Selig eyes MLB 'contraction': Washington's NEVER gonna get a team!

In My Humble Opinion
21

Jonathan Chance, I’d have trouble believing that MLB’s antitrust exemption would withstand a serious legal challenge. Even with it, they’re only immune from antitrust challenges - it is not at all clear to me that that would apply to a voluntary franchise move. And anyway, why would they even want to keep a zombie franchise in Montreal if there were a shining moneymaking opportunity in Washington or anywhere else?

The price to buy out a targeted franchise would be a subject of negotiation. If one is an incurable money loser, the price couldn’t be all that high. If Loria or Henry hold out for the big cash, that’s a suggestion that maybe they aren’t money losers after all.

RickJay, I won’t quibble about attendance figures; just point out that there is much more to a sport’s financial health than that. Overall fan interest based on broadcast ratings is most certainly down - if any of the World Series games break double figures, it will be a shock.

Average attendance figures mask a high degree of variation - there are a few deep-rooted franchises, like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs, that sell out virtually every game no matter what. There are a lot more that maybe sell out on Opening Day and then never again. My impression is that it seems to depend mostly on the size of the market and some other local conditions than on the team’s actual performance.

You’re quite right to point out that attendance, and fan interest (however superficial), can vary greatly over time for a particular franchise. But the contraction argument is based on long-term viability of the market, as measured by both size and depth. Large, historically-strong markets should be maintained even if fan support is temporarily down due to on-field suckiness, but markets that won’t or can’t support teams when they’re good don’t have an argument for keeping them. Example of the former: The Mets averaged less than 10,000 a game, and had minimal TV ratings, for a while in the 80’s, but that was friggin’ New York - there was never a question about the market’s fundamental strength. The Pirates were in the World Series less than a decade ago and I believe they barely sold out the park even then, much less drew boffo ratings.

Yes, there’s a hard core of fans in any market that will watch their team, in person or on TV, no matter what, and will buy the logo merchandise, and pay for autographs, and so forth, but there aren’t enough of them to keep a franchise financially healthy. The more casual fan base has to be attracted too, and few teams do that.

I heartily agree that baseball needs some realistic system of financial leveling longterm, like the other major sports. Keeping a 10:1 difference in gross revenues, as at present, is simply a way to tell the fans in low-revenue markets that there’s no reason to be interested in their clubs - they’ll always be losers. Putting a meaningful salary-cap mechanism into place may be the only way to keep star players from looking greedy, whiny, and selfish, and alienating the broader fan base.

Restoring the pace of the games so that they’re typically over in 2 hours or so, as they were as recently as the 70’s, and not 3 or 4 hours, would be a major help in marketing too, I suspect. Measures to increase the number of fan-pleasing home runs have already been taken since the '94 strike, as they were after the '19 gambling scandal, so there’s little else to be done there.

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Elvis - thanks for going into the problems with averages. Especially in baseball, with its strong large market/small market divide, averages don’t mean a hell of a lot.

I agree with you that baseball’s fandom isn’t as strong as the attendance suggests. First, like you say, the postseason games don’t seem to draw strong TV audiences anymore - and if that’s the case, why should the networks shell out good money to air them? And that’s going to dry up some of MLB’s cash flow.

I can certainly understand why people wouldn’t want to watch them. As a lifelong baseball fan, I don’t mind in the least that drama takes time to build, both in a baseball game and in a baseball season. But in a baseball game, there is such a thing as too frickin’ long, and the typical postseason game running 3.5 to 4 hours is well into that zone, as a rule. Which means that in the East, the games frequently end around midnight.

Which makes me wonder about the kids who may or may not be part of baseball’s next generation of fans. I just don’t see that a slow game that ends well after their bedtimes is going to become their lifelong obsession.

23

I can second that statement that Charlote would be a piss-poor place to put a team. I’ve lived there off and on for the last 30 years and in the last year, used to attend the Knights (Class AA) games in Fort Mill, SC, just over the state line.

Backstory: the Knights moved across the border after their old stadium in Charlotte burned down, and the city refused to give them any help in rebuilding. The owner, at that time Jerry Shinn, the shithead owner of the Hornets, built the stadium with the idea that it can be expanded into a MLB site if it ever happened. Of course, it was built along the old pre-Camden Yards lines, so if it ever should happen, it would be immediately obsolete.

Anyway, the powers in Charlotte (Hugh McColl, the head of North Carolina National Bank, then NCNB, then Bank of America) WANTED AN NBA stadium in downtown Charlotte. He wanted it like jarbabyj wants an orgasm. But the Hornets has sucked hot farts for the last few years, Shinn has shown no interest in pursuing a title, he was tried for sexual harassment, and his name is mud in Charlotte. Then he goes and lets an Atlanta businessman buy into the team and this shitheel waltzes in and, in one of his first meetings with city officials, hints that they need to move the team if the city doesn’t cough up the bucks to build them a new stadium.

Bad, bad move.

Finally, hatchets were buried, and the city’s leaders tried to figure out a way to ram a bond issue past the voters. They knew that a vote on financing an NBA stadium wouldn’t fly (Charlotte’s leaders are complete idiots, just partial), so they loaded the bond issue with tons of other stuff in the hopes that enough arts and educator supporters would outweigh those who would pay to see George Shinn’s head on a stick.

Not enough. Bond issue went down in flames. A wonderful clusterfuck all around.

So don’t except to see a “world-class” city (their words, not spoken in irony) like Charlotte on any MLB last anytime, oh, in the next decade. Ain’t gonna happen.

24

Well, Selig and the owners seem awfully serious about it.

If it’s a bluff, they’re definitely backing it all the way - and making enemies in the process, as the possibility of contraction has raised the ire of a fair number of Congresspersons.

That seems to be a lot of trouble to go to, just to get a leg up in their upcoming negotiations with the MLBPA, which will brush it off like a mosquito.

25

The fact that htey are threatening to contract the Twins out of baseball is making me livid, but I will restrain myself seeing as how this is not the Pit.

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But read any history of baseball’s labor negotiations, and you’ll conclude that this is exactly how the owners typically behave. They really seem to think that there’s some magic solution that’s going to restore the good/bad old days when no one had ever heard of free agents, and every time round they pick another candidate, blast off another couple of toes shooting themselves in the foot, then come out with a deal that’s usually worse for them than the deal they could have done in the first place. This time around, the magic bullet is contraction. If you’ve ever read Twain’s essay on the literary offenses of Fenimore Cooper, you’ll recognize Cooper’s Indians as described by Twain as the intellectual ancestors of baseball’s owners – they persist in doing the same stupid things even after it’s obvious that any chance for success is long past.

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Don’t worry. I’ve already started writing a pit thread tentatively titled, “Bud, the day you die, I will piss on your grave as often as possible until the police drag me away.”

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Sofa King’s started the Pit thread on this already. :slight_smile:

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The punchline to this ridiculous charade, of course, is that the much-publicized vote the owner held didn’t actually decide anything.

No teams were scheduled for buyout. They didn’t even decide which teams to get rid of, since, of course, there aren’t any two teams that need to be gotten rid of. If the “problems” were serious enough to get rid of teams they’d have chosen the teams to get rid of by now.

This was merely the first PR move in the upcoming battle with the players’ union.