Copyright Salt Lake City Deseret News
A former sports executive who ran major franchises and founded professional teams offered his forecast of Major League Baseball expansion during a recent panel discussion in New York. While Dave Checketts didn’t offer a time frame for the league adding two teams, he pinpointed the cities he sees as the frontrunners. Like commissioner Rob Manfred has stated, Checketts expects an expansion franchise in the East and the West. In the East, he said, it’s Orlando, Charlotte and Nashville. “Nashville is clearly No. 1 and out front,” he said at the inaugural Front Office Sports Asset Class summit in New York. In the West, he said, it’s Portland, Sacramento and Salt Lake City. Checketts, who worked as the president and general manager of the Utah Jazz in the early 1980s, then went on to talk about the Larry H. and Gail Miller family, who owned the NBA team until a few years ago. “The Miller family who I brought into the Jazz in 1985 has sold not only their team but sold all of their auto dealerships. They’re sitting on billions of cash and they’ve bought land just west of downtown Salt Lake. They have a beautiful stadium plan and they’ve got $900 million from the state legislature,” he said at the event. “They’re by far No. 1 in the West.” Checketts built a wide-ranging career as a top sports executive and investor. His tenure as Jazz president/CEO ran through 1990 before he moved on to take over as the New York Knicks chief executive and later became the president/CEO of Madison Square Garden from 1994-2001 Along the way he founded the New York Liberty, one of the original WNBA franchises, and founded Real Salt Lake, Utah’s Major League Soccer franchise. In 2005, the same year RSL began play, Checketts bought the NHL’s St. Louis Blues. Checketts knows Utah as well. He graduated from Bountiful High School and earned degrees from the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. The Millers’ big pitch Larry H. Miller bought the Utah Jazz in 1985, and his wife, Gail, assumed ownership upon his death in 2009. The Miller family sold the team for $1.66 billion in 2020 and sold its auto dealerships valued at $3.2 billion in 2021. It owns the Triple-A Salt Lake Bees, which moved to a new privately-funded ballpark in South Jordan this past season, and bought Real Salt Lake earlier this year. In 2023, the Miller family launched Big League Utah, a coalition of prominent Utah politicians, business leaders and former pro athletes, aiming to bring a major league team to the state. The proposed baseball stadium would be part of a $3.5 billion mixed-use development the Miller Company is building on Salt Lake City’s west side. It would sit between the Salt Lake International Airport and downtown and is bordered by I-80 and light rail, as well as the Utah State Fairpark and Jordan River. The ballpark would offer views of the downtown skyline and the Wasatch Mountains. Utah lawmakers passed legislation last year that would divert a rental car tax increase and other taxes to the stadium project, totaling as much as $900 million. When will Major League Baseball expand? Manfred has indicated he’d like to have an expansion process in place before he retires in January 2029, but has yet to describe how it would work. Expansion would also require negotiation as part of the Collective Bargaining Agreement that expires Dec. 1, 2026. Fees to enter the league are estimated at no less than $2 billion. Other than saying the league would need a team in the East and the West, Manfred hasn’t identified particular cities for expansion. He also said a strong ownership group is key to landing a team. Though expansion appears on the back-burner for now, it hasn’t dampened enthusiasm for the possibility in Salt Lake City. “There’s tremendous excitement locally about the potential for expansion,” Steve Starks, CEO of the Larry H. Miller Company, told The Athletic last month, while describing the market as “buzzing with anticipation” about the prospect of bringing big league baseball to Utah. Checketts isn’t the first person to single out Nashville and Salt Lake City. Last year, ESPN baseball analyst Buster Olney and Cy Young Award winner David Cone independently identified the two cities as expansion frontrunners. “There’s a lot of talk about Portland, Oregon, at one point, but I think Salt Lake City, Utah, might have moved ahead,” Cone said at the time. “That’s my handicap right now, but expansion will be on the horizon. We will get two new teams. Nashville will be one, and Salt Lake City will be the other.”
