To appreciate being bad you have to have been really good, the Cowboy’s owner has put them in the ditch with a boot in the face forever and he’s proud of it.
The Seattle Mariners left so many runners on base last year, they would aptly be retitled the Seattle Marooners.
That win, however, was epic. Note these two hilariously deapan concurrent entries in their Wikipedia page [the “Reds” is one identity of the Washington Generals]:
Klotz hit the winning basket in theuir only win in decades. Klotz is their only retired jersey number. 
The article you link to has both conceptual and factual errors in it. (e.g., Vernon Wells’ salary went up, not because he was traded to a big market, but because his contract was back loaded.) There is also no discussion of the new CBA, that increases the luxury tax to 50% for repeat offenders.
The reason big-market teams (or it should be successfully marketed teams) have higher payrolls, is that the potential revenue gained (or maintained) justifies the cost in adding payroll. An empty seat to the Red Sox is going to cost them $100, while an empty seat to the KC Royals will only cost them $30.
And if you are a contending team, you’re much more willing to overspend on a top player to improve from, say 88 wins to 90 (and a playoff spot) vs a non-contending team that projects to win 75 games.
Here’s an article by Dave Cameron, from Fangraphs.com that gives a better take on Payroll Efficiency, by Playoff Odds
But the expense of adding payroll to “go for it” is getting higher and higher because of a) the aforementioned luxury tax increase – which puts 50% additional cost, and b) the trend of smaller market teams re-signing their top, young talent to contracts, before FA. This means that top Free Agents are getting older, as a group, and teams signing them to long contracts are almost guaranteed to have more and more dead money on their payroll in the second half of the contract years.
Because they can’t escape the football powerhouse known as Ball State University!
IU is the only big-name school we can consistently beat so I had to throw that in
Good Lord, this must have been the most uninformed study in the history of studies. The authors could not possibly have been baseball fans.
Both these examples are almost dishonest.
A-Rod was… well, it’s hard to parse what they’re saying there but I think the idea was that he was only a high-potential player. In fact Rodriguez was widely regarded at the time as the best player in baseball. (Beginning the following year Barry Bonds would be the best player in baseball, but that’s now how it looked when the Rangers signed him.) A-Rod was a 25-year-old shortstop with a batting title and incredible skills who would have won the 1996 MVP Award but one of the writers screwed up his ballot. (Really, that happened.) He was the most sought-after free agent in the history of baseball.
Vernon Wells did not get a pay increase because he moved to Anaheim. He got a pay increase because the Blue Jays gave it to him. Wells’s pay increase was part of the contract Toronto gave him, a 7-year deal with an annualized value of $18 million. He went to Anaheim not because Toronto couldn’t afford him - the Blue Jays turned around and gave all the money they saved to Jose Bautista, and have since vastly increased their payroll - but because the Blue Jays believed he was about to fall apart and wanted to get rid of him. They turned out to be correct; Wells has since been one of the worst players in the major leagues and the Angels dumped him.
And of course, here’s the real problem; there’s no evidence the movement of these players conferred an advantage on the larger market team. When A-Rod went from Seattle to Texas, Seattle then set an American League record for the mot wins in a season, while Texas finished last (not that it was A-Rod’s fault, as he played brilliantly.) Wells going to Anaheim clearly hurt the Angels - Wells was a disaster, and the Angels didn’t get better, while Toronto did not get appreciably worse (at least the year after.)
There is no doubt large markets and large payrolls help teams. The Yankees have won championships solely because of the size of their market, and it’s significantly helped the Red Sox and Dodgers. There absolutely is a correlation between market size and sustained success. But there’s plenty of evidence you can win in smaller markets - St. Louis is a small city by MLB standards, San Francisco is a smaller market than LA but much more recently successful, Oakland builds good teams out of nothing, Tampa Bay contends every year with low attendance, etc. - and plenty of evidence you can fail spectacularly despite having lots of money. The Angels have gotten worse the more money they’ve spent, the Mets haven’t beaten many teams lately, and the aforementioned Blue Jays (a weird candidate for being called a small market, it’s a big market) went out and spent a ton of money and promptly collapsed.
Yeah, I’m not commenting on the article, I was just trying to find a reference for somebody. Geez! 
Brett Favre? Brett Favre? There is a call for you!
The Lions didn’t used to be the worst team in the NFC Central (North). That distinction for years was Tampa Bay. They were the perennial sad sack team.
I hear they have gotten better since them. However, the Lions have not.
We got that, it’s just that the linked-article totally missed the mark.
I do think a lot of progress has been made on establishing competitive balance in baseball. The revenue sharing process is now taking quite a bit of money from the regional television income. The-re-interpretation of the Dodger’s cable deal just added an additional (over the old interpretation) $1.9 billion to the revenue-sharing pool over the length of the contract (20 years?)
Smaller market teams have to be cyclical in their approach to contending and spending. They can “afford” to take a few down years, with low payrolls, while they build up their core and young prospects, and then when they feel that core is talented enough, they dive into the FA market and overspend. But large market teams, will almost always try to avoid down periods, since the potential loss of gate, concessions and tv ad rates will be much higher than the smaller market clubs.
Overall, the big market teams will be contenders more often, and win more than their share of playoff spots and championships, but they’ll have to compete with the small market clubs that have waited for the upswing of their “cycles” and choose to “go for it.”
