The logic behind revenue-sharing programs is easy to follow. In a post-free-agency world, team payroll is a huge predictor of team success, but budgets are limited by things outside of a team’s control, like market size and stadium situations. Revenue sharing, then, allows those teams who can’t match up financially with the big boys to […]
Tag: Bud Selig
The Minnesota Small-Market Con
While I may disagree with Bud Selig’s arguments regarding small-market franchises and what needs to be done to support them, there is no argument against Milwaukee’s position as a small market. With 882,210 television homes in its media market, per Nielsen, only Cincinnati (868,900) is a smaller major-league market. Milwaukee ranks 35th and Cincinnati ranks […]
Bud Selig’s Coalition Takes Aim
Major League Baseball did not establish its revenue-sharing program without a fight. It took until the 1996 collective bargaining agreement, the first signed after the contentious 1994-95 strike, and that plan was gradually implemented. The current plan, in which 34 percent of all “net local revenue” from all 30 major-league teams is subject to redistribution, […]
Bud Selig vs. The World
Over the past 30 years, no single person has made more noise about the plight of small-market teams than Milwaukee’s own Bud Selig. Whether as baseball’s commissioner or the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, Selig has acted as a small-market evangelist, preaching the impending doom of Major League Baseball should the game’s economic system not […]
Why We Need To Examine Small Market Rhetoric
Milwaukee is a small market. It ranks 35th in the nation by television market size, just behind Cincinnati and just ahead of that famously booming metropolitan area, Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson in South Carolina. No city in Major League Baseball serves a smaller potential fanbase, and more importantly, no Major League city has a smaller base of cable […]
Museums, Kind Histories and the Selig Experience
The Brewers are on some kind of hot streak right now. They entered Sunday’s game having won nine out of their last 12 games and have outscored opponents 79-45 in that span. The offense is clicking, scoring over seven runs per game, and the pitching has been much improved — particularly rookie Taylor Jungmann, who […]