Napa Valley and the Commissioner Who Never Came
Too Many Teams for the Same Game—and No One Running the League
This is a second interlude between Parts II and III—this time about how the game is being played in the Napa Valley. To understand what is happening in Napa today, it helps to think about what happens when a league expands without anyone responsible for preserving the value of the game.
I still remember the day I joined the Napa Valley Vintners Association.
We had received our use permit in 1994 and were still building the winery when I joined in 1996. I was one of five new members admitted that year, and together we pushed total membership just over 100. I remember the moment clearly because several long-standing members were genuinely uneasy. They could not believe the valley could already support that many wineries. Even then, there was a quiet question in the room: how many is too many?
In those days, the Vintners felt almost like a partnership. The culture was collaborative, serious, and shaped by the belief that if we worked together, we could lift all boats. There was a sense—never fully stated, but widely shared—that what we were part of was scarce, and that scarcity was something to be protected.
Fast forward thirty years, and Napa Valley now has more than 500 wineries operating on essentially the same finite land base.
The valley did not expand fivefold.
The number of claims on it did.
And when I try to make sense of how that happened—how something that once felt scarce became so crowded—I find myself reaching for an analogy.
To understand what Napa has done to itself, it helps to imagine the valley as if it were a baseball league.
The League I Thought I Joined
Imagine you are invited to become an owner in Major League Baseball.
Not a minor league. Not an expansion curiosity. One of the great franchises, in one of the great markets. There are only a hundred franchises in the league. Membership is limited. The economics are strong. The brand is global. And the other owners—serious, accomplished people—treat the league as something to be protected, not exploited.
That is what it felt like.
I believed I had acquired something inherently scarce.
Something that, if managed well, would only grow in value.
Then the league started issuing new franchises.
The Expansion No One Stopped
At first, it was easy to accept. A new team here, another there. Expansion is a sign of success, after all. More teams meant more fans, more energy, more relevance.
But then the expansion stopped making sense.
The league didn’t grow from 100 franchises to 120.
It grew to 500.
And not by moving into new cities.
By adding teams into the same cities.
My market—once home to a single franchise—now had five. Five teams competing for the same fans, the same sponsors, the same attention. Each one with a new stadium. Each one telling a version of the same story.
No commissioner of baseball would have allowed it.
The job of a commissioner is to protect the value of the franchise—by managing scarcity, not ignoring it.
But in this league, there was no commissioner.
Only a shared belief that the game could absorb it.
The Owners We Welcomed
And to be honest, we didn’t just allow the expansion.
We welcomed it.
The new owners were successful people from other walks of life—finance, technology, real estate, private equity. They brought capital, sophistication, and a kind of external validation that was hard to ignore. Their presence made the league feel more important. More visible. More prestigious.
Most of us, after all, had come up differently.
We were farmers. Winegrowers. Builders of something slow and rooted. We were not accustomed to rubbing elbows with people who had already made fortunes elsewhere and were now choosing to enter our world. It was flattering. It felt like confirmation that what we had built mattered.
So we opened the doors.
And we told ourselves that more attention, more capital, and more “serious” people could only be good for the game.
What we did not fully understand—what we did not want to understand—was what we were giving up in return.
Every new franchise didn’t just add to the league.
It diluted it.
It spread the same underlying asset—our market, our audience, our identity—more thinly across a growing number of participants. And unlike capital or infrastructure, that underlying asset could not be replenished. It depended on something slower, harder to manufacture: authenticity, continuity, emotional connection.
We had spent decades building that.
The new owners, for all their success, could not recreate it on demand.
And in welcoming them so enthusiastically, we began—quietly, almost invisibly—to trade depth for breadth.
We also began to lose something harder to name.
The game had once belonged to summer. Open fields. Familiar rhythms. A sense that it was part of the fabric of everyday life, not a curated experience set apart from it. As the league filled with new teams, new stadiums, and new expectations, that connection began to fade. The game was still being played—but it no longer felt quite the same.
Building Stadiums for a Crowd That Never Multiplied
Every new owner did what I had done.
They built a stadium.
Beautiful, expensive, carefully designed stadiums. Thoughtful architecture. Premium seating. Elevated food and wine. A “fan experience” built to justify top-tier pricing.
But these things take time. Five to ten years to permit, design, and construct. By the time they opened, the city wasn’t welcoming one new team.
It was welcoming five.
And the fans?
They didn’t increase fivefold.
They didn’t even increase meaningfully.
Instead, they were presented with a confusing array of nearly identical options. Five teams. Five stadiums. Five premium experiences. Each one claiming excellence. Each one priced as if it were among the very best in the league.
No one could keep track of them.
No one could remember all the names.
And over time, something else quietly disappeared.
Rivalry.
When there are too many teams, you don’t play the same opponent often enough to build a relationship. The emotional fabric of the game—familiarity, repetition, loyalty—begins to fray. The league becomes a rotating cast of opponents rather than a set of meaningful contests.
