Why did NOLA never have an MLB team?

Because it's fricking hot

We got better things to do baw

We are a football and basketball city

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Too small of a market for 82 games is my understanding.

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Currently, yes, New Orleans is the 50th largest media market and 47th largest metro area by population.

New Orleans needed to get an expansion team in the 60s or 70s to have much of a chance.

They cant even support 41 for the NBA

Cause nobody here gives a shite about baseball

Lots of good true answers on this post so far, but one has to look at the full history to understand why we never got a team.

For quite some time during baseball's mega-expansion in the 1960s, there was no place for a team to play.

The minor league Pelicans played for years to good crowds at Pelican Stadium at Tulane and Broad. But the property was purchased and after the 1957 season, the Fontainebleau Hotel (at the time one of the nicest hotels in the city) was built on the site. The Pels moved to Tad Gormley-- a football and track stadium--but that obviously didn't work, and they left the city after the 1959 season.

So from 1957 until the Superdome was completed in 1975, we had NO decent baseball stadium, for the minors OR the majors.

The Superdome WAS built to be a multi-purpose stadium, and had a baseball configuration. Most folks in town thought that baseball was next on the agenda. After all, we were still a big market at that time, AND with a growing economy and metro population growth mainly due to the oil boom. In addition to the Cleveland situation described above, there were news reports of serious talks to get Charley Finley to bring the A's here in the mid-70s (they could have added purple to their green and gold for the perfect color scheme, too). But like the Indians deal, that didn't pan out.

In 1977, we got a minor league team when oilman A. Ray Smith moved his Triple-A Tulsa Oilers to New Orleans to play in the Superdome (also as the Pelicans). After only A SINGLE SEASON, he then moved to Springfield, Illinois.

Back then it seemed that every year, we'd have a major league exhibition game or two in the Dome before the regular season began. This was up into the early 1980s. Anyone who attended those games, or the Busch Classic baseball games, can tell you that the Superdome was a TERRIBLE venue for baseball. Terrible sightlines, not the best atmosphere, just "blah". Much worse than the Tampa Bay Rays stadium, and I went to one game in the old Kingdome in Seattle. That place was a tomb, and the Superdome was worse for baseball.

Then the oil bust hit us, and by the time baseball got into expansion mode again in the early 90s we were rightly off the MLB radar.


Even if we HAD gotten a team in the boom years of the late 60s or early to mid-70s, they'd probably be gone now; because (1) we would have needed a new, retractable roof stadium (like Houston and Seattle got) which would have been difficult to do, (2) the market and economy down here went to shite during the oil bust, and (3) so many other areas have passed us up on the market/population/economy totem pole and would be a cinch to steal the franchise-- not only the cities that got the expansion teams in the 90s (Miami, Denver, Phoenix and Tampa Bay) but also Washington (who got the relocated Expos) and Charlotte, Austin, Nashville, Las Vegas, Austin, Salt Lake City, etc.

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Wasn't New Orleans like one of the 10 or 20 largest cities in America at some point last century? I guess from that standpoint, it is a little odd that they never had a team.

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I would think, in Babe Ruth’s era, New Orleans still had to be pretty high on the list of largest cities in the US by population. For example, in 1930, NOLA was the 16th largest city by population in the USA. Crazy they didn’t have a pro baseball team at that time.

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Wasn't New Orleans like one of the 10 or 20 largest cities in America at some point last century? I guess from that standpoint, it is a little odd that they never had a team.

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Baseball up until 1953 did NOT have a team past the Mississippi River (St. Louis on the Mississippi was the western-most team) and nothing south of Washington DC. It was strictly a northern deal.

And if you look at the following table, you can see that New Orleans proper hasn't been in the top 20 since 1970, or the top 10 since 1880.

YEAR: POP.: RANK in U.S.:
2020 383,282 53
2010 343,829 52
2000 483,663 33
1990 496,938 24
1980 557,515 21
1970 593,471 19
1960 627,525 15
1950 570,445 16
1940 494,537 15
1930 458,762 16
1920 387,219 17
1910 339,075 15
1900 287,104 12
1890 242,039 12
1880 216,090 10
1870 191,418 9
1860 168,675 6
1850 116,375 5
1840 102,193 3

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Wasn't New Orleans like one of the 10 or 20 largest cities in America at some point last century? I guess from that standpoint, it is a little odd that they never had a team.

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MLB wasn't in the South back then.

Braves were in Boston, Rangers were in Washington.
Astros, Marlins, and Rays didn't exist.