Wolfer79 said:

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Raleigh Tries to Break Its 54-Year Baseball Losing Streak
The fast-growing state capital appears to be a good candidate for a Major League Baseball franchise. But even a minor league team has eluded it for more than a half-century.

https://www.theassemblync.com/culture/sports/raleigh-major-league-baseball-team/

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Great article. Thanks for posting.

Wolfpackinalaska said:

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Is baseball ready to expand? Baseball has 2 $500m+ players (Otani and Soto), there's money overflowing. The key is baseball, like college fb, is regional based. Baseball owners get their revenue stream from the local market, not from the national market. MLB is prioritizing Charlotte over us because of population density. What can we do to change MLB direction?

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I was thinking about this very issue (population density of Raleigh area vs Charlotte area) just the other day, when reading/listening to people discussing whether Charlotte is bigger than Raleigh. So I'm not responding to your comment as a "gotcha" or anything. But I'm really just quoting and responding to your comment as a way to "piggy back" upon it and address this specific issue.

Using a Google search right now, the best data I can find is that Raleigh has a population within its city limits of ~499,825 and a land area within its city limits of around 149 square miles, for a density of 3,355 people per square mile. And for Charlotte, it is a population of 943,476 within a city limit land area of 307 square miles, for a density of 3,073 people per square mile.

So...Raleigh is actually more dense than Charlotte, within the city limits, with about 281 people more per square mile.

In general, there is this false perception out there, even among people who live in North Carolina and should know better, that the Charlotte area is "much bigger than Raleigh". In reality, the population of both cities and their metros are basically equal. The population within the official city limit land area is irrelevant. When you look at the population within a 15, 30, 45, or 60 mile radius from the center of each city, the population of both city metro areas are about the same.

And there are two main reasons for this false perception. Number one, they look at the population within the city limits of both cities (~945,000 in Charlotte versus ~500,000 in Raleigh). But the land area of the city limits of Charlotte is basically double the size of the Raleigh city limits. If you were to compare apples to apples and take an equal 307 square mile area (the city limit land area of Charlotte) around the city center of both Charlotte and Raleigh, the population of that 307 square mile area around Raleigh (which would include most of the population in Cary and Apex) might actually be slightly bigger than Charlotte, because the Raleigh city limits are actually more densely populated than the Charlotte city limits, as I just showed above with the basic density calculation.

The second main reason for this false perception that "the Charlotte area is much bigger than Raleigh" is the way that they "officially" define the "metro areas" for Charlotte and Raleigh. I just Google searched it, and for the "Charlotte Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)", they are essentially grabbing nine (9) counties that surround Mecklenburg County to count as the Charlotte metro. And with that, the "official" population of the "Charlotte metro" is 2.7 million.

The official "Raleigh- Cary Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)" population is listed as 1.56 million. But this excludes Durham County and Orange County, because there is a separate official "Durham-Chapel Hill Metropolitan Statistical Area" (MSA).

Does this mean that the Charlotte metro area is truly almost double in size to the Raleigh metro area? (2.7 million compared to 1.56 million). No, because, as with the city limit population comparison, with Charlotte they are including a much larger land area in the calculation of the "metro population". It is not comparing apples to apples.

Wake County actually has a slightly larger population than Mecklenburg County, with 1.23 million in Wake compared to 1.21 million in Mecklenburg. And so this "metro" definition for Raleigh appears to only be grabbing maybe like, effectively, 1 other county adjacent to Wake County (maybe Johnston County) to include in the total " Raleigh metro population". I haven't done the math, but since the "Charlotte Metro" takes 9 counties surrounding Mecklenburg, if we were to define the "Raleigh Metro" by including the 9 most populated counties near Wake County, it would probably be very close to the 2.7 million people in the official Charlotte metro population.