DrungoHazewood

I have an uncle who would be fine with just STARZ Westerns.

In 1957 you never ever ever had to worry about what to do with the last four years of ARod or Chris Davis or Albert Pujols. The minute they slipped you just released them at no cost. If Chris Davis happened in 1948 he would have been released from his one-year, $28k salary three years ago. Big market teams are the primary signers of 7/180 deals. They rarely hurt the Brewers or the Pirates.

Territiorial rights and market splitting aren't that big of a deal when most revenues are shared and everyone has a payroll cap. The Knicks can have half the basketball fans in the world, but only 20,000 of them can come to the stadium, 29/30th of the media revenues still go somewhere else, and they can't spend $300M on payroll. The other thing to take into account in that prior to 1969 there were no playoffs. The Yanks are just as competitive today as they were in the pre-free agency era (i.e. they win the division/league more times than not) but back then they went straight to the World Series where they had a ~60% chance of winning. Today they win the division by 14 games and they have roughly a (.6*.6*.6) = 22% chance of winning it all. So the 1920-1950s Yanks drew more fans than anyone else, there were no shared revenues, they could spend as much as they wanted on amateur talent, could have as many minor league affiliates as they wanted, owned the rights to their players in perpetuity, and if they won the league by one game they went straight to the Series. When Mickey Mantle got to six years of service time nobody noticed, because they just renewed his contract for one year for whatever money the team wanted. Everything except MLB free agency and the fact the Giants and Dodgers were in NYC was set up for a team to dominate.

I counted them personally. I won't 100% guarantee that some of those ne'er-do-wells from La Cienega didn't sneak in to sour the results.

I'll believe that Elias and Hyde think highly of Brooks when they say so. He's almost 30, has a low strikeout rate, a 6.50 ERA, and a low-90s fastball. Brooks' supposed improvement was in like 30 innings. That's enough for you, but not for most others.

New York and LA are big, but combined they're about 10% of the US media market. The bigger effect, to me, is that in most areas the 2nd favorite team is the Yankees. In some places like the Carolinas, New Mexico, Montana, and Louisiana the Yanks are the #1 team. There are like 14 Orioles fans in Santa Fe. There are probably 10,000 Yankee fans.

When did Dave Kingman give the female reporter a rat as a present? He kept his job even though he wasn't that good and a horrible person. But players have always been on a different set of standards. Nobody was talking about Osuna losing his job.

Part of the attendance "problem" is on purpose. In the past 27 years almost every team has replaced an older stadium with a newer one that has less capacity. Sometimes far less. One example, in 2010 the Twins moved into Target Field. In 2009 they had 14 games at the Metrodome with an attendance higher than the listed capacity of Target Field. They had three pennant race games in early October that had 49-51k. Those all would have been 38,000 and change in the new park. I'd guess this effect is on the order of 50,000 to 100,000 fans per team per season. A few percent. And with all the new fields there's much less of a Camden Yards effect. The Twins got a bump in 2010 but three years later they were back to the numbers they had at the Metrodome. But presumably with greater revenues from higher costs of attending games and greater opportunity to extract money for things like suites.

Jimmy the Greek got fired in 1988.

No, that's exactly right. Although under our new regime some people will be very devoted to watching our dear leaders (me, you, weams, obviously) ride white stallions around Montana on the state media channel, which could lower the ratings for the World Series. Perhaps some kind of picture-in-picture so we can watch both? Or just require everyone to have two TVs on at all times?

Oh, and yes, MLB has been losing attendance at a rate of a bit less than 1% a year for the last 12 years.

There's a point with any person in any job where your failure to act like a decent, responsible human overwhelms any good things you're doing.

More sense than what? Why would they want to give up a nice ballpark in a reasonably close and large metro area? That would kind of run counter to the idea that the O's territory runs from York to the South Carolina border. I guess if they ever put an expansion team in Charlotte Norfolk would be a nice market for their AAA team. Plus, I think PG County or Maryland would have to upgrade the stadium in Bowie to AAA standards. I think the capacity just meets the AAA limit of 10k, but earlier in this thread Tony mentioned that it didn't look like they'd done anything to the place in 20 years. And Harbor Park is much bigger, double-decked, and in my opinion nicer.

Ratings for everything everywhere are far lower than in decades past because of entertainment choices. Everyone has 300 channels, and nobody watches them because they also have the internet and Xbox and all their kids have activities six days a week. Kids don't watch sports, and our increasingly older population only watches Fox News and the Weather Channel (source: Drungo's dad) and is asleep by 8:30 anyway. On the east coast I don't think the Series starts until about 9:00; even if the O's were playing it would be a nightmare to watch and go to work for a couple weeks on four hours sleep. And unfortunately, nationwide baseball ratings are highly dependent on whether the Yanks, Sox, or Dodgers are playing. We have a front-running culture, to a large extent. Part of the reason baseball won't take bigger steps to solve revenue disparities. Yes, there's some amount of exaggeration in the post, but also a fair amount of truth.

Which is why we need the Continental League to spring up. Or the AL/NL to be broken up by the Justice Department for anti-trust violations (yes, that would involve overturning the anti-trust exemption). Territorial "rights" only exist inside of MLB. So let's end this period where MLB is the only game in town. Maybe Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Cuban or somebody should buy the Atlantic League and start moving teams from Long Island and Waldorf and York to MLB markets, and signing recognizable free agents. Yea, I know, never going to happen.

In the late 80s or early 90s the Buffalo Bisons in the IL drew over 1,000,000 fans for a number of years in a row. Buffalo was talked about as a possible expansion site. Then I guess people realized Buffalo is a rust belt town 2/3rds the size of Milwaukee.

Except that they would be displacing the existing Atlantic League teams in York and Lancaster.

atomic told me he won't last until next Tuesday.

That tells me that LA should be near the top of the list of possible expansion locations. Especially since going from San Clemente to Thousand Oaks in rush hour might take you three hours or more. I think LA needs four teams.

I think you could round it off to zero. Maybe a few folks bought tickets specifically for 3000 hits or 500 homers, but even then it's the equivalent of walk-up sales because you're never sure until a just prior. With the homers it could be a week or two of waiting. 2000 RBI... did anyone even notice until they put it on the scoreboard afterwards? I'm not sure Albert Pujols' mom went out of her way to see Albert become the, what... 6th person to get to 600 homers. And if they made shirts for any of that most of them ended up in sub-Saharan Africa for 50 cents a shirt undermining the local textile industry.

Shame on me for hoping that people in charge can be decent humans.

Hey, we only have six to eight years to get a reasonable accounting of how this signing class will work out, so that's just another 3000 days or so of hearing about how Elias doesn't have full control and our international presence is probably crap. We can wait it out.

I never liked Bud because he's dishonest. Also because he led the coup to oust the last semi-independent commish. Bud made it absolutely clear he was representing the owners, not the sport, and not the players. I don't have any really strong opinions about Manfred.

Say what you will about Bud Selig, but his expanded playoffs have made it very, very difficult for a team that has unlimited resources and never really has an off year to build a true dynasty. If this was the old days, prior to playoffs, where you go straight to the World Series, the Yanks would have had six or eight or ten more championships since 2000. Even with the old 4-team playoffs they'd probably have another 4-5 titles.

That's one of a dozen little Yankee Fan things in that scene. Apparently something really good just happened, and that guy's first reaction is to angrily say "F-you" to the world.