Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images
The Nashville Stars, a potential Major League Baseball expansion franchise that would be located in the Music City, has unveiled their logo and color scheme via their official cap. The Nashville Stars were previously a Negro league baseball team from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Major League Baseball currently has 30 teams, the most recent expansion of MLB came in 1998 hen the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays (now just the Rays) were introduced into the league.
The plan of the group behind the Nashville Stars is to either become the 31st team in the league or attract an existing franchise — as for which franchise that would be, there aren’t many contenders other than the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland (soon to be Las Vegas) Athletics.
Back in 2019, Music City Baseball LLC, an investment group led by John Loar and Alberto Gonzales, announced their plans to revive the Nashville Stars in an effort to either become an MLB expansion team or lure an existing team to the city. Loar and Gonzales then hired former MLB pitcher and executive Dave Stewart to be the face of the project.
In recent years, Music City Baseball LLC has added celebrities and athletes such as like music artists Justin Timberlake, Darius Rucker, Luke Combs, Don Mattingly, Bobby Bones and Eddie George to its advisory board.
“The approach that Dave Stewart and his team have in Nashville is exactly what the game of baseball needs,” Mattingly, a longtime MLB player with the Yankees and manager with the Dodgers and Marlins, when joining the group in 2023. “I am glad to see MLB taking an active approach on these important issues. We need more diversity in the game, and it starts from the top-down.”
If the Nashville Stars did come to fruition, they’d become the fifth professional sports franchise in the state of Tennessee, joining the Memphis Grizzlies, Tennessee Titans, Nashville Predators, and Nashville Soccer Club.