The game loses its shape.
The Luxury Suite Strategy
Then came the pricing.
Faced with rising costs and growing competition, owners made what seemed like a rational decision. If we were going to operate in a premium league, we needed to price like one.
Ticket prices rose. Then rose again.
Over time, they rose more than threefold.
The assumption was that our customer was not the broad fan base that had built the game, but a narrower group of high-end buyers—people who would pay for luxury suites, premium seating, curated experiences.
We told ourselves we were moving upmarket.
In reality, we were narrowing our audience.
Families stopped coming.
Kids stopped coming.
The next generation of fans—the ones who form lifelong attachments—simply weren’t there. The ballparks were full enough, but they were older, quieter, less rooted in the kind of emotional continuity that makes a sport endure.
And even the old signals of the game began to weaken. Hot dog sales plummeted. Beer went out of fashion. The simple rituals that had once tied the crowd to the ballpark—the familiar, democratic habits of summer—no longer held the same place.
We had optimized for the luxury suite.
And in doing so, we had begun to lose the crowd.
The Talent Problem
Meanwhile, the league faced a more predictable consequence.
We had quintupled the number of teams.
But we had not quintupled the number of great players.
Talent spread thin. The few true stars became even more valuable—and more expensive. Every owner needed them, because in a crowded league, differentiation becomes survival.
So we competed harder for the same limited pool of talent.
Costs rose.
Quality diluted.
And we told ourselves this, too, was just the price of success.
The Strategic Mistake
Looking back, the mistake was not tactical.
It was structural.
We assumed that adding more teams would create more demand.
We assumed that the prestige of the league would expand to accommodate every new entrant.
We assumed that supply could lead demand.
But markets don’t work that way.
Fans don’t adopt five teams.
They choose one—or they disengage.
What we had actually done was fragment the same audience into smaller and smaller pieces, while asking each piece to sustain a full-scale franchise.
We didn’t grow the game.
We diluted it.
The Desperate Response
When attendance began to soften—not collapse, but soften—we responded the way organizations often do.
We tried to extract more from what we already had.
We lengthened the game.
Longer innings. More between-inning experiences. More layers of hospitality. If we couldn’t increase the number of fans, we would increase the time and money each fan spent with us. We offered more elaborate food, more curated amenities, more premium environments, even as the old staples of the game were losing their pull.
It felt logical.
It was exactly wrong.
Because at that very moment, the world outside the stadium was moving in the opposite direction—toward shorter attention spans, changing tastes, more options, and more competition for time.
We responded to fragmentation by demanding more commitment.
The fans responded by quietly giving us less.
The Owners’ Illusion
For a long time, none of this looked like failure.
The stadiums were still beautiful. The experiences were still polished. Many owners had the resources to sustain losses without pressure. The appearance of success remained intact.
And that was the most dangerous part.
A team could look prosperous while being only weakly connected to economic reality.
We mistook aesthetics for viability.
We mistook participation for success.
The Realization
It took years for me to admit it.
The problem wasn’t my team. It wasn’t my stadium. It wasn’t even my strategy.
The problem was the league we had collectively created.
Too many teams.
Too little differentiation.
No mechanism to force adjustment.
And no one willing to say, out loud, that not every franchise should exist in its current form.
For a long time, I told myself that what I was seeing was just the normal strain of competition. Some teams would win more, some less. Some owners would be smarter, some luckier. That is how leagues work. But over time it became impossible to ignore the deeper reality. This was not ordinary competition inside a healthy system. It was a league that had lost control of entry, diluted its own franchises, confused its own fans, and spread its talent too thinly across too many nearly identical teams. What looked for years like growth was, in fact, a slow erosion of value.
And then one afternoon, standing in the middle of my own perfectly built ballpark, I realized something I had managed not to see for years.
This wasn’t baseball.
It was Napa Valley.
Upcoming
Part III: When the Market Clears
How Napa’s Wine Boom Reached Its Limits—and What Happens Next
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Ted Hall is a vintner and rancher at Long Meadow Ranch in Napa Valley. A winemaker for more than 50 years, he was named the 2017 Grower of the Year by the Napa Valley Grapegrowers. A former chairman of Robert Mondavi Corp., he is also a Senior Partner Emeritus at McKinsey & Company and a founder of the McKinsey Global Institute. He writes about economics, incentives, and how complex systems shape real-world outcomes across agriculture, food, wine, and consumer markets.
Ted Hall has brilliantly expressed what many of us "old timers" saw coming. I hope his voice is given the weight it deserves.
I anticipated it. When I was wine editor at the St. Helena Star -- which I always said was a minor league paper in the major leagues -- I wrote ironically in 2002-05 about there being then, too many wineries. Many of the poohbas didn't like what I was saying. Just like I imagine some are saying now about Ted Hall's courageous journalism. Keep on stepping up to the plate Ted.