MLB expansion, Vlad Jr.‘s breakout and Shane Bieber’s Humble Proposal | The Bandwagon
This week, Hannah Keyser is bandwagoning MLB teams that should exist, but don’t yet. Forget relocating the Oakland A’s, and add new teams in Portland and Nashville so everybody wins!
Hannah is also joined by Cleveland ace and 2020 AL Cy Young winner Shane Bieber, who gives her his ‘Humble Proposal to Fix Baseball.’
Video Transcript
HANNAH KEYSER: Why do we have a baseball team in Canada?
- She doesn't think Canada should have sports teams.
HANNAH KEYSER: No, I don't think they should be in our sports leagues. Get your own sports league. Taxes, that seems confusing.
- Yeah.
HANNAH KEYSER: It seems legitimately very strange that we have broad, overarching government body, and then 30 micro businesses to me that one of which is in a different country. If the EPL had one team in France, that would be confusing. And not just because there's a global pandemic and they can't go home.
I'm Hannah Keyser, and this is "The Bandwagon."
- Yes.
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HANNAH KEYSER: It's been a while since we talked about specific teams, and rooting for them on here, which was sort of originally the whole premise of the show. So we're going to get back to that today and tell you who to bandwagon. The catch is they don't exist yet.
Let's back up. Rob Manfred has said before that Major League Baseball can't pursue expansion until they settle the situation with the Rays and A's stadiums. And not because everyone at the commissioner's office is just too busy to think about an influx of the $2 billion, the price of a new team, it's just that the potential expansion markets are currently more useful to make the cities of Oakland and Tampa jealous then as opportunities to grow the game.
This all got a little more real for Oakland recently with the implicit option to relocate not doing much to motivate the city to make close to a billion dollars available for a new stadium project, the owners made a show of conspicuously clearing their throat while the league cracked its knuckles behind them and talked about how sad it was that Oakland had already lost two of their teams, and what a shame it would be if something happened to the A's.
Whenever a new location gets floated in these conversations, people get really excited about the possibility of going to games there. And yes, I love that, for all of us have emotionally and professionally invested in baseball. But what if-- and stay with me here, we specifically undermined the owners' ability to [BLEEP] over multiple cities by just giving a few new fan bases a team of their own, and thereby eliminating the leverage to leave.
See, keep the A's in Oakland and expand to other markets. What would that look like exactly? I don't really know because they don't exist. But we can pretend by bandwagoning-- we'll don't have a hat, the Portland Ponies.
The Pacific Northwest is wide open for a halfway competent team to swoop in and steal the least loyal segment of the Mariners vast and vocal fan base. Seattle is currently the most isolated team geographically, and while I'm not sure that there's anyone living in Idaho and Montana, Portland has more people than five current MLB cities, plus they got the 21st biggest media market, and NBA and MLS teams with some of the best attendance numbers in their leagues.
Why the Ponies, you might be wondering? Well there's actually already a group of eager rich people headed up by a former Nike executive trying to bring baseball to Portland, and part of their plan includes restoring a 20-ton carousel from the early 20th century and just plopping it right outside the ballpark. The group is calling themselves the Portland Diamond.
But I think we can swap that out for something with a little more character and unique candy-colored uniform potential. Tough to tell exactly what's going on in these glossy renderings, but it looks like we have a semi-sunken waterfront stadium with an outfield plaza leading to a row food trucks and a covered carousel. I have nothing snarky to say, because it's classy. And as long as Russell Wilson and Ciara are footing the bill, I'm all for it.
See, now here's where we would make a joke about the city being populated by hipsters. And by now, that stereotype is pretty played out. But actually, young yuppies spending their parents money and rediscovering retro hobbies and growing fiercely protective of them, in part because of how niche they've become, is pretty much an ideal target audience for a baseball team named for a classic amusement park attraction. Maybe they could mandate all the players have handlebar mustaches. Alternate name, the Oregon Trail.
- Yeah.
HANNAH KEYSER: Give us the West Coast team, and for realignments' sake, we are going to move back east and bandwagon-- again, no hats, the Nashville Records. Like with Portland, there is already a group working to secure an MLB team in the city while touting a robust, quote, leadership roster. Like really, really, really robust.
Where else are you going to get an org chart with Dave Stewart and Justin Timberlake? They promise a privately funded and apparently very shiny stadium for a franchise they're calling The Stars after a former national Negro league team. And I really like that homage, but I couldn't resist renaming it something with more musician-athlete fun crossover potential.
Besides, why should the Padres get to have the only enviable earth tone unis anyway? Make more brown uniforms. It's very in this year. Nashville is a growing market that could capture everyone caught between the Braves and Cardinals territory. It already churns out big league talent from the top tier Vanderbilt program.
I can't imagine a population more primed to appreciate baseball's big ass American flags and country music capital, and I'm sure all those bachelorette parties would love to have a destination where you day drink and ogle men in uniform before they hit the honky tonk bars.
I do have one quibble with the current plan to put a team for Nashville. And for that we need to bring back the aspirational stadium renderings. I'm sorry, is that a floating concert venue that shares a wall with the right field stands? That has got to be about the vibes and not the actual architecture, right?
Let's go to the diagram. Oh no, that appears to literally be a covered entertainment living room that is, quote integrated into ballpark. Are they trying to host concurrent live music and ballgames? That sounds very, very, loud.
