Wanting a Team Is Not the Same as Being Ready for One

Vancouver wants a baseball team.

Their city council approved a motion on Wednesday April 22, launching a formal review process for an MLB expansion bid. Mayor Ken Sim called it a "once-in-a-generation opportunity." The League has been interested in Vancouver since at least 2018, when Commissioner Rob Manfred named it as a potential expansion destination. Canadian baseball fans have been dreaming about a second MLB franchise north of the border for decades, likely since the folding of the Montreal Expos in 2004. The enthusiasm is real and the civic will appears genuine.

It is also worth asking a straightforward question before the celebration gets too far ahead of itself: what happened the last time a major American sports league awarded Vancouver an expansion franchise?

The Grizzlies

In 1994, the NBA awarded expansion franchises to two cities: Toronto and Vancouver. The Toronto Raptors are still there. The Vancouver Grizzlies are not.

The Grizzlies lasted six seasons in Vancouver before relocating to Memphis in 2001. The failure was not a mystery and it was not primarily about the basketball. It was about the conditions surrounding the basketball. It was about conditions that were either overlooked or underestimated when the league made the decision to expand there.

The most significant factor was the Canadian dollar. When the Grizzlies launched in 1995, the Canadian dollar was worth roughly 73 cents American. By 2002, it had fallen to about 62 cents. NBA player salaries are negotiated in US dollars. The ownership group led by Arthur Griffiths, who was already heavily leveraged from building what became GM Place, was effectively paying American salaries with a currency that kept losing value. The financial math became impossible before the team had a chance to build a fan base.

The roster situation compounded this. The early Grizzlies teams were bad in the way that expansion teams often are: thin rosters, no identity, no reason for a casual fan to show up and keep showing up. In a market where pro basketball had no existing roots, those early years were supposed to build the habit. Instead they burned through goodwill. By the time the team had a player worth watching in Shareef Abdur-Rahim, the financial situation was already terminal.

Griffiths sold the team in 1996 to a group led by John McCaw, who tried to stabilize the finances but ultimately decided relocation was the only viable path. The team moved to Memphis after the 2000-01 season.

The NBA did not do a bad job of identifying Vancouver as a city with potential. They did a bad job of stress-testing whether that potential was durable enough to survive a currency crisis, a weak early roster, and an ownership group that was undercapitalized from day one.

Wanting a team is not the same as being ready for one.

A Different Sport, But The Same Question

It would be lazy to draw a straight line from the Grizzlies to a hypothetical Vancouver MLB franchise. The situations are genuinely different in ways that matter.

Baseball is not basketball. A Major League Baseball team plays 81 home games a season compared to 41 for an NBA franchise. That means twice the stadium events, twice the concession revenue, twice the opportunities to build the kind of casual fan relationship that sustains a franchise over decades. The economics of baseball fandom are more forgiving in some ways. A $25 lawn ticket at a baseball game is a different proposition than an NBA arena seat, and the lower price point opens the market to a broader demographic.

The Canadian dollar question is also different now than it was in 1995. The currency has stabilized considerably and MLB, unlike the NBA of that era, has mechanisms for managing cross-border financial complexity that have been refined through 30-plus years of operating the Blue Jays.

These are fair distinctions and Vancouver deserves to have its bid evaluated on its own merits rather than dismissed because of what happened with a different league in a different era.

But the core question the Grizzlies raise has nothing to do with sport-specific economics. It is about the difference between a city that wants a franchise and a city that has demonstrated it can sustain one. That question does not change based on the sport. And it is the question MLB should be asking about every candidate in this race; including Vancouver, including Salt Lake City, including Portland, and including Sacramento.

What The PCL Actually Was

Sacramento's relationship with this question goes back further than most people realize.

The Pacific Coast League was not a minor league in the way people think of that phrase today. From its founding in 1903 through the mid-1950s, the PCL operated as an independent "open classification" league, meaning it was not formally subordinate to the major leagues and its best teams genuinely competed with major league clubs for talent and prestige. The league had its own stars, its own rivalries, and its own devoted regional fan base across California, Oregon, Washington, and beyond.

The Sacramento Solons were charter members of that league. They played continuously, with brief interruptions, from 1903 through 1960. They won back-to-back PCL championships in 1938 and 1939. They drew crowds that packed Edmonds Field at Riverside Boulevard and Broadway. On June 10, 1930, Sacramento hosted the first night game in Pacific Coast League history; five years before any Major League club ever played under lights.

This was not a minor league town tolerating minor league baseball. This was a city with a deep, proven, decades-long relationship with professional baseball at the highest level available to it.

