[yankeesrule]

Originally Posted by CBL-Commish

There's no reason you couldn't have seven teams in New York, four or five in LA and Chicago, and one each in KC, Pittsburgh, Cincy, Baltimore, or where ever. In fact, with many teams splitting the markets in the three biggest metropolises it would be far easier for major league teams in Portland, San Antonio, Sacramento, Columbus, etc to compete. The bar will no longer be set at the level of a big-market team with a $120M payroll, the bar will be the natural equilibrium point the league as a whole will find.

The solution is to eliminate territorial barriers and make expansion far easier. Or just add 2-3 more competing major leagues.

In any case, with the population expansion and foreign talent influx you could expand to 60 or 80 teams (gradually, of course) before you'd get back to the competitive and talent levels of the 50s and 60s. And using places like the DR as an example, it seems that economic incentives drive people to become baseball players, so there's a good argument that there's no real limit to the number of MLB teams the population could supply with talent.

you are also assuming that the new teams in those cities would bring in fans in big numbers comparable to the teams that are already there. unless they set ticket prices at 2/3 or lower the level of the teams currently in place, i dont see many fans(for NY we'll say Yankee and Met fans) that are willing to ditch their fandom of their current team for the Royals, Brewers, Reds etc if they suddenly started playing in the city. And if they came in and set prices that low, I dont think they'd be able to have payrolls similar to what the current teams in place have.