It’s about 20 minutes into the conversation when Dave Stewart brings up the question of money.

Stewart, the former major league pitcher, pitching coach, agent and general manager, wants his next act in the sport to be as an owner of an expansion club in Nashville, Tennessee — a vision he’s trying to bring into reality.

His name is at the top of the masthead for Music City Baseball, the working group trying to bring the Nashville Stars into existence.

There is a site assessment underway for a stadium at Tennessee State University in North Nashville, an underdeveloped community where an MLB team could mean jobs and opportunity. There is a list of advisors packed with baseball experience and Nashville connections, from music stars Luke Combs and Justin Timberlake to former Titans running back Eddie George to politicians and lobbyists. There is an attractive brand, built around the city’s Negro Leagues past and a hope for 51 percent black ownership, which would be a landmark for baseball. There is active support among players, with 69 percent naming Nashville as the best potential expansion city in a poll conducted by The Athletic in June.

There is a vision for Opening Day 2027, a city buzzing over its newest team the way it did for the Titans and Predators before.

All of this sounds wonderful.

But the money.

“People are saying, ‘Well, they don’t have a billionaire investor,’” Stewart says. “Quite frankly, I’m not sure that we need a billionaire investor to make this thing happen.

“But I have been having conversations with large sums of money and have commitments for large sums of money as I’m sitting here right now.”

From exactly who and for exactly how much, he cannot say, citing that he has yet to brief the commissioner’s office and that potential investors have yet to go through any vetting process. As grand as the vision is, it’s a reminder — this project is still on the ground floor.

A private commitment doesn’t mean much until pen hits paper.

Whether Nashville has a baseball team as soon as four years from now depends a whole lot on the specifics of those commitments, but it also hinges on factors beyond the control of this group.

Commissioner Rob Manfred must navigate an intransigent stadium situation in the Tampa area and the Athletics’ move to Las Vegas, while getting a group of 30 billionaires agreeing that Nashville is the right city and that this is the right time for baseball to expand for the first time since 1998.

“People are saying, ‘Well, they don’t have a billionaire investor.’ Quite frankly, I’m not sure that we need a billionaire investor to make this thing happen.”

Dave Stewart, head of the Nashville Stars’ Diverse Equity Ownership Initiative

The vision, though? That matters, too, and it’s real.

“Nashville today will be a different Nashville four or five years from now, which is when we hope and expect to be playing Major League Baseball,” Stewart said. “It will be a melting pot of people from all across the country, which it’s already becoming.”

The note that leads to Music City Baseball started in 2017, when John Loar was contracted by a client — unnamed, due to non-disclosure agreements — to analyze several markets for Major League Baseball expansion, including Nashville.

Loar, the managing partner of Music City Baseball, has a background in commercial real estate operations and acquisitions, but he’s branched off into sports before. He was involved in a 2012 bid to buy the Dodgers that included Tony La Russa, supported Stewart in a 2017 bid to buy the Marlins that included Mitt Romney’s family, and helped along a 1996 bid to relocate the Seahawks to Los Angeles that culminated in the team’s sale to Paul Allen.

Those connections underpin this group — La Russa, Stewart’s manager with the A’s 35 years ago, is on Music City Baseball’s board as an advisor — and after studying the markets in play, Loar came to believe the road to a 32-team league runs through Nashville.

Commissioner Rob Manfred has been open about his desire to expand eventually, though not before the Rays and Athletics resolve their situations.

One of those roadblocks looks as though it will be moved soon, with the A’s seemingly set to relocate to Las Vegas. Loar said that if the Rays, whose long-term location has been a question for years, want to move to Nashville, that could become a possibility, though his group is focused more on expansion than relocation.

The Brewers and White Sox have also reportedly threatened moves, with Nashville as a possibility, or as leverage to extract money for new or upgraded facilities.

Another, albeit smaller, obstacle is that of territorial rights.

The Triple-A Nashville Sounds, a Brewers affiliate, currently hold them for the city and are not keen to give them up. In 2022, the club broke single-game attendance records for First Horizon Park and hosted 555,576 fans. With a major league team in town, it’s hard to believe anyone would gravitate toward Triple-A baseball.

Realistically speaking, if MLB wants a team in Nashville, a minor league team will not be the reason it doesn’t come to fruition. Loar, however, hopes the Sounds will become an affiliate for the Stars, giving fans the appeal of seeing their own team’s prospects in town.