Then the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and the Giants moved to San Francisco. The major leagues' arrival on the West Coast in 1958 was not simply an expansion. It was a displacement. The PCL's open classification status was stripped. Teams that had operated independently for half a century were suddenly subordinated to the major league structure. The markets that the PCL had developed and cultivated, Sacramento, Portland, Seattle, among others, were absorbed into the major league geography without any of them actually receiving a team.

The Sacramento Solons played their last game after the 1960 season and were sold and relocated to Hawaii. The city that had supported professional baseball for 57 consecutive years was left out of Major League Baseball's westward expansion entirely.

Sacramento did not lose its team because the market failed. It lost its team because the league made a geographic decision that prioritized two coastal cities and left the interior of the most populous state in the country without representation.

That is the history Vancouver does not have. That is the history Salt Lake City does not have. That is the history that belongs to Sacramento alone.

The Stress Test Nobody Else Is Running

Fast forward to 2022, when Sacramento Kings owner Vivek Ranadive purchased the River Cats and Sutter Health Park. Then to 2024, when he brokered the deal that brought the Oakland Athletics to Sacramento as a temporary home while their Las Vegas stadium was built. The A's arrived at Sutter Health Park on March 31, 2025, for the first time in the city's history.

What has happened since is the most important data set in the entire MLB expansion conversation, and it belongs exclusively to Sacramento.

Opening Day 2025 sold out at a facility with roughly 12,000 publicly available tickets. The 2025 season drew 768,464 total fans. Not a record, but a baseline established in year one at a minor league facility with minimal local marketing, no Sacramento identity on the jersey, and a team that most of the country associated with Oakland's grief rather than Sacramento's future.

Opening Day 2026 broke the Sutter Health Park all-time attendance record with 12,410 fans on April 3rd. The A's introduced Sacramento-branded jerseys and Sacramento Saturdays programming because the market demanded it. Season ticket waitlists existed heading into year two.

The trajectory from year one to year two is the relevant data point. Not the raw attendance number, but the empirical direction.

No other expansion candidate can show this. Salt Lake City has $900 million in committed public funding and a shovel-ready stadium site, and those are real, serious advantages that Sacramento cannot match on paper. But Salt Lake City has not run a single MLB game. Portland has bipartisan state financing and a waterfront site. Portland has not run a single MLB game. Vancouver has enthusiasm and a cautionary tale. Vancouver has not run a single MLB game.

Sacramento is the only candidate city in this race where you can point to an actual MLB market, currently operating, producing real data, in real time.

The Vacuum That Makes It All Matter

When the Athletics leave for Las Vegas after the 2027 season, the San Francisco Giants will be the only Major League Baseball franchise in all of Northern California.

More than 10 million people from the Oregon border through the Central Valley to Fresno will have no team within reasonable distance. The Giants' effective service area centers on the Bay Area. It has never meaningfully extended to Sacramento, Stockton, Chico, or Redding. These communities have been baseball fans without a local team for their entire lives, borrowing allegiance from franchises that were never really built for them.

Former A's co-owner Lew Wolff said it plainly in his memoir this week: "When I read about expansion — Nashville and Portland and Salt Lake City — why isn't the Bay Area included in that? It was a two-team market. Now it's a one-team market."

Wolff was talking about the Bay Area, but the vacuum he is describing extends well beyond it. Northern California is not a Bay Area story. It is a regional story, and Sacramento sits at its center.

A Sacramento expansion franchise does not compete with the Giants. It fills the market the Giants have never served. That is a different and stronger argument than anything Salt Lake City or Portland or Vancouver can make, because territorial geography is structural — it does not change based on how good the financing is or how enthusiastic the mayor sounds at a press conference.

What May Means

Mayor Kevin McCarty and Mayor Martha Guerrero of West Sacramento have committed to a formal, joint press conference announcing Sacramento's official MLB expansion bid in May 2026. They are building toward that moment with a regional coalition that includes cities, counties, and economic development partners. Vancouver announced its interest today. Salt Lake City has been building its case for three years. Portland has been working toward this for longer. The field is real and Sacramento should not pretend otherwise.

But Sacramento is the only city in this race that does not need to ask the league to imagine what a franchise there might look like. The league has already seen it. Two seasons of it. Sold out opening days, broken attendance records, a Sacramento identity emerging organically from a market that was never formally given one.

The Grizzlies failed in Vancouver because the league awarded a franchise to a city that wanted one without asking hard enough whether the conditions were right for it to last. Sacramento is not asking the league to take that risk. It is asking the league to look at the evidence it has already produced and make the obvious decision.

Wanting a team is not the same as being ready for one.

Sacramento has been ready since 1903.