The Florida Marlins get permission to move and now Portland is all aflutter with the possibility that major league baseball might move to the Rose City. This is a bad idea, for several reasons, but mostly because it would be bad for the Mariners, and for the Portland team as well.
Here are my two main reasons, which I’ll expand on when I have the time:
1. Television market. Right now, Seattle has a decent chance at being succesful over the long term because they have a monopoly over a mid to larger sized television market. If you split that market with Portland, the Mariners would be left with a much smaller tv market, lessening their revenues drastically, and putting both the Mariners and the Portland MLB team in Milwaukee land.
2. No one seems to want to argue for a Mexican based MLB team. There have been two teams founded in Canada, and there have been some MLB road games played in Latin America. From a strickly economic point of view, putting a team in say Monterrey, Mexico makes sense. Three million people, highest quality of life of any major Mexican City, and close to other MLB markets.
It seems that both the Blazers and Sonics do well. Portlanders are Mariners fans because there is no Portland team. I grew up in Portland, and can say that we wanted our own baseball team all along. I will say that had we had our own team, I would have missed out on being a Griffey fan. I think the teams could co-exist nicely, and PNW fans could root for both. They would be in different leagues and would mostly only meet in the world series, with the exception of inter-league play.
I think people choosing to root for both teams is different than them being able to make money or compete at a high enough level to win consistently. Not many people are going to be fans of two losing teams. Chicago is different because of the history.