DrungoHazewood

Let's guess... they pay the players for the months they play, so 3-4 months. We'll go crazy and say $1500 per player per month. And add on 50% for the bus and insurance and some other stuff. 20 players per team? Plus 3-4 coaches. That's $180k. If I'm off by 100% it's $360k. So half a Stevie Wilkerson, give or take.

That brings up another issue. Sorry for the 400 posts in this thread, but the article mentions the terrible quality of minor league stadiums. But who pays for new stadiums or upgrades? It's almost always taxpayers. If MLB was really concerned about the conditions for their precious farmhands, maybe they could foot the bill or at least contribute to the renovation of the minor league ballparks? Oh, no, no, no... they don't care that much. They only care that the taxpayers of Bowie and Fredrick will pitch in $millions so they don't lose their local team. And with the threat of 25% contraction hanging over their heads that gives local politicians that much more incentive to redirect scarce resources to ballpark upgrades.

It might mean higher quality NCAA baseball, but I doubt that really impacts much of anything. A few dozen players a year will probably choose to stay in school rather than become 27th round draft picks. The real reason behind this, I think, is that baseball can't continue to pay players $8000 a year. So they're doing this to minimize or eliminate any impact from raises to their budgets.

Oh, and the very worst idea in the article is having the St. Paul Saints become an affiliated team. Their entire reason to exist is to thumb their noses at the affiliated establishment. You might as well have GM buy Tesla just so they can make generic electric Chevy Equinoxes.

I'm not convinced that the Dream League would work. It's essentially an indy league, subsidized somewhat by the majors, but without the former AAA guys and cup-of-coffee MLBers you get in the Atlantic League. You're rooting for the equivalent of anonymous 33rd-round draft picks who could be signed by any MLB team at any time. I guess it's the Frontier League writ slightly larger. With no continuity year-to-year, and randomly distributed players so that the pennants are also randomly distributed. I don't know, I think it would draw like the Florida State League.

The Bristol Pirates averaged 586 fans per game over 32 games. If they got $15 in revenues a person that works out to less than a $300k budget for the year. If they went Indy and had to pay 20 players each $1000 a month they probably fold up shop tomorrow.

I guess. The median per-game attendance in the Midwest League is about 3100 fans. About the same in the Southern League. Six of the ten teams in the Appy League averaged under 1000 fans a game.

One more thing... I've mentioned in the past that it's my opinion that the current structure of MiLB isn't based on optimizing player development or cost. It just kind of happened. It's been different in the past. MLB existed for 50+ years with essentially no affiliated structure at all. Then there was a period in the 1920s-50s where some teams had three minor league affiliates and the Dodgers and Cards each had 32. If they were to eliminate 40-some teams there would be no observable impact on the quality of players in the majors. It would be much bigger if they changed the free agent setup to where service time didn't matter and everyone was a free agent at, say, 28. Then you'd have top prospect in the majors years earlier.

Or there could be three new Indy Leagues pop up, with most of the stadiums and cities carrying on like nothing much happened. If the business case is there without MLB subsidies. If MLB eliminated the entire Florida State League no one would notice. I think the average game there draws 1000 fans. It's hard to believe any of those teams would be fiscally solvent without MLB support.

Not in any way surprised MLB wants to eliminate the tiny leverage MiLB teams currently have.

You'd have hitters raised on modern baseball suddenly being asked to play deadball-lite baseball. Because the current rate of Ks under mdbdotcom's proposal would result in about 1.5 runs per game. So a lot of desperate attempts to not strike out by players who currently average 120 strikeouts a season. It would be chaos. Plus the bookkeeping would be nonsense. Mancini has scored three runs today... oh wait, two of those were removed because his teammates struck out six times, so he really didn't score any. But Hanser Alberto keeps his run scored because the world is inexplicable. And I'm not convinced that deadening the ball will really change a whole lot. The math would have to work out that contact was better than one homer a game and nine strikeouts. I don't know that's true. Teams started this flyball/K trend quite a while ago, and it was going along pretty well in 2014 when homers were off, what, 30% from today? Really deadening the ball might. But we might not like the transition where we're scoring three runs a game.

In the old days, prior to WWII, everyone was incentivized to move the game along because most games were late afternoon. If you start at 5:00 and have no lights and it's prior to daylight savings time being a thing... you move it along or you have games called due to darkness. And you have to start at 5:00 because work. I've said before I'd be okay with a rule that says the game ends after three hours. All stop. Like the old days. Move it along or you don't get all your innings. I realize that's not going to happen. The real solution here is an automatic ball if a pitch isn't thrown by 20 seconds. No more of this "well.. I know that's the rule, but he had dust in his eye or missed the sign or needed some more pine tar, so we had to make exceptions with 80% of pitches." And really, actually enforce the stepping out rule. You step out of the box and it just doesn't matter. The pitcher has to pitch anyway. If it's strike three, it's strike three. You have to have a 2x4 sticking out of a body part before the ump will grant time. The will has to be there to enforce the rules.

That's just the NFL. They encourage you to show up early, drink as much as you can in the parking lot, then continue drinking their outrageously priced alcohol right through the 3rd quarter. And the stadium usually seats 85,000. It's a little like nickel beer night in Cleveland every Sunday.

