\u00a0<\/p>\n
Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday.\u00a0Sign up for our free newsletter<\/a>.<\/p>\n On the surface, a Major League Baseball team in Vancouver seems like a great idea. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred himself said as much<\/a> not that long ago in an interview with Sportsnet.\u00a0<\/p>\n Think about it. A city that has craved another Big 4 franchise since the NBA\u2019s Vancouver Grizzlies left town some 25 years ago (and that still has the very real scars from that event).\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s an argument.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOur city has a strong sports culture and a proven track record of supporting professional teams,\u201d said Sim in a press release sent today. \u201cWith 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Sim\u2019s 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\u2019t dare vote down Sim\u2019s motion. (It depends, one guesses, on whether enough members of the party, including a councillor who doesn\u2019t live in the city, show up.)<\/p>\n But it isn\u2019t exactly hard to adopt a skeptical position on the mayor\u2019s move.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s years away. If the team thinks the current deal with BC Place is untenable (which it does<\/a>), then it seems somewhat unlikely that the MLS team will stick around after this current year.\u00a0<\/p>\n Longtime broadcaster and Vancouver Canadians executive Rob Fai doesn\u2019t think the idea has legs<\/a>. 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\u2019t have the latter.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t heard about it from the mayor or the ABC party.\u00a0<\/p>\n After he briefed himself on the news, Fry was still a bit puzzled. \u201cI don\u2019t know where the cogent rationale comes from,\u201d said Fry on a call with the Straight. In an int<\/a>erview with BIV<\/a>, reporter Mike Howell says that Sim \u201ccould think of three to four locations for a stadium, but wouldn\u2019t disclose them, leaving that decision to potential bidders.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t think of a single one off the top of my head,\u201d said Fry. \u201cYou want it to be transit-oriened for a stadium of that size.\u201d<\/p>\n BC Place reportedly wouldn\u2019t work<\/a>. And while some very smart person wrote an article about this<\/a> in Vancouver magazine a few years ago, there don\u2019t seem to be many obvious solutions.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s over 81 home games per year. The Vancouver Canadians sell out the 6,500-capacity Nat Bailey Stadium occasionally. It\u2019s always a great time at the ballpark, but it\u2019s harder in the early spring months.\u00a0<\/p>\n Expect Fry and other opposition councillors to push the mayor about prospective buyers and stadium locations. \u201cAt this point it behooves the mayor to come clean with where he\u2019s thinking and who he\u2019s been talking to,\u201d said Fry. \u201cNone of this should be confidential information.\u201d<\/p>\n Fry also doesn\u2019t love the fact that the press release was sent to media before other council members were made aware of the idea.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s good form to put out a press release without a heads-up or sharing the press release with us,\u201d said Fry. \u201cFor me to hear it from you, it\u2019s not setting up for a collaborative approach. It smells like an election-year stunt\u2014it\u2019s all hat, no cattle.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday.\u00a0Sign up for our free newsletter.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[415,17,412,413,418,407,414,420,416,423,226,389,419,422,421,417,95],"class_list":{"0":"post-5901","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-vancouver","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-city","11":"tag-culture","12":"tag-dining","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-events","15":"tag-fashion","16":"tag-film","17":"tag-food","18":"tag-lifestyle","19":"tag-music","20":"tag-nightlife","21":"tag-restaurants","22":"tag-shopping","23":"tag-tv","24":"tag-vancouver"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}