As suspected once commissioner Joshua Schaub first teased an expansion announcement a week and a half ago, the American Association will finally be expanding for the first time in six years with the announcement of a new franchise coming to Minneapolis suburb Blaine, Minnesota for the 2028 season.
The move returns the American Association to the Minneapolis-St. Paul market, which of course served the league so well with the St. Paul Saints for the league’s first 15 years.
In addition to the Saints, the Land of 10,000 Lakes was home to two additional franchises in the AA’s predecessor, the Northern League: the Rochester Aces, who played the league’s charter 1993 season before moving to Winnipeg, and the Duluth-Superior Dukes, another charter franchise who played a decade in Duluth before moving to Kansas City for the 2003 season.
Why Blaine?
First and foremost, it comes down to the city (and an ownership group) wanted to build a stadium and bring a team to town. At the end of the day, whatever city is willing to build a stadium and an owner willing to bring in a team is what matters. Those are the two biggest hurdles to clear.
Outside of that, Blaine makes sense for other reasons. First of all, it is already a youth sports mecca, with the National Sports Center (which is located right across the street from the stadium site) attracting nearly 4 million visitors annually.
The city itself has grown quickly, with over 20 percent growth in the last two censuses an on track to approach that figure for the 2020’s as well. The city is home to an estimated 76,000 people with a per-household income north of $100,000 per year. The city is also located in Anoka County (north of Minneapolis), which is home to over 380,000 people. Those are all encouraging numbers.
Also, there’s a certain subset of St. Paul Saints fans who miss independent baseball. Maybe Blaine can bring some of those people on board.
The Work Still Remaining
The obvious issue that announcing just one new franchise brings up is needing to figure out an even number. So, either one more needs to come on board, or someone has to go.
Publicly, there are no clear frontrunners for where a second team would go. I laid out the somewhat-recent proposals, but none of them seem to be anything close to actually putting shovels in the ground. There has been absolutely nothing that has been publicly published, but a couple times (from different people, years apart) I’ve heard about someone trying to bring an AA franchise to a location outside the Central Time Zone. That information is so flimsy, though, that I’m not even going to put the location out there.
Luckily, the timing still gives the AA some time to figure this out. Unofficially, Blaine is the farthest-out expansion announcement: still 21 months to the club’s first game in May, 2028. In comparison, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Lake Country were all announced 12-15 months before their first game. Cleburne was even shorter: just seven months before they began play (though with construction already underway).
Both Wisconsin teams didn’t begin ballpark construction until less than a year before their first games (though Milwaukee’s Franklin Field opened about a month late). Realistically, if a groundbreaking takes place before Opening Day, 2027, we should be fine on having two new ballparks ready for ’28.
Outside of figuring out a 14th team, Blaine of course would need to build an organization from the ground up. As of now, there has been no publicly confirmed ownership group for the new franchise, though I’ve heard for quite some team that an existing AA ownership group would be owning this franchise.
The only people named in the league’s official release are Robb Bader and Chris Burstad, developers of the ballpark and the overall $750 million development in the immediate ballpark vicinity, currently known as The Farm. Whether they will have any stake in the team itself is not immediately clear.
If an existing group does in fact take on another franchise, then we could certainly see executives and on-field staff coming over to build a new squad. But not much more can be said without knowing for sure.
Looking at The League
One thing Blaine absolutely has going for it is the location relative to the rest of the American Association.
From a league standpoint, it is firmly within the AA’s footprint. While no team is closer than 3 1/2 hours (Fargo-Moorhead), there are five teams within five hours of Blaine, so there’s no creating a Cleburne-type island. It’s a site where a team can easily play on a Thursday night and travel somewhere else on Friday with no problems.
Also, being in between the East and West Divisions gives the league flexibility to put Blaine wherever they need to put them. Depending on where the 14th team team winds up, you could either slide Blaine over to the East with the Chicago/Milwaukee bloc or put them with the group up and down I-29 in the West. That also opens the possibility of moving Cleburne to the West, which is a little better geographic fit.
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