This is a credit to the Royals’ players — while it’s tempting to think it might be easier to construct a team like this considering the exhorbitant sums top starters and sluggers fetch in free agency, there just aren’t that many players that have the all-around skillsets necessary to power a team like the Royals. Good luck finding too many quality two-way players like Lorenzo Cain, Alex Gordon and Salvador Perez or shutdown relievers like Greg Holland and Wade Davis. Usually by the time players like these reach free agency, either the league has caught on to the fact that their skillset is worthwhile, or they’ve already started their decline phase — particularly since pitcher velocity and position-player defense are usually the first skills to decline for each group.

But that doesn’t mean teams aren’t going to try to copy the way the Royals won, by losing for years, racking up tons of high draft picks, waiting for a wave of prospects to come around, and carefully spending to fill the few holes that remain. Of the Royals’ core players, Mike Moustakas (pick 1.2 in 2007), Eric Hosmer (pick 1.3 in 2008) and Alex Gordon (pick 1.2 in 2005) were all the fruits of selecting high in the draft after terrible seasons. Lorenzo Cain and Alcides Escobar were acquired in exchange for Zack Greinke, pick 1.6 in 2002.

From 2003 through 2008, the Royals had a payroll between $36 million and $67 million, ranking between 24th and 27th in Major League Baseball in all six seasons. This is when they drafted most of the core talent from their 2014 and 2015 playoff runs, or the players who were traded to improve the team around them. The Royals slightly increased their payroll in the latter part of the decade with ill-advised deals for Jose Guillen and Gil Meche, but in 2011, the Royals entered full Process mode and whittled their payroll down to a league-low $38 million. They then slowly built the payroll up as their young players moved up the salary scale, up to $64 million (26th) in 2012, $82 million (22nd) in 2013, $92 million (19th) in 2014, and fueled by their AL Pennant, $113 million in 2015 (13th).

You can’t deny the effectiveness of the Process. Everything that was supposed to happen for a small-market team to win happened. The prospects showed up, they grew together, the front office filled in the gaps, an exciting and improbable first playoff run then gave them the experience and confidence to bring the championship home a year later.

But this is part of the problem I’ve been writing about here for the past couple of months. The reason small-market teams are going to copy the Royals is because every other route to contention has been closed off. And this isn’t just about money — it’s about rules like the qualifying-offer system, revenue sharing, and caps on draft and international amateur spending that have made it impossible to take other routes to contention. Having to surrender draft picks for mid-level free agents makes it difficult to slowly build year-by-year, and the spending caps in the amateur market make it impossible to go above slot to keep top-tier talent coming in if a team improved (and improved its draft slot) slowly but steadily.

So, sure, teams probably aren’t going to “copy the Royals” in the sense Crasnick discusses. It’s going to be near impossible to cobble together a group of uniquely defensively talented contact hitters like the Royals had in 2014 and 2015. That’s what their scouts and system were good at identifying and developing, so that’s what came out, much like how the Brewers rose to contention in the late 2000s behind a roster filled with Jack Z Specials — young sluggers who could win despite their defensive deficiencies. But you can bet teams are going to copy Kansas City’s process — and they already have, in Houston, and to a lesser extent, on Chicago’s north side.

However, it can’t be forgotten that a critical part of this process is years and years — maybe a decade, maybe more — of losing. That would be just fine with most fans, I think, if it always worked out as cleanly as it did for the Royals. But it won’t, as we saw with the Brewers in 2008 and 2011. Next year isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, and a talented core can disintegrate quickly. So to all the teams getting ready to copy the Royals and look to the future: Best of luck when your window finally comes, and don’t blink or you might miss it. Hopefully all the losses are worth it.

The Pirates pocketed $69 million in revenue sharing and made $29 million in profits as they lost 189 games between 2007 and 2008. The Marlins reportedly made $300 million in revenue-sharing checks from 2002 through 2010. When faced with a formal grievance from the MLB Players Association, the club agreed to put all revenue-sharing money towards player salaries and development. Shortly after the end of the 2012 season, when the agreement expired, the Marlins promptly traded away all but one player on their roster making more than $1.6 million (the lone exception, Ricky Nolasco, was gone before the trade deadline).

Part of this is because Major League Baseball teams are run by snakes like Jeffrey Loria and Bob Nutting, of course. But part of it is a structural problem with the way baseball’s revenue-sharing program is designed, to the point where it actively incentivizes failure. Instead of creating a rising tide that lifts all boats, revenue sharing has instead acted to make teams into spendthrifts regardless of where they fall on the revenue spectrum.

