Technology never kept baseball out of Honolulu and Anchorage. The real barrier is boring, and it's sitting right there in the census: not enough people.
The thought experiment making the rounds asks how far travel and scheduling tech has to advance before an MLB team in Hawaii or Alaska becomes reasonable. It's the wrong question. You can build the fastest jet in history and Anchorage still has roughly 400,000 people across its whole metro footprint, which ranks around 137th in the country, well outside the top 100. No app or hyperloop scheme adds a single resident to that number.
Start with Alaska, because it's the easy one. The entire state sits around 737,000 people, roughly half the size of Milwaukee's metro area. Milwaukee is already MLB's floor: the smallest market in the sport, a metro under two million. The Brewers just played the smallest-market World Series in two decades, against the Rays. Wisconsin as a whole holds about six million people. Alaska can't get one metro past half a million. There's no technology on anyone's whiteboard that closes that gap. It's a people gap.
Hawaii is a stronger case on paper. Oahu is home to around 980,000 people, and Honolulu's metro ranks about 56th nationally. That's a real city. It's also a city MLB has had the option to notice for decades and never seriously has, because 56th still sits below markets that keep getting passed over on the mainland.
Yes, people like to point out that a Seattle-to-Honolulu flight is barely longer than mainland routes teams already fly. Grant all of it: the travel's solved, today, for free. Hawaii still doesn't have the population or the local TV revenue to carry a franchise, and its isolation runs up the cost of every road trip without adding a dollar to the home gate to pay for it. Solving the flight doesn't solve the math.
Look at who's actually in the expansion conversation. It's mid-size and mainland: Salt Lake City, which already has an ownership group, financing and a site, and looks like the favorite for a western slot; Nashville; Orlando; Portland, which still lacks the anchor owner needed to cover a fee expected to top $2 billion plus a stadium. Charlotte, Montreal and San Antonio get mentioned too. Hawaii and Alaska are not on that list. Expansion chases metros with real population bases, and those two can't offer one.
Rob Manfred, the one person who could put either place in play, has never once framed this as a tech problem. When he talks expansion travel, he talks realignment and saving "a lot of wear and tear on our players in terms of travel." He wants the process moving and the cities picked before his term ends in 2029, saying those "teams won't be playing by the time I'm done but I would like the process along and [cities] selected." Nothing in there waits on Silicon Valley.
Blame geography and demographics, and blame the absence of any stadium-financing deal a market that size could ever repay. Population is the real reason baseball isn't in Anchorage or Honolulu.
