SALT LAKE CITY — The mayor is standing on a chair.
A mention of the massive map on a wall outside Erin Mendenhall’s office in the City-County building has turned into an impromptu city tour, with the stately, upholstered seat used for extra reach. The mayor points out the State Capitol and the Salt Lake Temple, suggests spots for craft beer and cocktails, and describes the areas of the map lined with colored tape: orange for priority city projects, green for a Green Loop, yellow for the multibillion-dollar development of a downtown sports-and-entertainment district.
Then the mayor’s attention lands on a cluster of barren industrial lots on the city’s west side. It doesn’t look like much on a map, but it could be the future home of a Major League Baseball expansion franchise.
An MLB team would be a seismic addition for Utah’s already exploding sports scene. “It has grown almost exponentially,” Mendenhall says, “but it doesn’t feel like a reach, because Salt Lake City has been evolving right alongside the sports market.”
A market once monopolized by the NBA’s Utah Jazz has emerged as America’s next sports boomtown, with the arrival of an NHL franchise, frontrunner status in MLB expansion, and the return of the Winter Olympics in 2034. Salt Lake City’s transformation into a Mountain West sports hub seems sudden. But those involved describe it as a “crescendo” of two decades of methodical planning since the 2002 Winter Olympics to situate Utah as a year-round sporting destination. That crescendo has swelled into a cacophony of construction sounds throughout the Salt Lake Valley.
There’s a light snow falling one January morning as a soaring, clanging drill rig bores holes to fortify the foundation of a 10-story office building — the first structure going up at the Power District. The Larry H. Miller Company’s $3.5 billion project is turning west-side industrial lots into mixed-use development and, perhaps, a ballpark district.
“When the pioneers came into the valley, they said, ‘This is the place,’” says Steve Starks, the company’s CEO. “What we’ve said, as it relates to Major League Baseball, is this is the place — and we’re ready.”
Readiness has put Utah at an advantage. While other cities announced their entries into MLB expansion consideration with renderings and merch, Salt Lake City arrived with a 100-acre site, a coalition of prominent Utahns, broad bipartisan support, a plan for public funding and a reputable anchor investor. Gail Miller took over the LHM Company after her husband, Larry, the auto dealer who saved the Jazz from relocating, died in 2009. Now, after selling the Jazz and the family’s fleet of car dealerships, Gail and her children are leading efforts to land an MLB franchise. Commissioner Rob Manfred wants the league’s next expansion cities settled before he retires in 2029. Utah’s Power District presents a turnkey option.
City and state officials are not subtle about their aspirations. They want Salt Lake City to be a larger dot on the map. Part of their plan is to continue building a robust sports scene. “We need baseball to kind of round it out,” says Stuart Adams, Utah’s Senate President. “Then we’ll go after something else later — that other sport.” (The NFL.)
The market is already bigger than you’d think, yet not nearly as big as it could become. The population of the Salt Lake City-Provo-Orem corridor, now nearly 3 million, has roughly doubled since MLB last expanded in 1998. That surge is one of the forces driving the evolution of Utah sports, as are the state’s economic forecast and its pro-business, sports-friendly legislature. But the “secret sauce,” says Jeff Robbins of the Utah Sports Commission, is how the state’s public and private stakeholders work in unison to prepare for new opportunities.
“We don’t mess around in Utah,” Adams says. “We’re ready, willing and able.”
Scott Sandall, a Republican member of the Utah State Senate, compares it to being invited to a black-tie event. As others scurry to get ready, he says, “We have our tuxedo on. And we’re there a half hour early.”
Ahead of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony earlier this month, an 82-year-old Utahn woman with white hair and a warm smile carried the Olympic torch through a shopping center in downtown Milan, Italy. Crowds pressed close. She waved. They cheered. It was Gail Miller’s second Olympic torch relay. The first, 24 years ago, was in her hometown of Salt Lake City.
A large contingent traveled from Salt Lake City to Milan to look ahead to the 2034 Winter Olympics. If anything, Olympic officials said, Utah is overprepared. Venues are ready. Organizers have raised more than $250 million from private and corporate donors, plus a pledge from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City, for financial support, volunteers and use of its land.
