadium deal, expressed his opinion that “the Rays strategy sucks, to be perfectly honest with you, and I think it has for quite some time. They are horrible communicators and I think they’re the most politically tone-deaf organization I’ve ever met in my life.”
We know where the Rays will play in 2025. The Rays will play in the stadium of the Tampa Tarpons, the Class A affiliate of the division-rival Yankees. They will play at Steinbrenner Field, named for the late Yankees owner George (who happens to share a last name with his son and current Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner). The latest update came on December 30, when the Rays emailed St. Petersburg to confirm their intention for the city to repair the roof in time for the 2026 season. The email stated that MLB would hire an independent adviser to “evaluate the timeline and monitor progress,” while repeatedly emphasizing that “a partial 2026 season in Tropicana Field would present massive logistical and revenue challenges for the team.”
Theoretically, things are on track, just delayed by a year. But the email is conspicuously missing any affirmation of the Rays’ intent to continue with the new ballpark. The ballpark deal that took decades to finalize automatically terminates if the Rays and its development partner failed to meet certain progress benchmarks by March 31st, including demonstrating that they have the requisite cash to fund their portion of stadium construction. It’s not clear if they intend to do so.
The Miami Marlins
The Marlins began play in 1993 as one of two new expansion teams (along with the Colorado Rockies) that brought MLB to 28 teams. The Marlins targeted established players in the expansion draft in hopes of winning quickly, with one selection (Bryan Harvey) earning a higher 1993 salary than every Rockies player combined. It worked! Kind of. It took until 1997 for the Marlins to finish with a winning record and make the playoffs, but once they got there, they went on an improbable run that culminated in a World Series championship. The euphoria was shortlived — original owner Wayne Huizenga wanted to sell the team free of long-term contractual obligations after the season and a championship did not persuade him to change his mind. By Christmas, the Marlins had traded away all the stars who propelled their magical October, and the 1998 Marlins crashed to a 54-108 record. No defending World Series champion had ever lost 100 games before, but it’s not really fair to say that the Marlins were trying to “defend” anything.
Huizenga was an instrumental figure in South Florida sports throughout the 1990s. At the start of the decade, he purchased an interest in the NFL’s Miami Dolphins (and their stadium) from the family of recently-deceased founder Joe Robbie, becoming full owner in 1994. Joe Robbie had the good sense to build his namesake stadium in a configuration that would be suitable for potential baseball games, believing it a certainty that MLB would eventually expand to Miami. Huizenga fought to bring this vision to fruition and won expansion rights for the Marlins over competing groups in Orlando and Tampa Bay, then put his new baseball team in his football team’s stadium. Naming rights were sold to a subsidiary of Fruit of the Loom, resulting in the pleasantly multi-sport moniker “Pro Player Stadium.”
Huizenga sold the team to John Henry after the 1998 season, who flipped them four years later to finance his purchase of the Boston Red Sox. The Marlins were sold to former Expos owner Jeffrey Loria, who had just sold the Expos to MLB in preparation for an eventual relocation. Loria had acquired 24% of the Expos ahead of the 2000 season for $12 million and tried to raise payroll, but was hamstrung by a substandard stadium and broadcasting deals, which he made worse by failing to come to any agreements that resulted in English-language television or radio broadcasts. These attempts to spend also involved Loria issuing several capital calls and investing more cash, serving to increase his ownership stake to 93% (at a $50 million valuation) and dilute minority investors. After the 2001 season, 28 MLB owners voted to contract the Expos (and the Minnesota Twins), with only two owners objecting to the decision and only a successful legal challenge in Minnesota courts preventing the contraction from being completed. The resolution was for Loria to sell the Expos to MLB for $120 million in cash and an additional $38.5 million interest-free loan to purchase the Marlins. His initial investment in Montreal baseball had appreciated tenfold while also destroying the future of Montreal baseball, with both feats accomplished at an astonishing pace.
