With Major League Baseball still planning to expand to at least 32 teams, plenty of cities are still in the running to become possible host sites for a new MLB franchise.
The league has stood at 30 teams for the last two-plus decades. However, commissioner Rob Manfred believes it’s time to put the game of baseball in more places across the U.S.
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“I would like to expand. Think 32 [teams] would be a good number for us,” Manfred said earlier this month. “When people want your product, you oughta try to find a way to sell it to them.”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – AUGUST 04: Chris “Mad Dog” Russo attends the SiriusXM’s Chris “Mad Dog” Russo returns to Bar A at the Jersey Shore on August 04, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for SiriusXM )Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images
(Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images)Chris ‘Mad Dog’ Russo predicts which cities MLB will expand to
During a recent radio appearance with 440 Sports’ Jared Stillman, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo talked about the league having it’s eye on expansion and where he believes Major League Baseball will look to house it’s next two organizations.
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“I think you will see by the time Manfred leaves in ’29— and he is gonna leave— I think you will see an announcement that, whatever year it might be, there will be two new teams in baseball and I think Salt Lake City and Nashville will be the two teams,” Russo predicted.
Salt Lake City and Nashville are in the running along with places like Portland, OR, Raleigh, NC, Orlando, FL and potentially San Antonio, TX.
Rob Manfred also floats MLB realignment
Among the other things possibly on the docket for Rob Manfred and Co. is realignment along geographical lines — which would represent a seismic restructure to divisions in both the American and National Leagues.
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“We have those four-window days that I love,” Manfred said of the MLB playoffs last August. “You get four baseball games in a day, it’s awesome. But when you think about the fans in the individual markets, you always end up with — because of the way we’re set up — you get Boston versus Anaheim in one of the early rounds. So you’re either going to be too late (in the day) for the fans in Boston or too early.”
“If you realign geographically, you would look more like other sports, where you play up east into the World Series, and west into the World Series, and that 10:00 game on the [East] Coast that sometimes is a problem for us becomes a primetime game on the West Coast for the two teams that are playing,” he explained. “So there’s a lot of advantages to it.”
Adding, “I think you would try to keep the two-team cities separate. That would be my thinking.”
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Time will tell if that ultimately ends up coming to fruition. But it remains more likely than not that Major League Baseball adds two more franchises before the end of the 2020s.
This story was originally published by The Spun on Feb 8, 2026, where it first appeared in the MLB section. Add The Spun as a Preferred Source by clicking here.