Jerry Crasnick posted an article at ESPN on Friday suggesting that teams won’t be copying the Royals‘ free-swinging, contact-oriented team constructed around solid defense and a strong bullpen, rather than around middle-of-the-order sluggers and ace-level starting pitchers. There’s a perfectly good reason for that: most teams don’t play in cavernous parks like Kauffman Stadium that encourage contact […]
Tag: Small Market Rhetoric
Baseball’s Revenue Sharing Fails in Theory and in Practice
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 […]
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 […]