I concur on all accounts. I've had a Virginia Tech game there that ended at midnight, and I walked in my front door at 4am (normally 1:15 away). I've sat in seats at FedEx that felt like a quarter-mile from the field. I once sat five seats over from a woman who vomited over most of an entire section, it was barely cleaned up and other people were allowed to come sit in the abandoned seats. You can park in stadium lots that must be almost a mile from the stadium. And a Miller Lite costs like $14. It's my least favorite stadium. RFK, dilapidated and obsolete, with 11,000 soccer fans at a DC United game, was a wonderful experience.

Also, before the 1910s or so team nicknames were unofficial. The 100+ year old names in modern encyclopedias and bb-ref and wiki are often post-facto use of things that may not have been commonplace at the time. I have no direct knowledge of this situation, but it's possible that Maumee is something a Toledo sportswriter with a flowery, Victorian style attached to the team, and bb-ref needed something for the name field in the database. Often in old guides you'll see teams just referred to as The New York Nationals or New York Unions or Baltimore Federals, in reference to the league they played in. Or just the Detroit Nine.

As with the Orioles, winning matters. The last time the Redskins were strong Super Bowl contenders I was in college. I'm now 48. The Redskins are the old Pirates, Royals, and Orioles, just without the 2010s surges each of those teams had. Almost no team could go through 25 years of irrelevance without taking a significant hit in their fanbase.

The Redskins had few problems selling out FedEx when some living fans could still remember when the team had been relevant.

The expansion Senators were regularly 8th-10th in attendance in a 10 team league. Only once did it rise as high as 6th. The original AL Senators were 8th in an 8 team league through most of the 50s, falling back in the pack after the Browns and A's moved. Their attendance was poor. And FedEx Field is often substantially empty for Redskins games, even after removing or covering a ton of seats.

How many people do you know who aren't from DC who used to be real O's fans who have abandoned the team for the Nats? The only ones I know are old guys who grew up around DC and used to root for the Senators.

I'd like to know how much of those "other expenses" were things like depreciation and other legal-but-not-real things that businesses do to limit their tax exposure. And how much money MASN provided to the very same owners of the Orioles that isn't reflected on the Orioles' books. The idea that the Orioles lost $6.5M, meaning Angelos and team had to write checks out of their own accounts to keep the team solvent, seems preposterous. What legitimate other expenses could they have that add up to about $100M dollars? In any case, we know that teams with less revenue (the Rays, in particular) are able to manage their team far better and have an operating profit according to Forbes. And then there's the Yanks, with 2/3rds of a $billion in annual revenues who apparently by some sleight of hand had a lower operating income than the Pirates. And the Orioles are listed as having a value of $1.3B, 19th in MLB. And ahead of more successful on-field teams like the Twins, Brewers and Indians. They'll be fine.

What spiritof66 said. Also, remember that 1890 was the year of the Players League revolt. The Players League got a good number of guys from both the NL and AA to jump to the new league, throwing all kinds of things into chaos. Teams that were terrible in '89 became great in '90 and vice versa. Then the PL folded in '91, the AA folded after '91, so what had been 24 Major League-ish teams in 1890 were down to 12 in '92. More churn than we've seen in a major sport in our lifetimes.

I'm guessing you're the type of person who sees a 10% drop in year-to-year car sales and extrapolates that out to 10 years from now when zero cars will be sold in America and all the automotive related companies will be bankrupt.

The Orioles have revenues of about $250M and a player payroll of, what, $70M or so? They pay a fairly trivial rent on their beautiful and completely taxpayer-funded stadium. Their coaching staff makes a total of a few $million a year. Within the last few years they've drawn over 2M fans, and in the last decade they have several playoff appearances and 90-win seasons. The city has 130-plus-year history of supporting professional baseball, with great-great grandparents of today's season ticket holders having been to games in the city. Most of Maryland is still more Oriole fans than Nats because everyone grew up rooting for Cal and Brooks and Palmer and Eddie. Yea, you're right, there's no way that can be a fiscally viable franchise. Might as well send them off to a more established baseball market like Nashville or Austin.

Perhaps. it was the height of the PED era, and many oldtimers hadn't gotten around to reading/accepting the findings that MLBers peak around 27, which had been published 15-20 years prior. Some GMs probably assumed 35-year-old BJ Surhoff would be a really good LFer for many years to come. As late as 2015-16 my contracts calculator worked very well with no age inputs at all. Meaning that most GMs signed 34-year-olds like they were 27.

Which is a little odd because they were the beneficiaries of the syndicate agreement with Cleveland. The reason the 1899 Spiders happened was that their owners teamed up with St. Louis' and transferred all the actual major leaguers to Missouri. I would have thought they'd have gotten a significant boost from that, but the bump only lasted a single year. From 130 years away it looks like the Browns/Cards took a very long time to recover from the transition from the AA to the NL. They went from maybe the best AA team to a .350 team in the NL. They didn't consistently contend in the NL for almost 30 years. In 1890 St. Louis was considered far out west. Teams would go on long train trips to Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis. I thought maybe the city just wasn't large enough to compete with the eastern teams and Chicago, but their population was as big as Baltimore in 1890, and was rapidly expanding. I guess it could have just been that they were run poorly.