When the 2002 Winter Olympics came to town, Utah governor Spencer Cox says, “There was a little bit of an inferiority complex. Like, can we pull this off?” Afterward, the state began to dream bigger. Only four years later, Robbins traveled to Turin, Italy, to ask Peter Ueberroth, the then-president of the United States Olympic Committee, how soon Utah could host again.
The Olympics will return in 2034 to a radically different Utah. Since 2002, the state has added NHL, MLS, NWSL, pro lacrosse and softball franchises. It has hosted UFC fight nights, X Games and an NBA All-Star Game. An NHL Winter Classic is next. The University of Utah and Brigham Young University athletic programs are flush with financing. There are gleaming athletic facilities all over the region — new ballparks for the Utes and the Salt Lake Bees (the Miller-owned Triple-A affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels), state-of-the-art practice facilities for the Jazz and the NHL’s Utah Mammoth, an under-renovation Delta Center and more.
“Most people are surprised that there’s so much in the middle of nowhere,” says Derek Miller, president of the Salt Lake Chamber.
Ryan Smith, the billionaire owner of the Jazz and Mammoth, believes there’s another reason for Utah’s momentum: a better narrative being told. “We’re doing a much better job as a state saying, ‘Actually, this is who we are,’” he says.
The story told about Utah and its capital city hasn’t always been marketable. Insular. Boring. A Latter-day Saints bubble.
Sport has a way of softening differences. After arriving from New Orleans in 1979, the Jazz served as a “cultural bridge” between Utah and the rest of the United States, says professor Matthew Bowman, the Mormon Studies chair at Claremont Graduate University. Yet their existence wasn’t entirely secular. Before buying his first stake in the Jazz in 1984, Larry Miller sought counsel from Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the LDS Church. Hinckley spoke of the “potential for good in the millions of tiny impressions” made every time people heard the Jazz mentioned, Miller wrote in his autobiography: “He knew that keeping the team in the state would be beneficial for Utah and, by extension, for the image of the Church in Utah.”
Construction is already underway at the site of the Power District, a downtown sports-and-entertainment hub. (Courtesy of the Larry H. Miller Company)
At times, NBA players have delivered some of the state’s most scathing critiques. Derek Harper nixed a trade to the Jazz in 1997, saying, “You go live in Utah.” In 2021, Jazz guard Deron Williams said he gave up trying to recruit players there. Visiting players mocked the lack of nightlife and rated it as the city where they least liked to play. After five years with the team — a stretch during which multiple Jazz fans were issued bans for racist remarks toward visiting players and their families — star Donovan Mitchell said upon departing, it was “draining” to be a Black man advocating for racial equality in Utah.
Increasingly, Utah has sought to refresh its image. Politicians describe it as a place of natural splendor and big spenders. They cite research rating Utah as the youngest and healthiest U.S. state, and among the top states in population growth, family size, economic outlook and upward mobility. They are working to avoid environmental disaster and restore the Great Salt Lake. Though the church still holds outsized influence in state politics and owns large swaths of property in downtown Salt Lake City, the surrounding county is now minority Latter-day Saints. The capital city is increasingly diverse. It’s not hard to find a drink. (But could we interest you in a dirty soda?) Utah is having a moment in pop culture, too, with social media influencers and reality shows suggesting to a global audience that the housewives there are as real as those in Beverly Hills. In time, Bowman says, “I suspect the sense that Utah is an inhospitable place will begin to fade.”
The story Smith tells about Utah is one of limitless growth. In 2002, the year the Winter Olympics first came to Utah, Smith co-founded the market analytics company Qualtrics in his family’s Provo basement. The company sold in 2018 for $8 billion. The “Silicon Slopes,” a vibrant tech ecosystem, are teeming with young talent and ready to do business, Smith says. “If I learned anything in tech,” he adds, “you always bet on youth, and the future of where it’s going to be.”
