Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Salt Lake City?

Orioles fans celebrate at Camden Yards during pregame introductions for Baltimore's home opener against the Yankees. The home team rewarded their fans with a 7-6 win. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)

There's been lots of hype in the local media in Salt Lake since Ryan Smith took over the Utah Jazz NBA basketball team, then bought the Real Salt Lake soccer team, and then started hyping wanting to bring other professional teams--hockey, baseball--to Salt Lake.

To me it was puffery because Salt Lake is a small market, about 1.2 million residents in the county, although more resident in abutting counties (Utah, Davis, Summit) add to the market for sporting events, and is significantly smaller than other "small market" baseball cities like Pittsburgh ("Why Pittsburgh doesn't have a professional basketball team," WESA-FM/NPR), Baltimore, Kansas City, Saint Louis--all of which have at least 1 million more residents in their metropolitan area than SLC.

Tampa Bay, with the worst attendance in the MLB despite significant success on the field, their metropolitan population is almost 2 million residents greater than Salt Lake. 

-- "Revisiting "Framework of characteristics that support successful community development in association with the development of professional sports facilities" and the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team + Phoenix Coyotes hockey," 2022 

Portland has been bandied about for an MLB team for years, it has 1 million more residents.  And Nashville, which has only about 700,000 more residents.

Plus, teams are going to be somewhat less profitable going forward because the bombing out of the value of regional broadcasting rights for teams and the bankruptcy of regional sports cable networks ("The Way You Watch Sports on TV Is Changing. Here’s Why," New York Times).

And in the many years ago study by American Business Journals of the capacity of metropolitan areas to add teams, Salt Lake was very low on the list.

-- "American City Business Journals calculates the capacity of North American metropolitan areas to support new/additional professional sports teams," 2015

Partly because college sports are particularly popular, especially Utah Football, and BYU Football and Basketball, which draws patronage and sponsorship away from professional sports.

But baseball is in the news, because of ESPN's, "Salt Lake City group joins MLB expansion chase" reporting on how The Miller Family, which a couple months ago announced they are decamping their minor league team to the suburbs to support their real estate ventures there ("The call of sprawl: Salt Lake Bees minor league baseball team to move to the suburbs"), are behind the effort, and they are definitely well capitalized.

But it seems like a stretch.  The market is small, and other cities like Portland and Nashville have been seeking a team for years.

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When there was first talk about the minor league team moving, I was skeptical because it makes no sense from a business perspective.

But if you're a real estate developer, you have different motivations.  Profitability of the team matters less than activating your real estate development and selling property.

But I am not a rich guy, so who cares what I say.