Quote:
Originally Posted by Cirrus
I was skeptical of SLC as a baseball city so I looked up where it sits in the ranking of TV markets.
OT1H there are an awful lot of cities above SLC, not even counting Canadian options, and IDK how you call anybody more of a turnkey operation than Sacramento given the A's currently play there.
But OTOH I'm shocked at how low Vegas is (I guess Vegas' hinterlands are just completely empty). And if they can do it then so can anybody, so this is clearly not an impediment.
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As someone who grew up in San Diego and has been a lifelong Padres fan, there's a LOT that factors in to success of a baseball team. Baseball is twice as long as the next professional sport, it takes a huge amount of desire in a city to attend 81 home games. Padres just set their all-time attendance record and sold out 72 of their 81 home games, finishing second behind the Dodgers in average home attendance for all of MLB. That's insane to outdraw the Yankees, Mets, Phillies.
How have they done it? Sure, the Chargers are gone, but SD has so many distractions, similar to places like Miami and LA. They've drastically increased roster spending the last few years, they have the generally top-rated stadium in all of baseball and it's 21 years old. They go all-in with the community. The stadium is easy to get to, especially by train and trolley, it's surrounded by a ton of restaurants and bars, things to do before and after games. The perfect weather doesn't hurt; in SLC you're going to deal with possible snow games at the beginning of the season, and 100 degree games in the summer.
I'm not so certain Vegas will succeed. Raiders were 25th in % capacity attendance last year, and third lowest in total attendance, only ahead of Chicago and Jacksonville. Golden Knights are hugely successful because it's a winter indoor sport, the team had instant success, and they were born in Vegas. The Athletics? They've not had real success since 1990 when they reached the last of 3 straight World Series. They have terrible ownership that has no desire to put a winning product on the field, they don't have any built-in fan base in Vegas, they're struggling to figure out how to even afford to build the stadium, and they're going to ask fans to support a team when the community never really had a huge desire to want one?
SLC is a unicorn in that regard; we took the Coyotes and welcomed them with open arms. The fan base here has been impressive to bring in a second pro team in the same season as the Jazz and sell out almost every game. Having ownership change hands had a lot to do with it; Meruelo bringing the Coyotes here would have looked a lot different.
I'd love to see MLB work here, if they design the stadium and the surrounding area the right way. San Diego worked so well because they put the stadium in the PERFECT spot, gave good access to mass transit, and it skyrocketed development around with new residential and commercial construction. The area around Petco is unrecognizable now compared to 2004. That's what SLC needs to ensure happens, that the area around the stadium becomes a focal point of construction over the long-term. You can't manufacture some sort of entertainment district that is vacant or undesirable if not a gameday. You've gotta have people living and working in that area year-round to generate enough investment from outside firms to build.
Utah also needs to step up their TRAX game for gamedays. San Diego runs specific trains before and after home Padres games. These trains depart 45 after game end, no matter what time that is. I've heard lots of complaints that there's no extra TRAX on game days to get fans to and from the DC. If MLB comes, they for sure need to stack up TRAX along the green line to take people to North Temple and have an extra Frontrunner.
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