Nothing lends credence to the viability of another Big Four franchise in Salt Lake City like three nail-biting periods at the Delta Center. It’s a midseason game on a school night after the holidays, yet there’s a capacity crowd ready to explode at every shot and skirmish. Fans wear sweaters and beanies branded with a “Mountain Mammoth” logo unveiled nine months ago, losing their minds over a team that didn’t exist two years ago. They flash “Tusks Up” with their hands. And to think that all this newness sprouted from the husk of the financially floundering Arizona Coyotes.
During an intermission, father and son Breck and Jaxson Fullmer follow the fans spilling into the concourse for a bite to eat. Jaxson wears a Boston Red Sox cap; like many Utahns, he has inherited a cluster of random allegiances. Breck grew up in Provo. In his youth, he almost never went to Salt Lake City. Now he and Jaxson are there often, drawn downtown by the hum of activity.
“There’s energy. There’s a vibe. There’s a lot more to do,” Breck says.
Earlier that afternoon, Smith pulled up a chair beside his wife, Ashley, and NHL commissioner Gary Bettman for a news conference at Rice-Eccles Stadium, where the Utes play, to announce it as the site of the 2027 Winter Classic. Bettman began: “If I would have suggested such an announcement three years ago, people would have thought we were making it up.”
In the front row, Mendenhall, the Democrat mayor, sat beside Cox, the Republican governor. Growing up in rural Utah, Cox said, the only thing that brought Utahns together was the Jazz — a bond strong enough to overcome religious differences, party lines or college rivalries. He hears echoes of that in the way fans have embraced the Mammoth.
Robbins, who has run the Utah Sports Commission since it was founded in 2000, has worked with five gubernatorial administrations on his organization’s efforts to rebrand Utah as “the state of sport.” Had Cox, like some of his predecessors, not shared Robbins’ view of sports franchises as strategic state assets, the story told about Salt Lake City’s sports scene ahead of the Olympics’ return might read more like a cautionary tale.
In early 2024, when Smith was deep in discussions to buy the Coyotes’ hockey assets, he was considering relocating both the Jazz and the potential NHL expansion franchise south along the Wasatch Front, where Smith Entertainment Group would build a new, custom-fit arena closer to the state’s population center in Utah County. Almost all sports owners want a sports-and-entertainment district — a veritable cash cow — around their venue; and, as with The Battery in the Atlanta suburbs, space is more plentiful and less costly outside the city. In Utah, officials faced the prospect of having several franchises in the southern suburbs — Smith’s NHL and NBA teams in Draper, the Millers’ MLS and NWSL clubs in Sandy and the Triple-A Bees in South Jordan — and none left in Salt Lake City itself.
“This is what gave me sleepless nights,” Derek Miller says.
The future of the Utah sports scene was sealed in one legislative session in 2024. Lawmakers, with the backing of the church, passed a bill granting Smith Entertainment Group up to $900 million to create a sports-and-entertainment district around the Delta Center. Another $900 million bill to fund stadium construction at the Power District will be triggered if Utah gets an MLB team. As part of the agreements struck then, the Jazz and Mammoth will stay in Salt Lake City for at least 50 years.
Pushing across nearly $2 billion in public funding for the sports projects induced sticker shock for some. David Berri, a sports economist and professor at Southern Utah University, told Crain Currency that the deal keeping the Jazz downtown was unlikely to generate economic growth: “Salt Lake City would desperately like to be thought of as a major city, so they need a basketball team,” he said. “It’s unfair because we’re shuffling taxpayer money to someone who’s fabulously wealthy.” Lawmakers argued the state would be far worse off without sporting events boosting the capital city’s economy.
“I have concerns like every citizen out there about public participation in financing projects for very wealthy people,” Cox says. “I have no interest in just helping with a stadium upgrade or building something like that. What I do have an interest in is revitalizing the downtown of our capital city, which is incredible. And I have a huge interest in the west side of Salt Lake that has been underinvested in for generations.”