“I think there’s an opportunity for both teams to coexist,” Loar said. “The distance is shorter than any other example out there, I think the Sounds, given their involvement in the neighborhood, their involvement in the development around it, [being] a part of a major league system could benefit both, so I think we have an opportunity to really play that out.”

In a perfect world, ground will be broken on a stadium about a year from now, and MLB would commit to expansion on a similar timeline.

The first of those is the one Music City Baseball can control, and that process is going well.

Though the group has yet to close the door on alternatives, the focus right now lies around the Tennessee State University site.

Helping grow an underdeveloped neighborhood fits the brand that its eventual tenants are trying to build, and they stress it is not meant to gentrify the area but to empower residents. Eighty-one home dates aside, the goal is to build a development around the stadium where local businesses can thrive, and for music artists to play there year-round.

“This is a situation where we’re building the community or helping to rebuild the community,” Stewart said. “We’re putting the residents in an opportunity to make above minimum wage salaries as well as remain residents in the same area that they’ve always lived in. And so it will kind of change the curve of the gentrification that’s taken place there because the residents now will have more to work with, which will allow them to take control and take back their areas.”

Granted, similar promises have been made and left unkept routinely by billionaires looking for public dollars to build arenas across the country.

“In that community, it’s mostly people who have heard this story so many times from other people who are saying they’re gonna come in to benefit their community,” said Mia Vickers, Music City Baseball’s community engagement director. “So they basically are looking for somebody to walk the walk, cause they’ve heard so much talk already.”

One major difference between the Nashville project and others: they’re not counting on public money to help build a stadium.

Since the city of Nashville has helped fund a new Titans stadium, set to open in 2027, and MLS stadium (Nashville SC’s Geodis Park), the political will to throw public dollars behind another stadium doesn’t exist. Loar brought up the possibility that the state could help, but they can’t bank on that.

“There’s a number of alternatives we’re looking at, but that’s our primary objective,” Loar said. “To privately finance with some support from the state.”

That raises a question of circular logic: Why would construction start on a stadium if MLB has yet to commit to a team playing there? But why would MLB commit to expanding in a city where a stadium deal doesn’t exist?

This is where the add-ons to baseball that are central to this project come to the fore. They want local restaurants and businesses to surround the stadium, akin to Wrigleyville in Chicago or St. Louis’ Ballpark Village, creating a year-round buzz. Getting music artists to come play there — this is Nashville after all — is central to that.

“Part of this is removing the obstacles to prevent that [roadblock] from happening,” Loar said. “… When we look at this ballpark, it’s really a world-class entertainment venue. If we can look at moving forward on that project, knowing we can reserve a site that baseball could be played at, I think it helps us advance — I keep using the word objective, but that’s really what it is.”

It’s been almost 75 years since the Stars — the Negro League team, that is — last took the field in Nashville, but the short-lived club represents an inextricable part of this project, and a reminder of why Stewart is involved.

There’s not much information available about the old team, only that they played in the early 1950s, with membership in the Negro Southern League and home games at Sulpher Dell, near the Tennessee State Capitol building.

“In that community, it’s mostly people who have heard this story so many times from other people who are saying they’re gonna come in to benefit their community. So they basically are looking for somebody to walk the walk, ’cause they’ve heard so much talk already.”

Mia Vickers, Music City Baseball’s community engagement director

You can, however, draw a direct line from them to the way the current ownership group wants its eventual MLB team to be defined.

There is a focus on diversity throughout — from top-line investors to vendors at the ballpark. The Tennessee State site, explicitly, fits within that picture.

“It is a predominantly black area which is suffering what a lot of black areas suffer, which is gentrification,” Stewart said. “So being able to do a development in North Nashville partnered with Tennessee State University allows us to change the curve a little bit. … ‘Cause now we’re driving money into the area. We’re not going in and buying houses and raising the cost of houses and not technically putting anything back into the community.”

Stewart is one of few black men who have held leadership roles in a front office, a problem he thinks black ownership can help remedy. Say nothing for the sport’s abysmal and declining rate of black players.

The one element of investment that has been made public is a figure of $4.5 million, in the form of $25,000 ownership stakes bought by community investors. The figure itself — which Stewart says has grown past $4.5 million, and goes toward daily operations — is less important than the source of the money. 

It is a small but noticeable example of action following rhetoric. Delivering on the rest of the pitch does not figure to be easy.

“To change the culture of baseball as it is right now, you have to have intentionality,” Stewart said, “and you have to be thinking a little bit broader than what you’re used to.”

That, at least, is the vision.