Meh-LB? Commish Names Nashville As Expansion Target; Mayor Shrugs

NASHVILLE, TN -- With Major League Baseball looking to expand for the first time since 1997, Commissioner of Baseball Rob Manfred mentioned the Music City as a potential home for one of two new franchises Tuesday, though the response from the mayor's office neared "oh bless their heart" territory.

Appearing on Fox Sports ahead of Tuesday's All-Star Game at Washington, D.C.'s Nationals Park, Manfred named a handful of cities that could be potential homes for the big league's 31st and 32nd teams.

"We have a real list of cities that I think are not only interested in having baseball, but are viable in terms of baseball — places like 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," he said.

Baseball is considering expansion for the first time since adding the Tampa Bay Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks 21 years ago, largely as an effort to create the more sensical alignment possible with 32 teams.

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It's not the first time baseball expansion has been linked to Nashville. Then-Nashville Sounds owner Larry Schmittou led an effort to get a team in the 1993 expansion round, ultimately losing out to Denver and Miami. Former Mayor Karl Dean batted his eyes - so to speak - at the Rays at various times during that team's struggles in Central Florida. In 2015 interviews with The Tennessean, Schmittou and Dean disagreed about the future prospects for big league baseball. Dean, now a gubernatorial candidate, argued that Middle Tennessee's projected growth gave Nashville "a very strong chance" at a baseball team. For his part, Schmittou said the ship sailed with the near-simultaneous relocation of the Houston Oilers to become the Tennessee Titans and the NHL's addition of the Predators in the late 1990s.

In the years since those interviews, Nashville built the Sounds a new $91 million stadium - which cannot be expanded from its 10,000-seat capacity to MLB standards - and has been awarded a Major League Soccer franchise.

Current Metro Mayor David Briley told The Tennessean Tuesday he is firmly focused on shepherding the MLS stadium project through its final steps to fruition and won't be distracted by baseball's flirtations.

"It's flattering, but my full focus right now is on bringing Major League Soccer to the city," he told the paper.

Given the long-term debt outlays Nashville had to make for the Music City Center and the Sounds stadium and those that will be required for the soccer facility, the chances of a municipally-funded stadium seem slim, particularly with the Titans and Preds leases coming to an end. While Bridgestone Arena, which remains in the top 10 American venues for concert ticket sales, has stayed fairly well updated, what is now Nissan Stadium was built on a shoestring and was essentially outdated the day it opened, fueling speculation the team will ask for an extensive overhaul or a wholly new facility.

Nashville is already ranked near the top for long-term municipal debt per capita among American cities and is coming off a difficult budget season that opened with the shock revelation that, despite all the chatter of an economic boom, Metro was in a revenue crunch.

As The Tennessean's Metro reporter and astute observer Joey Garrison noted on Twitter in his characteristically dry manner "I'm going to go out on (a) limb and say that building a new city-financed MLB stadium in Metro's current climate might be ... difficult."

In other words, as Briley all but said, thanks, but no thanks.

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