Luz Escamilla, the Democrat state senator representing the district encompassing Salt Lake City’s west-side neighborhoods — a diverse, working-class area in which the main attractions for decades have been the Utah State Fairpark and the famed Mexican restaurant Red Iguana — hears progress in whirring construction machinery. The Power District development is moving forward even if MLB expands elsewhere, or not at all, so billions of dollars are being poured into the district as the city’s downtown footprint expands westward.
“I’ve been begging the state for years: We need to help the west side,” Escamilla says. “This community has been told so many times, ‘We’re going to invest.’ It never happens. It’s happening now.”
The windows of the governor’s office in the State Capitol building look west toward the steam stacks of the Power District. Cox often finds himself thinking about watching MLB games there one day.
“I like our chances,” he says. “I really do.”
When Dale Murphy retired from baseball in 1994, after two MVPs with the Atlanta Braves and 18 seasons in the majors, he and his wife, Nancy, settled their family in Alpine, Utah. Murphy is from Portland, Oregon, born and raised, but because he converted to the Latter-day Saints and clean living while in the minor leagues, he became a fan favorite in Utah.
After moving there, Murphy was regularly asked whether an MLB club could survive in Salt Lake City. “I was always like, well, there’s not a lot of people that live here,” Murphy says.
This past decade, as other U.S. cities launched early MLB expansion efforts, Murphy signed on as an ambassador of Portland’s MLB project. Starks, the LHM Company CEO, texted in the spring of 2023 asking Murphy to support Salt Lake City’s plan instead. Starks took Murphy to the Power District. They walked the proposed ballpark site and talked through the Miller family’s vision. An MLB team in Utah? Murphy can see it now. “I used to say, ‘I don’t know,’” he says. “Now it’s like, ‘Absolutely.’”
It no longer requires squinting to see Salt Lake City as a big-league market. It now ranks as the 27th-largest U.S. media market, up seven spots in the past decade and ahead of current MLB markets Pittsburgh, Baltimore, San Diego, Kansas City, Cincinnati and Milwaukee. A club in Utah would fill a gap in MLB’s geographic footprint — a Mountain West partner to sit between Las Vegas and Denver — without cannibalizing an existing market. Salt Lake City has been a minor-league town since 1901. It had a rookie-ball club that set the longest win streak in American pro baseball history. But what cemented the city in baseball lore is a dusty field a few minutes’ drive from the Power District: the sandlot from “The Sandlot.”
It’s also not difficult to see how the Power District would work as a ballpark district. The site is easily accessible, bordered by three interstates and a light-rail line, and situated between the city’s central business district and the airport, a five-minute drive from each. That proximity would be rare in any major-league metropolis; finding 100 acres of developable land so close to downtown, almost unheard of. “It’s an unparalleled opportunity,” Starks says. “Like The Battery, but five minutes from downtown.”
There’s a chainlink fence encircling the proposed stadium site. That spot was previously occupied by industrial tanks that stored tar and pitch for a power plant, the one still standing there, with its three steam stacks looming like towering baseball bats. The storage tanks are gone. Long grass grows there instead. There are plans to turn the dilapidated, paved-over Jordan River into a crown feature of the stadium site, complete with a riverwalk, close enough for home-run balls to splash down.
Directly across the river from the proposed stadium site, there’s a gravel parking lot that used to be a softball field. Gail Miller brought the couple’s first child there at two days old to watch her husband, Larry, play softball.
Larry Miller had an active mind, and whenever he really got going on an idea, he’d talk about “tape transfers” — sharing what he was seeing in his head.
“I wish you could see it, too,” he’d say.
His son Steve, chairman of the board of directors for the LHM Company, is having that feeling. He’s imagining Utah’s first Opening Day. He sees a packed stadium, crowds on the riverwalk, kayaks in the water. The sun is starting to descend, casting a golden hue across the white-capped peaks of the Wasatch Mountains beyond the outfield wall.
“It’s all there,” he says. “It just needs to be created.”
Back inside the City-County building, Mendenhall steps off the chair and away from the map. She surveys a changing city. There’s no question MLB will thrive in Utah, the mayor says. Only when. “When the rest of the sports world looks at us,” she says, “I hope they know that this is where anything is possible. We’re just the right size. We have just the right momentum.”