The problem comes from the system’s use of actual revenues to calculate who pays in and who gets a payout from the system rather than a measure of potential revenues — something akin to market size that accounts for structural differences in team revenue rather than rewarding a team that is simply failing to earn because it is poorly run. The best illustration of the absurdity this system can produce is the 2005 revenue sharing numbers, in which the Philadelphia Phillies — in the fourth-biggest media market in the league and the largest market without a second team — were paid out $5.8 million.

(If you’re interested in deeper proof of this concept, William Colby, an Amherst graduate who has also worked in the Rays front office, published a paper in 2011 analyzing the actual impacts of Major League Baseball’s revenue-sharing programs. It attacks the problem from both a theoretical and empirical angle to prove MLB’s program creates disincentives for teams to spend and actually increases competitive imbalances.)

By creating a system in which increasing revenues by buying talent and winning games actually reduces profit margins, Major League Baseball instead created a disincentive to spend. I have a hard time believing this was an accident, considering the recent changes made to the draft and the international talent market. The institution of hard slotting in the draft and spending limits in the international market act the exact same way, levying huge penalties on every dollar spent over the limits in both cases.

This has made it tougher for teams like the Brewers to dive into the international market or gamble in the draft. But the Yankees? Assigned a $2.2 million cap on international spending in 2014, they went out and spent nearly seven times that, $14.4 million. The $12.31 million in taxes levied on the Yankees as a result would be anathema to most teams, but to the Yankees and their structural advantages, it’s a pittance.

The result is the exact opposite of what these programs are supposedly trying to accomplish. Instead of creating a more competitive game in which teams aren’t limited by structural disadvantages, teams are economically encouraged to lose as cheaply as possible and reap the rewards of revenue sharing until a short competitive window emerges as a result of their many years of top draft picks.

It might sound counterintuitive, but that’s mostly because we’ve been inundated with Bud Selig’s small-market idealism for some three decades now. It was easy to sell because it was what we all wanted to hear — that our teams weren’t losing because they were incompetent, but because the odds were stacked against them. As nice as the logic sounds, though, it has proven to be broken both in theory and in practice.

These, in my estimation, are baseball’s true small-market franchises; perhaps you could get away with adding San Diego (28th, 1.0 million), Baltimore (26th, 1.1 million), Pittsburgh (23rd, 1.2 million) and/or St. Louis (21st, 1.2 million) to the list. But baseball’s definition of the small market has grown absurdly expansive since Selig started forcing the small market debate in 1985. And I think there is no better example of that than the team in the city I now call home, the Minnesota Twins, whose status as a small-market team is a result of nothing short of con artistry.

Minneapolis-St. Paul is the 15th-largest media market in the nation, with 1,723,210 television homes. It is one of six media markets with between 1.6 and 1.9 million television homes, including Tampa-St. Petersburg, Phoenix, Detroit, Seattle-Tacoma, and Miami-Fort Lauderdale. Despite the market size of the Twin Cities — and the total lack of competition from nearby markets, as Milwaukee is the closest fellow major-league city at 294 miles away — the Twins have been labeled a “small-market franchise” since at least the late 1980s, even as they were winning two World Series championships in five years and paying multi-million contracts out to players like Kirby Puckett and Gary Gaetti, whose $2.4 million salary in 1989 was the highest of any player in the major leagues.

“Such is the price of success for the Twins, who won the World Series in 1987 and won more games in 1988,” Tracy Ringolsby wrote in January 1989. “Baseball’s salaries take abilities into consideration, not market sizes. That’s where the Twins are going to find themselves in a squeeze. They play in one of the smaller population areas in the big leagues and have one of the least attractive local radio-television contracts.”

Of course, as I just illustrated above, the population argument simply isn’t true. It feels rather like an assumption made by the kinds of people who dismiss the Midwest as an entirely rural block of “flyover country.” Minneapolis is a small market compared to cities like New York and Los Angeles and Chicago, of course, but the difference in market size between squarely large-market Boston (2.4 million TV homes) and Minneapolis is less than the difference between Minneapolis and Milwaukee. Do you consider Detroit a small-market team? When I asked my Twitter followers if Detroit was a small market baseball team, the answer was resoundingly “no.” Minneapolis-St. Paul is effectively the same-sized market.

do you consider Detroit to be a small market baseball team?