Loria’s first act in Florida was to fire 60 Marlins employees and replace them with former Expo employees. His second season as owner was the second winning season in Marlins history. Once again, the team made the playoffs as a Wild Card team, and once again, the team pulled off a longshot run to win the World Series. The Marlins had only existed for 11 years and paired nine losing seasons with two championships. This particular dichotomy ended in 2004 and 2005, when the Marlins posted back-to-back 83-79 seasons. After attempting to remain competitive in the afterglow of the 2003 title, the Loria regime gave up and instituted the franchise’s second post-championship teardown.
The Marlins’ stadium situation was suboptimal at the time of Loria’s purchase and became increasingly untenable as time went on. When Wayne Huizenga sold the Marlins, he retained ownership of Pro Player Stadium and continued to collect the majority of in-stadium revenue. Although ostensibly suitable for multiple sports, it was clear that the stadium was built with football in mind and less-than-ideal for an MLB team. This divide became stark in 2005, by which time the Pro Player brand no longer existed and the Marlins played in a building called “Dolphins Stadium.” The team ranked last or second-to-last in NL attendance in every season from 1999 to 2011, barring one surge in the post-championship 2004 season where they were only third-to-last. Marlins President David Samson was the pointman for negotiations on a new stadium and spent a couple of years failing to come to an agreement in South Florida, then a couple more travelling around the country and pandering for funding from various local governments.
In 2009, construction began on Marlins Park after the city, county, and team came to an agreement that would provide public funding for 80% of the construction costs, with the Marlins covering the remaining $155 million and agreeing to change their name from the Florida Marlins to the Miami Marlins. After running a below-average payroll in every season of their ownership and last-place payrolls in each of 2006, 2008, and 2009, the Marlins went on a rare spending spree ahead of the 2012 season. On Opening Day, the Marlins had a new ballpark and a club-record $101 million payroll that was 10th-highest in baseball. The Marlins lost their first game at their new home and things quickly went off the rails from there. After the season, the Marlins completed their third fire sale, trading away substantially all of the high-priced free agents they had signed the prior offseason. The next Opening Day, the Marlins had a $50 million payroll that was 29th-highest in baseball. They’d finish 30th in each of the next two seasons.
With the stadium deal complete and the team still bad, Loria decided to end his time as Marlins owner in 2017. After investing $12 million into the Expos and $155 million into a new stadium, Jeffrey Loria sold the Marlins to an investor group financially led by Bruce Sherman and publicly led by former Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter for $1.2 billion. David Samson, who led the sales process and now works in media, has frequently stated his belief that the new owners overpaid for the franchise and lacked the funds to meaningfully add to the club. According to Forbes, he’s right; as of 2023, the Marlins were only worth $1 billion, with a lower valuation and higher debt ratio than any other team.
By this point, the Marlins had built up a new core of young players and given contract extensions to several of them, including a record-setting megadeal for franchise slugger Giancarlo Stanton. The first act of the Sherman/Jeter group was to trade them all away, embarking on the fourth and most severe fire sale in franchise history in hopes of building a cheaper and more sustainable core. A completely aberrational 2020 season and a more normal 2023 season resulted in two playoff berths with records that were just over .500, both of which ended with early sweeps. Besides that, the Marlins have lost at least 90 games in every year of the Sherman era.
It’s hard to exaggerate how depressing the current state of the franchise is. After a slight bump in the stadium’s first year, the Marlins have finished last in the NL in attendance in every other season thanks to a fanbase that has been consistently let down by various ownership groups. After a 2023 season that offered rare signs of optimism, GM Kim Ng declined the option in her contract and left the team and Manager of the Year Skip Schumaker told his team that 2024 would be his last year with the team. Peter Bendix was hired from the Rays as new President of Baseball Operations and managed to launch a fifth fire sale despite the fact that the team hadn’t even been “built up” in any meaningful sense. This offseason, the Marlins have distinguished themselves by being the only team to not add any MLB players. They are projected to receive $70 million in revenue sharing this season, and a CBA requirement that revenue-sharing recipients run a payroll equal to 150% of those proceeds means they risk a players’ association grievance if their 2025 payroll is lower than $105 million. They’re about $22 million short of that mark, but don’t seem too worried about a potential grievance, since they’re already subject to a still-pending grievance from 2018. On January 17, a fan on Reddit asked “is this franchise beyond repair?”
