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Also, Sun expected to rise in the eastern sky tomorrow, experts predict.
It's just that there are more teams now that seem to be able to throw money around. Of course, throwing money around is no guarantee for success. I mean, look at how the Twins have gotten worse as they've gotten richer, or how bad the Angelos-era Orioles botch things when they try to do a spending spree ("Let's get Miguel Tejada, Javy Lopez, Rafael Palmeiro, BJ Surhoff and Sidney Ponson-after-his-one-good-season!")
Sigh.
In the short term it might just slow some teams from leaping up to BOS/NYY salary levels, but in the long run this will be bad for baseball. Players will miss the huge checks and the usual 50% of revenues, and small money teams will carp about fairness just like the good old days of 1993.
Hey, if you assume British Columbia is Mariners territory the rest of Canada is only 29 million people.
The Cardinals seem to manage ok. Also, I know the Astros have sucked recently, but that's a little harsh.
It's harder to eyeball the population numbers from a map for St. Louis' market size, but I was under the impression that in the early days, the Cardinals expanded their radio market pretty wide, and as a result have territorial rights in about 10 states. No, they don't have the market size of a Texas or Los Angeles, but they're still bigger than the typical small market. And they're one of the few small market teams that can be counted on to fill the stadium even if they only win 70-75 games. They're an exception when it comes to being a 'small market' and I'm not seeing what other small market teams could do to reconstruct the Cardinals revenue model.
When the Orioles were big spenders, about 15 years ago, they were good, and in 1997 were the best team in baseball. For the last ten years, the Orioles have not been a high-payroll team. You can criticize Angelos for spending like a mid-market owner, or you can criticize him for buying three mediocre players for the price of one good one, but "spending spree" is not really how I'd describe his approach. Also, Tejada and Palmeiro provided a lot of value for a lot of money, and Surhoff provided a lot of value for not very much money. There's lots to dislike about the Angelos era, but not those three guys.
Of course, it's true that throwing money around is no guarantee of success. It just substantially increases the probability of success.
The revenue sharing model was completely screwed up. Not only the Phillies, but the Mets and Angels have collected revenue sharing as well. And yes, the owners do use it to take money from the players. But that doesn't make the advantage of being in a large market ########.
I'll give them plenty of credit for this, but there are other factors at work. Again, they gathered up unclaimed territory like it was the Wild West (and I'll take nothing away from how brilliant a strategy that worked out to be), and the brand doesn't really take much of a hit locally if they have a below-average team. If no one else is responsible then there has to be a business model that true small market teams can follow to build up their brand. What is it?
Concur. You really can't give the Cardinals all that much credit for being the western and southernmost team until 1955.
Yes, but how many Canadians are Blue Jays (or for that matter, baseball) fans? It's like the Atlanta Thrashers couldn't draw flies but are selling out in Winnipeg, even tho ATL is seven times the size of WPG.
What's remarkable is how successful the team has been on the field over a long period of time. 36 of their last 52 seasons have been winning seasons. They've only had back-to-back losing seasons once over that time (1994-'95). They've had a 90-loss season just three times in half a century. They've won five championships over that time. Its no surprise they have such a strong fanbase.
Some. Maybe not as many as if you were looking at fans of some US-based team among an American population of similar size and presumed loyalty, but still enough to make the territory worth something to you.
What about Houston?
Here's a couple of thoughts:
As a kid in the 50's I remember the Pirates taking their train-based road trips through Chicago then to St Louis. St Louis was as far west as baseball went in its first 90 years.
St louis had fans all the way to california, texas, colorado, etc back in the days before West Coast expansion.
St Louis also supported two teams as late as the early 1950's - remember those lovable losers, the St Louis Browns, who became the Orioles back in 53 or 54.
Pittsburgh, the city, now has less than 400,000 inhabitants.
Allegheny County has about 1.1 to 1.2M citizens to draw from; Butler, Beaver, Washington and Westmoreland counties that are located nearby should add another 500,000 potential fans.
The Angels can now broadcast to and draw from 15M to 20M fans; the Bucs are lucky to reach the aforementioned 1/10th that sized community.
Just to nit pick, this isn't a good comparison. The Boston-Worcester-Manchester Combined Statistical Area is the fifth-largest in the country, and the only one of the top 6 without two teams. The Boston CSA covers an area that's roughly the far reach of commuting distance from Boston, maybe a 75-minute drive from Fenway. I used to work about a mile from Fenway and had a coworker who lived in Providence and one who lived outside of Manchester, so these places really are within Boston's everyday orbit. A huge part of the Red Sox financial success comes simply from having 7.5 million people who live close enough to Fenway that they can go to a game without having to get a hotel room. That's not at all the same thing as the Cardinals building up a fanbase in Arkansas or wherever to supplement their fairly paltry commuting-distance market (of ~2.9 million).
I guess my point is that most people don't realize how big Boston's market actually is, just because Boston itself is so tiny. It's not at all comparable with St Louis.
Except the average salary in the wealthiest Mexican cities are about one-third of that in the poorest cities that currently have MLB teams. There's nowhere near enough disposable income to support a team.
I was trying to riff of John Henry's statement when he tried to assert the Red Sox played in the fifteenth or whatever it was largest market. Yea, Boston is still pretty big. Even so, if you didn't know anything about baseball, you probably wouldn't guess it could support the second largest payroll in baseball based on the MSA of Boston/Worcester/Manchester alone.
Which is a better record than they've had in all the years since, when they didn't have a big payroll. Also, the 1998 Orioles outscored their opponents and had a 84-78 Pythag record. Not a bad team, certainly not when compared with the tighter-pursestring teams of the last decade. Big spending substantially increases likelihood of success.
I think this headline describes the problem with that.
Hey, that's nothing. Back when things like this were going on all the time in Chicago, both the Cubs and White Sox made the World Series regularly.
I feel pretty strongly otherwise. You're still going to have a decent number of luxury boxes, and you can make up some for having lower ticket prices by having a larger stadium than we're accustomed to. 65,000 seats strikes me as doable. TV revenue will also be pretty tasty, given the undivided audience.
If you look at a team as being Mexico's rather than Monterrey's or Mexico City's, it looks a little more viable. But there's no way Monterrey would routinely draw 65,000 people, and national TV rights would be adversely affected by the fact that huge parts of Mexico don't care much about baseball.
As recently as a couple years ago, I thought Monterrey was increasingly viable, but the growing violence there makes it a non-starter. There's simply no way MLB would consider it under the current conditions. Non-Mexican players wouldn't want to sign there, and Mexico doesn't have enough MLB-caliber players from which to build a team.
For everything that's great about it, Mexico still isn't really a westernized nation. Moving and administrating a team there now would still be a logistical nightmare, due to tax laws, accounting laws or lack thereof, customs, crime, relative value and stability of the currency, corruption, etc., plus as mentioned above the huge disadvantage the team would have in terms of attracting players. It's not like Canada, where they're essentially "just like us" except they can't buy guns. Try telling an 18-year-old white kid from Georgia he has to go play minor league ball in the boondocks of Mexico (presumably they'd put the team's minor league teams in Mexico as well in the Texas League and whatnot), or that he has to spend the first six years of his career a couple hundred miles south of the border. There would be a riot.
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