It’s opening day and MLB is batting .867 with domains

Major League Baseball owns 26 of 30 team names in .com.

It’s a sure sign of spring as Major League Baseball opens up the 2013 season with 12 games today.

MLB made a good acquisition over the summer, buying the domain name Rockies.com for an unspecified amount.

With the Rockies.com domain, MLB now owns 26 of 30 team names in .com. MLB has upped its average from .767 in 2010 (23 names) to .867 (26 names) in 2013. Those are numbers even Miguel Cabrera would be proud of.

Here are the domains that Major League Baseball does not own yet:

Giants.com – you’ll find sports at Giants.com, but of the football variety. The domain is owned by the National Football League for the New York Giants.

Rangers.com – The Rangers just can’t seem to win a World Series ring (queue David Freese homerun) and they also don’t have their prime domain. It’s owned by Future Media Architects, which doesn’t sell domains from its incredible portfolio.

Rays.com – Instead of baseball stats, fans are greeted with mouth watering dishes at Rays.com. It’s owned by Seattle restaurant Ray’s Boathouse, Inc.

Twins.com – D&D Miller in California owns the domain.

Of the four domains it doesn’t own, I’d argue Rays.com and Twins.com are the most obtainable.

But it will be interesting to see how much MLB cares about these domains once it owns the .mlb domain name. Right now MLB uses team domains to forward to their respective team pages on MLB.com. When it gets .mlb will it start promoting rays.mlb?

Maybe, although it could just as easily do that today with something like rays.mlb.com. So I think it will still care about its team.com domains.