Realizing Synergies
We’ve discussed the history of both MLB teams in the state of Florida. The Rays have been hypercompetent technicians, extracting maximum performance from a constantly-rotating stable of anonymous players, but have won nothing meaningful and irritated every local stakeholder. It took them 20 years to reach a deal for a stadium located in the same inconvenient place as their current one, and that stadium deal could conceivably be dead in two months. Their home stadium for 2025 is their rich rivals’ Class-A stadium. The Marlins have assembled an excellent highlight package of franchise moments, with two championships and a lightly-used stadium, but have failed to demonstrate any ability to operate effectively (and also irritated every local stakeholder). They’re the only MLB franchise whose value didn’t increase between 2018 and 2022, threatening to be the one exception to the time-honored principle that franchise values only go up.
Even if seasoned fans have grown numb to the experience, the problems facing these franchises are individually existential and severe enough to complicate operations for the entire sport. For several years, commissioner Rob Manfred has expressed interest in expanding to 32 teams, but tabled discussions of MLB expansion until there were resolutions to the unacceptable stadium situations in Oakland and Tampa Bay. This matter has taken on some personal urgency, with Manfred stating that he’d like to have expansion cities selected by the time his reign ends in January of 2029. With the A’s ballpark situation resolved, at least in the eyes of MLB, the Rays are the last remaining stadium bottleneck and facing increasingly fraught circumstances. While they retain ticketing revenue from Steinbrenner Field, they’re also paying the Yankees $15 million for the right to host 81 games in the stadium and have only limited rights to sell in-stadium advertising. Fans in Tampa might enjoy an easier trip to the stadium, but the Rays’ front office will be working from temporary office space across the water in St. Petersburg. The only ways that this particular circumstance can end for the Rays is through expensive repairs to an obsolete stadium or the construction of a new ballpark.
The Marlins’ challenge is more abstract. The region has justifiably checked out on its MLB team, but still boasts a lovely stadium in a booming major market. Marlins Park (now unfortunately rechristened as loanDepot Park) has regularly hosted the World Baseball Classic since its construction and was the first stadium ever to host games in every round of the competition in 2023 (a role it will reprise in 2026). The fifteen 2023 WBC games in Miami averaged 31,684 fans per game, and nine exceeded 35,000. The 2024 Marlins got 32,564 fans to show up for their home opener, but never drew more than 26,000 for any other game, averaging 13,425 per game.
Ordinarily, this problem would be solvable. Winning fixes everything, and fans in Miami may be content to merely see effort. If the Marlins get good players, spend money to keep them, and win more games, the stadium will surely fill with fans (just ask hockey’s Florida Panthers). But it’s not clear that the current ownership group has the financial capacity to operate effectively. The financial model that was shown to prospective investors in the Sherman/Jeter ownership group was called “Project Wolverine” (presumably named for the mascot of Jeter’s University of Michigan) and projected rapid growth in revenue and profits. The team fell wildly short of these targets and accordingly was not worth $2.1 billion in 2022, as Project Wolverine had forecasted. Derek Jeter divested from the team amid complaints over low payroll, issuing a statement that said “the vision for the future of the franchise is different than the one I signed up to lead.” This is particularly problematic as it appears that the Sherman group was banking on an increased franchise valuation to deal with the large amounts of debt used to purchase the team. The team with extremely high debt and extremely low revenue does not appear to have the financial capacity to spend their way out of the conundrum.
The natural inclination with a non-spending baseball owner is to beg them to sell the team, but it’s unlikely the Marlins could be sold on acceptable terms at present. The golden rule of sports franchise values is that they don’t go down. The only recent example of a loss on a franchise sale came in 2010, when the aftermath of the Great Recession forced Bob Johnson to sell his Charlotte Bobcats to Michael Jordan for about $275 million after he paid a $300 million expansion fee in 2003 and failed to make a profit in the intervening years. This resulted in something of a contagion, with “more than a quarter of the [NBA] for sale in some manner,” and the flurry of franchise sales coincided with a 2011 lockout that lasted 161 days and shortened the basketball season from 82 to 66 games. When the lockout was resolved, the share of basketball-related income that went to players decreased from 57% in the 2005 CBA to 50% in the 2011 version. The threat of declining franchise values was so severe that owners were willing to suspend play to make sure the trend reversed.
