San Antonio sports commentator Mike Jimenez drew a flurry of online criticism for saying San Antonio will have trouble landing another professional sports team because the city is "poor" and "lacks visionaries."
The comment came during an episode of the Alamo City Sportscast, a podcast during which he and co-host Joe Garcia discussed a recent ESPN article ranking the San Antonio-Austin region among the top contenders to land an MLB expansion team.
"San Antonio does nothing big," Jimenez said. "There's not one visionary in San Antonio. I guess probably the biggest visionary we've had over the years is [former Mayor] Henry Cisneros."
Garcia also said San Antonio remains a low-income city, adding that a MLB expansion team is far more likely to end up in Austin than here.
While Jimenez and Garcia caught flak for their blunt talk about the Alamo City, some scholars said their assessment is pretty close. Others, however, said the metro area's brisk growth and its hunger for sports may outshine its lack of financial heft.
"Not only is San Antonio poor relative to its neighbors, especially in this case Austin, but San Antonio is the seventh-largest city by population and is still only the 31st-largest media market," said Char Miller, a professor at California's Pomona College who's written extensively about the history of San Antonio.
"[San Antonio] is a big place, but it can't generate the advertising and ratings necessary to support major league teams," Miller added.
A poor but populous city
San Antonio sports fans frequently tout the size of the city's population when explaining why it deserves another sports franchise. Based on the population inside its city limits, SA is bigger than both Dallas and Denver, each of which have four professional sports teams, they point out.
Although metro areas are usually seen as a more accurate representation when it comes to measuring the size of an urban area, the San Antonio-New Braunfels metro is still larger than the metro areas of Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Cleveland, Indianapolis and Nashville — all of which boast more than one professional sports team.
Even so, San Antonio remains far poorer than any of those cities and their surrounding metros.
In 2022, 18.7% of San Antonio's 1.4 million residents lived in poverty, according to the latest American Community Survey. The Census Bureau defines poverty as an individual earning less than $13,590 or a family of four earning less than $29,960.
For reference, Dallas' poverty rate was 17.8%, and Austin's was only 11%, according to the survey.
San Antonio's residents earn considerably less than their counterparts in other Texas cities.
Workers in the San Antonio metro brought home $27.90 an hour on average last year – $3.37 less than the average hourly wage in Texas and far less than the national average of $33.22 an hour — according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
So, when Jimenez and Garcia say that San Antonio is poor, they're not lying. And that's a real hindrance to professional sports leagues, according to Pomona College's Miller.
"One of the issues [of being poor] is having fewer television sets," Miller said. "In a place like San Antonio, which is soccer-mad, there is not a Major League Soccer team. That's pretty astonishing until you question how that team would generate off-field income, and television is the key there."
Miller also said San Antonio's lackluster airport with few direct non-stop flights, especially when compared to DFW International or Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport, poses another hindrance.
"That also becomes problematic in trying to think about the nature of an economy, which is both about transportation, corporate presence and television," Miller said. "It's hard to imagine how San Antonio pulls itself out of that hole, which is largely, but not exclusively, of its own making."
Still hope?
Although San Antonio lacks a lot of what makes a city a desirable location for a pro sports franchise, Ricard Jensen, an associate professor of sports marketing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said it does have a shot at an MLB expansion team.
Other than the San Antonio-Austin Region, ESPN also listed Charlotte, Nashville, Orlando, Raleigh, San Jose, Salt Lake City and Portland, Oregon, as potential contenders. While the Alamo City lags those areas in earning power, it does have a highly coveted metric working in its favor, Jensen said.
"San Antonio's got a growing population — everyone wants to come here," the professor said, pointing out a recent study labeling our metro as the No. 1 destination for Gen Zers.
"Texas is still the land of opportunity," Jensen added. "And San Antonio's got a growing population, we've got a young population, and we have a Hispanic population."
Moreover, with the city having already grabbed exclusive rights to more than 13 acres of land at Hemisfair last week, meaning there's plenty of room for a new Spurs arena and a professional baseball stadium, according to the professor.
Time will tell whether MLB is willing to overlook a lack of TV screens and fan buying power for growth and available land.
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