— Jack Moore (@jh_moore) January 24, 2016

The true con of the Minnesota Twins and their owner Carl Pohlad claiming small-market status didn’t really begin until the new millennium and the start of contraction rumors. There was no reason for the Twins to be grouped with truly flagging franchises like the Expos, Devil Rays, and Marlins. “Minnesota is hardly the weakest link,” reads an Associated Press column from 2001. “The team has made money each of the last five seasons, outdrawing the Yankees as recently as 10 years ago, when the economics of the game still allowed small-market teams to contend. In that sense, the Twins are practically a rallying cry.”

Despite all of this, the Twins continued to be held up as an example of how small-market status meant instant doom for a baseball franchise. Pohlad continued to claim it was impossible for his franchise to survive in Minneapolis. It got to the point in the 2001 offseason where former professional wrestler and Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura called for the institution of a salary cap and revenue sharing — Bud Selig’s personal hobby horses — to be connected to the building of a new stadium for the Twins.

The Twins stormed to a division title in 2002, winning 94 games and holding the division lead straight from May 27th through the end of the season. Speaking at a journalism conference that August, as the Twins had racked up a double-digit division lead, Selig stated the Twins’ success was an “aberration” and that the Twins and the Expos were “number one and number two” in the league with the least potential for growth. Selig claimed the Twins’ fortunes couldn’t change without a new stadium.

The Twins, instead, won the American League Central in each of the next two seasons and would win three more division titles over the next six years, only one of which came after the Twins made their move to Target Field. The Twins were a rallying cry for the small markets, indeed — proof that winning was possible despite the imbalances.

The game that Selig and Carl Pohlad were playing was a complete farce. As the New York Times reported in 2002, there was a clear conflict of interest in Selig’s desire to contract the Twins. The club was worth an estimated $100 million on the open market, but under Major League Baseball’s ownership structure, Pohlad would be owed $150 million from the other major-league owners if the team were contracted. Pohlad had previously lent Selig $3 million in 1995, after Selig had become interim commissioner — an action forbidden by Major League Rule 20 (c):

No club or owner, stockholder, officer, director or employee (including manager or player) of a club shall, directly or indirectly, loan money to or become surety or guarantor for any club, officer, employee or umpire of its, his or her league, unless all facts of the transaction shall first have been fully disclosed to all other clubs in that league and also to the commissioner, and the transaction has been approved by them.

Even without the shady loan history, Selig stood to benefit from the Twins’ contraction. It would placate the large-market owners he needed in his camp for the upcoming CBA negotiations. But most critically, it would open up the Minneapolis-St. Paul television and radio market, an obvious target for his Milwaukee Brewers. If the Brewers had picked up Minneapolis-St. Paul’s population in the cable market, it would have resulted in a massive increase to the team’s revenue stream.

The Twins were proof that winning was possible on a budget. But despite what their low payrolls may have suggested, they weren’t proof that baseball couldn’t be profitable in Minnesota. That was merely proof that Pohlad was cheap. As Jim Caple wrote in 2009, “A top Twins executive once told me that Pohlad didn’t mind not making money off the Twins, but he was dead set against losing a dime on a baseball team.”

Still, the threat of contraction did its job. The small-market label has stuck hard to the Twins ever since, and they managed to wring $350 million in public contributions to Target Field out of it. The subsequent five seasons have proven the viability of the Minneapolis market — they have managed to draw at least 2.2 million fans per year over the past five seasons despite failing to come within even 10 games of a division championship.

If the billionaire Pohlads had been willing to take a short-term loss, they could have made their way out of the Metronome years earlier without taking the public for such a ride. Instead, Pohlad and Selig played games with the public to service their own greed. The threats of contracting the Twins were never about Minneapolis’s “growth potential” or any of Selig’s typical economic concerns. Those threats were about bullying the people of Minneapolis and creating a culture of fear outside of the untouchable cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. And in that sense, even though the contraction plan never went through, the gambit worked perfectly.

Last week, I took a look at the beginning of Bud Selig’s fight for “small-market” franchises 30 years ago. “These negotiations were a fight for the Milwaukees of the world,” Selig told the Milwaukee Sentinel. “In the end, Milwaukee was the only franchise being mentioned.”

Selig and his coalition of small-market owners deposed Fay Vincent and installed Selig himself as acting commissioner just seven years later, in 1992. The next year, Selig and his group flexed their muscles and proved they were serious about forcing the big-market owners to seriously consider a revenue-sharing program.

In the early 1990s, “superstations” like Chicago’s WGN and Atlanta’s TBS were making baseball games widely available on television outside of a team’s home market for the first time. Both New York teams also had games broadcast on superstations — WPIX for the Yankees and WWOR for the Mets. In 1993, as the game’s collective bargaining agreement approached expiration the next year, small-market owners took aim at these sources of revenue for big-market teams through a little known clause in a decades-old contract.