Any problem facing MLB owners is much more limited in scope. The Marlins are one of just four team sales to take place in the last decade (Marlins in 2018, Royals and Mets in 2020, Orioles in 2024)) and one of just five that valued a franchise at more than $1 billion (the four recent sales and the 2012 purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers). The Orioles sold in 2024 for slightly more than the $1.7 billion valuation that Forbes estimated in 2022, while the Mets, Dodgers, and even the Royals have all stood out for particularly aggressive spending under new owners. Despite concerns that the decline of regional sports networks could harm franchise values, every MLB team not mentioned in this paragraph would easily sell at a substantial profit for their owners. And when Manfred discussed potential expansion fees in 2021, he cited an average MLB franchise valuation of $2.2 billion before saying “I think that’s kind of a lodestar in terms of where you would start in terms of evaluating expansion opportunity.”
There’s no indication that the Marlins could be sold for profit anytime soon. It’s not clear that the franchise was worth the 2018 purchase price and not clear that its value has increased at all since then. There is no way to build a feasible route to a sale of the team in the near-term and it’s difficult to imagine optimism for the fanbase until that happens.
The solution I’m proposing is far from perfect and would probably cause even more complications than I can presently imagine. It’s reasonable to think this is a bad idea. But this is a proposal made in the mindset that something needs to be done for these two franchises. MLB has typically failed to be proactive about the long-term success of its franchises, as evidenced by the Athletics slinking off to Sacramento for a few seasons after burning every bridge in the Bay Area. It’s unlikely they’d have the ability to get something this radical done, but maybe they should.
The Florida Fish
Here’s an outline for the way out of this conundrum:
The Miami Marlins and the Tampa Bay Rays complete a merger after the 2025 season, creating one statewide Florida MLB team. In isolation, this would be an impermissible contraction in violation of Article XV(H) of the current CBA, which prohibits owners from “undertak[ing] any centralized effort to reduce the number of Major League Clubs effective for a season covered by this agreement.”
To keep the league at 30 teams, MLB offers an immediate opening for the 2026 season to an expansion franchise with a fee of around $2 billion. They will likely play in a temporary stadium at first, though some candidate cities are already moving ahead on ballpark plans as St. Petersburg did in the late 1980s. The least-complicated scenario would have this team be close enough to division rivals in the AL or NL East, avoiding the need for a realignment in the current divisions.
Instead of being split among all owners, the expansion fee goes straight to whichever of Bruce Sherman or Stu Sternberg (and their respective partners) is most eager to exit their investment, with the other owner continuing to serve as controlling owner of the combined franchise. In 2024, Sternberg was in talks to sell the team to Tampa-area investors for $1.6 billion before the deal collapsed, and realistically the take-home amount might be closer to that amount after dealing with the costs of various legal complications (such as the fact that my plan violates the Marlins’ lease agreement). The path to the least moral hazard might be to force both owners out, bringing in a new owner with additional capital to purchase a team with a statewide footprint.
Other owners are incentivized not just by the opportunity to stabilize the league’s Florida teams, but by the clear pathway to subsequent expansion up to 32 teams on a more typical timeline that would see the new teams begin play around 2030. These expansion fees will be split solely among the other 28 owners (bypassing Florida and the prior expansion team), resulting in about $143 million per team based on the $2 billion fee estimate. Divisions would be realigned at this point to make eight pods of four teams (or four pods of eight teams).
