Bid launched to bring Tennessee Summitt WNBA team to Nashville
Former Gov. Bill Haslam is part of a star-powered bid to bring a team named after Lady Vols coach Pat Summitt to Tennessee.
Former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam believes Nashville will eventually have an MLB team, but acknowledges the financial hurdles.MLB commissioner Rob Manfred considers Nashville a good candidate for expansion, while mayor Freddie O’Connell emphasizes the need for a strong ownership group.
Bill Haslam said he thinks Nashville will have a Major League Baseball team “at some point,” but added that the challenges “will be real.”
Does that mean the former Tennessee governor, who is the incoming majority owner of the Nashville Predators, is interested in helping make that happen from an ownership standpoint?
That remains to be seen. But the man who has a bid in to bring a WNBA franchise to Nashville didn’t say he wasn’t.
“I believe in Nashville,” Haslam told The Tennessean in early June. “But, you know, everything has to work, right? A, you have to be able to get a franchise. B, the economics have to make sense, including on a stadium.”
Haslam said the challenges of MLB ownership “are not the easiest” compared to other sports because of the lack of a hard salary cap. He used the New York Mets as an example.
“Can we put the salary cap so the Mets can’t have a $500 million payroll and the Brewers have a $70 or $90 million payroll?” said Haslam, who takes over as Predators majority owner July 1. “My sense is they’re working toward that.”
Does MLB in Nashville make sense?
The idea of an MLB team coming to Nashville is hardly new.
Music City Baseball, formed in 2019, is a group working toward trying to bring a team here. Former MLB pitcher Dave Stewart has expressed interest in doing the same, and said he had the investors do so.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, who said he hopes to have a two-team expansion plan in place by the time he leaves office in January 2029, called Nashville “a good candidate” for a team.
“I have learned that saying too much about any potential expansion candidate sets off a chain of phone calls from everybody,” Manfred said when he was in town in April. “So I’m just going to leave it there.”
Nashville mayor Freddie O’Connell did not discount the city as a possible MLB destination but stressed the importance of having a strong ownership group.
“Yeah, we’ve had conversations of all kinds with people who will come and express interest,” O’Connell told The Tennessean in early February.
‘Baseball is feasible in Nashville’
News last week that Nashville SC minority owner Justin Ishbia came to “a long-term ownership agreement” to purchase Jerry Reinsdorf‘s majority stake in the Chicago White Sox between 2029 and 2033 prompted some speculation the team eventually could move to Nashville.
Whispers of that possibility began to sprout in early December 2023, when Reinsdorf met with O’Connell during MLB’s winter meetings at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center.
An O’Connell spokesman told The Tennessean at the time that the meeting was “introductory in nature.”
Be it an expansion team or a team relocating to Nashville, Haslam believes the city could handle it. Whether he would be a part of that team remains a question.
“I think baseball is feasible in Nashville,” he said. “Now, the challenges with that are huge, right? You have to get a stadium. You don’t want a team without a stadium and you don’t want a stadium without a team.”
Paul Skrbina is a sports enterprise reporter covering the Predators, Titans, Nashville SC, local colleges and local sports for The Tennessean. Reach him at pskrbina@tennessean.com and on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter)Â @paulskrbina.