Obviously, these are not the only two options for expansion sites. But they're my favorite space, at least in part in where I would like to go for a game. But the most important thing, no matter where MLB decides to bring baseball next, is that we don't ask taxpayers to fund billionaires' business ventures.
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- The Vlad Junior breakout.
HANNAH KEYSER: Vladimir Guerrero Junior is very good, and he's still very young. He's 22. It's two years after he debuted. There was a really good story by James Wagner of the "New York Times" and it was like Vlad Guerrero Junior's grandmother lives with him, and she cooks for him, and this is very cute.
He's 20 years old. She makes all of his Dominican favorites. She makes so much food that he takes it to Dominican teammates, Dominican opposition. And that story came out in 2019, it was like very, very, cute. It was like oh my God, you cook all this favorite foods.
And then there was a story that came out this year that was like team asks Vlad Guerrero Junior's grandmother, please stop cooking so much food for him. He needs to lose weight. And it was like-- it was like-- who could have seen this coming?
I don't know it's very good that Vlad Guerrero Junior is very good. It would have been really sad if he was not good. Like, there-- it's tough to go from people talking about whether or not you should be a Hall of Famer before you ever played the game to still impressing people with your actual production.
And he has managed to do that and it only took him till he was 22, and it's still really cool. Yeah, fan.
- Joe West.
HANNAH KEYSER: Cowboy Joe is now the, I believe, record holding most ever officiated games umpire? That's not the most efficient way to say that. But it's true, it's accurate. And so now maybe he'll retire. Fan.
- Bleached blonde hair.
HANNAH KEYSER: Oh, that's-- sorry. That's me. I dyed my hair blonde. You guys like it?
- Fan. Fan.
HANNAH KEYSER: So much maintenance. Here's the thing about dyeing your hair blonde. First you have hair that requires like minimal maintenance, and then you're like what if I paid a lot of money to have to pay more money? And for some reason, we do it anyway.
I don't know why we do it. It's really good. But I'm a fan for now. I'm probably not going to keep it. I got to be honest. It's a lot of upkeep. Also, a bunch y'all-- literally these people texted me. They're like what you think about your eyebrows?
I was like, leave them the same? And then I read every one of those texts to my hairdresser, and she was like, men are dumb.
- True.
- That's fair.
HANNAH KEYSER: Fan.
- Memorial Day weekend.
HANNAH KEYSER: Is coming up, and I don't care, because it was my birthday this past weekend. So I'm not a fan, because it was 90 degrees this past weekend, and none of the beaches and none of the pools in New York City were open because it wasn't yet Memorial Day weekend. And it's going to be like 65 and rainy on Memorial Day weekend. Classic New York.
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This week on Humble Proposal, my guest is reigning AL Cy Young Award winner Shane Bieber, who's going to tell us how he would fix baseball. Take it away, Shane.
SHANE BIEBER: I would enjoy baseball a little bit more if we could open up the strike zone. I'd say we'll make it even bigger. No, that's kind of a joke. I know that there's a lot going on right now with the pitching, and ways to change the game, maybe moving the mound back, or making the strike zone smaller, bringing robot umps. But yeah, if I got one proposal, let's make that strike zone bigger.
HANNAH KEYSER: Why, though? So here's what I'm saying.
SHANE BIEBER: Because I'm a pitcher?
HANNAH KEYSER: We need you guys to get some runs. How are they going to score? How does--
SHANE BIEBER: I love our guys. I got all the confidence in the world in our guys. Whether the pitch is in the zone or out of the zone.
HANNAH KEYSER: So I'm taking it you don't love moving the mound back?
SHANE BIEBER: I don't moving the mound back, no.
HANNAH KEYSER: What about automated balls and strikes, robot arms?
SHANE BIEBER: I don't know. I go back and forth on that one. It takes away a crucial part of the game. I love umpires, and they have an extremely difficult job, as well as people aren't thinking about, you know, the art and the craft of being a catcher, and working with a pitcher, and framing pitches, and receiving pitches, and presenting them to the umpires. And it's a whole intricate part of the game that could potentially be affected.
HANNAH KEYSER: All right, so I now want to give my official ruling. And I don't want you to think that I can't appreciate a pitcher's duel, because I love a pitcher's duel. I am not a fan of your humble proposal. I got to stick up for your teammates. Position players, they got to get hits. They got to get paid in arbitration. They got--
SHANE BIEBER: No, they absolutely do. Like I said, I got the utmost confidence in my guys. But maybe I'll come back in and create a nice lengthy PowerPoint proposal.
HANNAH KEYSER: Hey, I'd love to see it.
SHANE BIEBER: Maybe I'll sway your opinion.
HANNAH KEYSER: Yeah. I want to see-- I want to see numbers. I want to hear testimonials from catchers. So we'll have you back on the show. Thanks for doing this.
SHANE BIEBER: Perfect. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
HANNAH KEYSER: This week, we talked about how expansion would be way better than relocation from like a literal community standpoint. And everything we said was sort of made up. The team names, and the colors, and the logos, shout out to Ron.
The importance where teams play, that part is very real. We say sports are like real life. And it's not just like in an allegorical sense. It's because they affect communities, and gentrification, and environment, and traffic patterns, and tax rates. And so all of this stuff is like in some ways the realest part of sports, even though it's kind of boring.
- Expand.
- Yeah.
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