The Florida Fish (we can negotiate on the name) would combine the histories of its two constituent franchises, claiming World Series titles in 1997 and 2003 along with AL Pennants in 2008 and 2020. They’d keep the Marlins AAA, AA, and A affiliates in Jacksonville, Pensacola, and Jupiter to ensure statewide continuity, with the Rays’ affiliates going to the 30th team (they could argue over the division of the Beloit and Bowling Green Hi-A teams). Uniting the front offices would be surprisingly easy given the Marlins’ recent attempts to emulate the Rays and past reluctance to spend anywhere in the organization, though dividing the players would be a tougher matter. The optimal approach would likely hybridize a distribution and expansion draft, with Florida generally retaining priority players from both teams and the expansion team taking the rest (with light supplementation from the other 28 teams). We might flesh out what the rosters could look like in a later post.
Since most of what the Marlins bring to the table is their ballpark, it’s reasonable to expect that a majority of home games would be played in Miami. But instead of forcing a strict relocation on Tampa Bay Rays fans, the Florida Fish could embrace a regional identity and take advantage of the fact that they play in a state with several major metro areas and the highest density of professional baseball in the Eastern United States. With 81 home games split among roughly 26 series, the Fish could have a home base in Miami but make annual sojourns to play a few series in front of fans in Tampa and occasionally a series or two in more far-flung home markets like Jacksonville, Orlando, Fort Myers, or even Pensacola (preferably earlier in the year so that the retractable roof at loanDepot Park can prevent summer rainouts).
My personal opinion is that every MLB team should do something like this, taking advantage of a massive inventory of games to create more opportunities to attend for people who don’t live near major cities. While the MLBPA did rattle some sabers about the relocation of the Oakland A’s to a minor league park in Sacramento, the relative lack of union protest to that move highlights the substantial flexibility in the CBA about what constitutes a team’s “home stadium.” Florida would likely need to pay its players a travel allowance as if it were a road game, but the chance to activate a fanbase throughout the heavily-populated and quickly-growing state should be worth it. It would be substantially more organic than claiming “sisterhood” between St. Petersburg and Montreal.
And there’s always the more cynical option, which is to get public funding for the construction of a second home ballpark in St. Petersburg or elsewhere in Florida. From a policy perspective, a second home ballpark is probably not the best use of public money. From an empirical perspective, Florida tends to be a pretty easy mark, featuring a lucrative combination of heavy tourism and a permissive attitude towards development. After some recent political posturing, the state allowed Disney to resume literal governmental control over its jurisdiction, control they’ve enjoyed since the 1960s. The city of Orlando spent $175 million to renovate their publicly-owned football stadium in 2007 and recently authorized an additional $400 million in renovations, despite the fact that the stadium doesn’t have a permanent football tenant. Jacksonville is putting $775 million towards major renovations to the Jaguars’ stadium despite the fact that the team has had multiple homes, playing one home game at Wembley Stadium in London (and only seven in Jacksonville) since 2013. There are enough in-state cities with money and no conceivable shot at getting a major league franchise that there’s a grift out there for an enterprising owner.
Merging two teams was unpopular in Japan and may be unpopular in Florida. But as a result of the merger, NPB embraced player reforms that brought the league to new levels of success. A league where eleven teams were once dwarfed by the hegemonic fanbase of the Yomiuri Giants enjoyed substantially more parity, as the newly-owned Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks and the newly-launched Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles both became quite popular. Of course, this wasn’t just the result of a merger, as new measures like the luxury tax and interleague play served to increase competitiveness within the league to ensure franchises could compete on equal footing.
The question of financial competitiveness has dominated this MLB offseason, with baseball fans voting in an MLBTradeRumors poll signaling a 67% preference for a salary cap. 50.2% want a salary cap so badly that they’d accept a work stoppage that wiped out the 2027 season. An increasing number of baseball fans root for teams that don’t seem like they’ll ever have a real shot at winning. Both of the Florida teams play in divisions with teams who can outspend them before breakfast, as evidenced by the Mets giving Juan Soto $765 million and the Yankees responding by adding several hundred millions worth of players. Every team in the AL or NL East (with the possible exception of the Orioles) has shown willingness and ability to run payrolls beyond the wildest dreams of Florida baseball fans. It was extraordinarily difficult for Tampa Bay or Miami to compete with these teams under the best of circumstances, and those are not the circumstances of either team in 2025. It would be much easier for them to compete if they teamed up.
You may still hate this concept! The comments are open if you have any better ideas.