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On the surface, a Major League Baseball team in Vancouver seems like a great idea. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred himself said as much not that long ago in an interview with Sportsnet. 

Think about it. A city that has craved another Big 4 franchise since the NBA’s Vancouver Grizzlies left town some 25 years ago (and that still has the very real scars from that event). 

And with the rampant Toronto Blue Jays fever that grabbed the city last fall (and rears its head whenever the Jays play a series in Seattle), there’s an argument. 

So it makes some sense as to why Vancouver mayor Ken Sim recently sent out a press release calling for MLB expansion to the city. 

“Our city has a strong sports culture and a proven track record of supporting professional teams,” said Sim in a press release sent today. “With the MLB publicly expressing interest in league expansion in the near future, we see an opportunity to position Vancouver as the next home for a franchise.”

Sim’s release stated that the mayor will bring the motion to council on April 22. It will surely pass, as the ABC majority on council wouldn’t dare vote down Sim’s motion. (It depends, one guesses, on whether enough members of the party, including a councillor who doesn’t live in the city, show up.)

But it isn’t exactly hard to adopt a skeptical position on the mayor’s move.

We currently have a professional sports franchise that is very much on the brink of leaving town. As of right now, no buyer for the Vancouver Whitecaps has emerged. And though the city signed an MOU with the team to explore Hastings Park as a venue for a new stadium, that’s years away. If the team thinks the current deal with BC Place is untenable (which it does), then it seems somewhat unlikely that the MLS team will stick around after this current year. 

Longtime broadcaster and Vancouver Canadians executive Rob Fai doesn’t think the idea has legs. As Fai notes, many other cities are in solid positions with potential owners and stadiums at the ready. Vancouver might have the former (though that remains to be seen). It definitely doesn’t have the latter. 

This is, of course, an election year in Vancouver. And after getting destroyed in the 2025 city council byelection, the pressure on Sim to win back support from constituents has been high. 

Sim and his ABC government have mostly focused on their plan to institute steady governance focused on making the city work. But there have been some grandiose promises as well, including $400 million to fix five community centres and another year of no property tax increase. 

Councillor and Green Party mayoral candidate Pete Fry was surprised when the Straight informed him of the release, as he was in council chambers and hadn’t heard about it from the mayor or the ABC party. 

After he briefed himself on the news, Fry was still a bit puzzled. “I don’t know where the cogent rationale comes from,” said Fry on a call with the Straight. In an interview with BIV, reporter Mike Howell says that Sim “could think of three to four locations for a stadium, but wouldn’t disclose them, leaving that decision to potential bidders.”

“I can’t think of a single one off the top of my head,” said Fry. “You want it to be transit-oriened for a stadium of that size.”

BC Place reportedly wouldn’t work. And while some very smart person wrote an article about this in Vancouver magazine a few years ago, there don’t seem to be many obvious solutions. 

Fry noted that the Vancouver Canucks pull in just under 20,000 fans a game, with the Whitecaps usually around that. An average MLB team sees some 30,000 fans per outing, and that’s over 81 home games per year. The Vancouver Canadians sell out the 6,500-capacity Nat Bailey Stadium occasionally. It’s always a great time at the ballpark, but it’s harder in the early spring months. 

Expect Fry and other opposition councillors to push the mayor about prospective buyers and stadium locations. “At this point it behooves the mayor to come clean with where he’s thinking and who he’s been talking to,” said Fry. “None of this should be confidential information.”

Fry also doesn’t love the fact that the press release was sent to media before other council members were made aware of the idea.

“I don’t think it’s good form to put out a press release without a heads-up or sharing the press release with us,” said Fry. “For me to hear it from you, it’s not setting up for a collaborative approach. It smells like an election-year stunt—it’s all hat, no cattle.”