The distribution of funds from local and cable telecasts was dictated by agreements dating back to the mid-20th century, 1956 for the National League and 1965 for the American League. Each league distributed the cash slightly differently — American League teams with superstations shared 20 percent of the revenue with the rest of the AL, and National League teams shared 25 percent of the revenue from each game with that game’s road team. The agreements contained critical clauses, according to the Sentinel: Each can be terminated when five teams in a league give notice. Without these agreements, small-market teams would have the right to block superstations from broadcasting any games in which they are involved. The result would be a substantial loss of revenue for the superstations which needed the baseball money to survive.

The Milwaukee Journal reported that San Diego, Houston, Pittsburgh, Florida, Montreal, St. Louis and Cincinnati all supported the blackout in the National League, and seven teams including the Brewers and Twins backed the blackout effort in the American League. This rift in ownership made things awkward for Selig, and the Sentinel report shows the absurdity of his attempt to act as neutral commissioner and Brewers owner at the same time.

The article read, “Interim commissioner Bud Selig, president of the Brewers, was reluctant to discuss the situation. His small-market team supports the coalition, athough as acting commissioner, he is required to appear impartial.”

Selig did say, “I wouldn’t make too much of this. I don’t think it’s an issue of leverage as much as the clubs taking a new look at decades-old agreements.” Another owner was a bit harsher, as he said, “I don’t know how far we’ll go with this, but we need to have the attention of the big-market clubs. They need to know we’re serious about a revenue-sharing agreement that will give us some significant help.”

It was unclear how much leverage the small-market owners actually had. The report suggested the previous renewal of the American League contract ran through 1994, which would mean nothing could happen until after the CBA expired regardless of the small-market coalition’s votes. Still, the point was made — there were enough small-market franchises willing to band together to make a real threat to a major source of revenue for the large-market franchises that were blocking a revenue-sharing program. Peter Gammons suggested furthermore that “a half-dozen financially distressed franchises” would make a mad dash to be the first team to relocate to the open market in St. Petersburg, Florida* and that the potential infighting between the owners could be enough to threaten baseball’s exceptionally lucrative antitrust exemption. The small-market franchises had the attention they desired.

*Jonah Keri’s The Extra 2% includes an excellent summary of the race to St. Petersburg, as the Giants and White Sox both nearly wound up moving to South Florida before the Rays were granted a franchise.

By the signing of the next collective bargaining agreement in 1996, Selig and his small-market coalition had won their revenue-sharing system and a luxury tax, the first of a number of small-market-forward measures enacted in collective bargaining agreements since. It was just 11 years after Selig’s impassioned fight for the “Milwaukees of the world,” back when he was the lone wolf treated like a crazy person by the rest of baseball’s suits. Selig didn’t even need a decade to get his troops in line and remake the baseball world in his image, as his deft threats to hit large-market owners where it really hurts them turned the tables entirely in his favor.

These days, small-market logic is pretty well accepted as common sense. Revenue sharing programs have become standard for American sports leagues. In baseball in particular, all number of measures, from the luxury tax to hard slots for draft signing bonuses to caps on international spending, have been adopted in the name of supporting small-market teams in their uphill battle against the league’s financial titans in the nation’s largest cities. (Whether or not they actually work is another question, one I’ll cover in this space in more detail later.)

This has not always been the case. In 1985, Major League Baseball went through its shortest strike in its history, a mere two days. The issues centered around restrictions to salary arbitration; specifically, the owners wanted to increase the amount of service time needed before arbitration (from two to three years) and a cap of double the player’s previous year’s salary on arbitration awards. The result was a compromise: the owners ditched the cap, but won the third year before salary arbitration kicked in, giving small-market franchises like the Brewers an opportunity to keep homegrown stars at the league minimum salary for 150 percent as long as before.

“Everybody on the PRC (the owners’ Players Relations Committee) knew there had to be meaningful modifications in the arbitration system or we were in trouble. And finally the union realized it,” Selig told the Milwaukee Sentinel after the strike in August 1985. “These negotiations were a fight for the Milwaukees of the world.”

Selig went on to admit, “In the end, Milwaukee was the only franchise being mentioned. These negotiations were terribly important for this city and this franchise.”

