AH: New Orleans baseball team

[JoeMulk]

Whats a good scenario for getting a major league team in New Orleans?

[glenn67]

A New Orleans Saints football team that becomes a playoff team a few years after its first season (instead of waiting 19 years IOTL) and a more successful NBA team in New Orleans during the 1970s.

[AltSptHst]

In 1978, and again in 1979, Charlie Finley tried to move the A's to New Orleans, but the City of Oakland and Alameda County wouldn't let them out of their lease. In 1980, Charlie went through a divorce, and he had to sell the team.

He was going to sell it to oilman Marvin Davis, who was going to move it to Denver, but since the Raiders were threatening to leave, Oakland didn't want to let both teams leave, and wouldn't let them out of their lease, so he sold it to Walter Haas, Jr, President of Levi Strauss & Co. and a local buyer who kept it in Oakland.

If he would have gone through a divorce two years earlier, with the same conditions (and he still had to sell), maybe some New Orleans group with the money to deal with their lease in Oakland could have bought the team from Finley, moved them to New Orleans, and re-named them the Blues or something like that.

[Mr. Stubacca]

Tampa Rays don't get a new stadium.
Selig works out a deal where Tampa owner Steinberg buys hte Mets from the Wilpons after they lose the Madoff suit.
Tampa sold to a buyer who relocates to N.O.

[zoomar]

Is there even a major league sized baseball stadium in NOLA? I may be wrong, I didn't think the Superdome can be configured for baseball. Also, New Orleans' difficulty keeping an NBA franchise suggests the city never was big enough for more than one major league sport - and in the South, if its anything it's gonna be football.

[JoeMulk]

They have a triple A stadium that could be expanded upon and any of these scenarios would have to include a new stadium deal.