The article also describes Selig as “often termed the lone wolf howling about the finanical stability of the game” and states that he “described the negotiations as the salvation of smaller markets.” My search through the Google News archives did not find any earlier discussions of Selig and the plight of small-market teams. Perhaps it was harder to grab the press’s ear when his “lone wolf” reputation was fiercer.

The 1985 season was critical in the history of Major League Baseball’s labor relations. Despite Selig seeing his mission of helping small-market franchises as “accomplished,” per the Sentinel, a number of owners were extremely dissatisfied with the strike’s aftermath and with Commissioner Peter Ueberroth’s role in the negotations in particular. “He’s a no-good s.o.b,” an NL owner said of Ueberroth. “We could have gotten the whole thing but Ueberroth forced the settlement for his personal benefit.”

One American League owner agreed, saying, “We got the bad end on the arbitration, no question.” Another loss in the labor battle was hardly what the owners wanted to see after the league’s average salary had risen from $44,676 in 1975 to $371,157 in 1985 thanks to the union’s repeated victories on issues like arbitration and free agency.

The next step for the owners was to collude to keep player salaries down, as player movement dropped substantially over the next three seasons as owners agreed not to submit offers on other clubs’ free agents. When the three collusion cases brought against baseball in the late 1980s were finally settled in 1990, owners paid the players $280 million in damages. Fay Vincent, the commisioner deposed by Bud Selig and the coalition of owners he built in 1992, would later blame the massive 1994-95 strike on what he called player anger at “a $280 million theft by Selig and [White Sox owner Jerry] Reinsdorf.” It’s an important point, but it’s also important to remember it goes both ways — there was clearly a good deal of owner anger directed at the players for the audacity of believing they deserved their share.

Arguably nobody represented this anger more than Selig, even if he managed to smartly disguise it under the rhetoric of protecting small-market franchises like his own. It’s hard to believe that just 30 years ago, and less than a decade before Selig’s rise to the commissionership, his way of thinking was considered outlandish, crazy, and made him a “lone wolf.” It was Bud Selig vs. The World, as ludicrous as that may seem after seeing him and his small-market-centric approach rule the commissioner’s office for over two decades.

If you have been a Brewers fan in any capacity, you are familiar with this reality and the uphill battle to contention because of it. Every free-agent signing is viewed through the lens of budgetary constraints before potential production. Homegrown stars, such as Prince Fielder, are presumed to leave as soon as they are able to test the market. Such is life in a small market.

But what I want to explore more closely over the rest of this interminably long offseason is the use of the small market as a rhetorical device. How does small market rhetoric shape our fan experiences? What does baseball do in the name of supporting small markets? What are the real effects of pro-small-market initiatives, like the luxury tax and revenue sharing? Who really benefits from seeing the world as one where the small markets need help to compete with the big markets?

Much of my previous baseball writing — specifically, for FanGraphs and for Disciples of Uecker — has been written from the perspective of a general manager who needs to, as B.J. Upton put it in the Tampa Bay Rays’ late-2000s heyday, “Ball on a budget.” This means finding the next market inefficiency, like Billy Beane’s Athletics and Andrew Friedman’s Rays did. The unfairness of it all had a visceral appeal to me. Why should things like census counts and television contracts have anything to do with who wins a baseball game? It’s an easy argument to make and an easy argument to understand, particularly for those who have been rooting for cellar dwellars for decades.

That, I think, is why it’s so important to take a hard long look at how the small market concept has been used by baseball’s owners and executives. Here we are in 2016, about 30 years after Bud Selig started throwing his weight around in MLB ownership meetings and negotiations, talking about how hard life is for small-market franchises and how the structure of the league must be reorganized to help them compete. This rhetoric has been employed for decades, and yet, as we look at Major League Baseball today, it is as much of a haves-versus-have-nots league as ever. Teams with open pocketbooks like the Dodgers, Yankees, Angels and Red Sox dominate the markets for major players to the point where a team like the lowly Diamondbacks (in the 12th largest market in the nation, hardly a small market club) spending on a major free agent like Zack Greinke is considered uncouth. And with teleivision money flowing in large sums into baseball’s largest markets, the gaps are primed to grow even bigger despite the efforts of Selig and his Blue Ribbon Committees.

With the imbalance between large and small cities remaining constant, it has become almost impossible to talk about baseball in Milwaukee without talking about the constraints and realities of the small market. As such, beginning next week and continuing throughout the offseason, I’ll be taking a deeper look at the way baseball owners, executives, players and writers have talked about and deployed the small market concept, for what they have used it, how the term has evolved, and how it has affected the game today, both here in Milwaukee and across the league. Keep an eye out for it here at BP Milwaukee.