The problem is that with 30 teams in the league, the WS championship droughts may be very long. If everything were equal, a team could expect to win a WS every 30 years, or so. But with the big market teams winning twice as much, you could have 50-60 championships droughts, as a rule. Pittsburgh has won it all since 1979, and the Indians’ drought has been 60 years. How long does a fanbase hang in there? (The Red Sox fanbase endured an 86 year drought, but the running joke before the 2004 WS, was, “The Red Sox killed my father, and now they’re coming for me.”) Will other teams, in lesser baseball markets, be able to hold on to their fans?
First World Series win since 1918, but in the interim they had won pennants in '46, '67, '75, and '86.
As evidenced by the Chicago Cubs, you don’t even have to be a small market. Heck, the Mets are getting a little long from a championship - it’s been 28 years and I don’t like their chances anytime soon, so they’ll shortly be over the 30-year mark. The entire state of Texas hasn’t had a World Series win in almost a hundred combined years of pro ball. You simply have to be unlucky, or just have another team have a good run. Toronto’s championships in 1992 and 1993 mean, logically, that some other team has to go a long, long time without a World Series win - maybe it’s the Brewers, who Toronto just beat out of the division title in 1992. The Giants winning it twice in three years means someone else is out a championship, too. Maybe SF’s win in 2012 means the Tigers will skip a generation or two without a World Series win.
The sheer number of teams in modern North American sports leagues (they all have 30 teams except for the NFL, which has 32) absolutely guarantees long stretches of futility.
And while established franchises, with a century+ of history, seem to survive these droughts, I wonder how the expansion franchises hold up. Not to mention, in today’s world, it’s all about winning, whereas 60 years ago, it was more of just enjoying the game. Before there were baseball playoffs, a team played the entire season to try and WIN the league pennant. And then, as a bonus, you got to play in the WS. As a kid, in 1967, it felt like the Red Sox had WON a pennant more than they LOST the World Series to the Cardinals. In today’s 3+ tier playoff system, they would have played 162 games to just be the best of 5 and get seeded into a tournament. The introduction of divisions and playoffs in 1969, may have helped the game, but it cheapened the joy of a regular season. Now it’s all about winning a WS in Boston. Anything else is a lost season.
Well, some of them didn’t, though; many of them packed up and moved to greener pastures. The St. Louis Browns aren’t called that anymore.
The expansion teams with the longest droughts mostly do okay. Houston is the oldest team without a World Series win and is a viable franchise. Texas is as old, of course, if you count their Washington years, but they just won two pennants so not a great example. San Diego does okay, they’ve never won a World Series in over forty years. Montreal moved, but there was a lot more to that than a lack of on field success.
In the eyes of most fans an “expansion” franchise that has been around for 30 years is as much a part of the sports landscape as an original franchise. Most hockey fans cannot remember a time when the Philadelphia Flyers and Vancouver Canucks did not exist. To most baseball fans the Padres are as permanent a fixture in the league as the Phillies.
If one looks at more recent expansion, success is generally a function of how wise it was to put a team there in the first place. Tampa Bay is not looking like a beacon of hope, inasmuch as even when the team wins people don’t go (or, given the traffic there, CAN’T go) while Colorado appears to be healthy as can be. To take hockey examples, the Ottawa Senators have survived some atrocious ownership issues and a terribly located stadium because they’re a hockey team in Canada; the Dallas Stars have terrible attendance despite a history of success because they are a hockey team in Texas.
The NFL is a bit less market-sensitive because it’s more a TV show than a live sporting event, but even then the problem with Jacksonville isn’t that it’s an expansion franchise, it’s that Jacksonville is a terrible place to put a pro sports team by any logical analysis.
Gosh, I’m not sure that’s true at all. At least in baseball there has always been a pretty close correlation between winning and attendance; teams with dismal records generally did not draw well.
Regular season attendance ballooned AFTER the introduction of divisional play.
I don’t think most people woulod agree that more playoffs cheapens the regular season to a point, anyway) - especially the 1969 change. I certainly don’t agree. Maybe there would be joy in winning a pennant in a 15-team league, but how much joy is there in being in fourteenth place? Or in having a good team that finishes fifth?
I fully understand that adding a playoff tier to baseball increases the amount of teams and fan bases that follow their teams to October, but the cost is that the regular season was depreciated. Before the playoffs, each baseball season had a winner and a WINNER. Now there’s just a World Champion and 29 losers. With the two wild card system, you can play 162 games, finish 3rd in your division, get hot at the right time and end up as World Champion.
And I understand all about the money, it’s why virtually every college basketball conference has a tournament at the end of the season, whereas a generation ago, the ACC was one of the very few conferences with a tourney. Tournaments make extra money.
I think living in Boston colors your point of view here. The 67 team was not expected to do much, won the AL in dramatic fashion, and hadn’t been in the WS in twenty years. Under those circumstances your perception that getting to the WS was the big deal made perfect sense. Now things are different: Boston has been highly successful and making the playoffs or even the World Series doesn’t seem so much of a big deal.
But from what I’ve read about it, that was not the reaction of the players or fans of, say, the 1960 Yankees or the 1966 Dodgers…teams that had won the WS in the past and fully expected to do do again.
And while my Cub fan relatives and my KC fan friend would all love a World Series title in 2014 (good luck with THAT, guys), the reality is that they would be over the moon if their teams got into the World Series at all.
I’m not sure there was ever a time in any living person’s memory when the World Series was widely perceived as nothing more than icing on the cake.
This is another one of those questions that hit the SDMB, seem straightforward, but then are analyzed to the point that a definitive answer is almost impossible.
Recent decades is an important factor. In my mind, with the game being rigged by money (there are teams with a lot more money to throw around than others) that is an important factor. So, teams that are hugely unsuccessful with no valid excuse:
Basketball: The NY Knicks. Tons of money wasted, one of the most valuable franchises and have just pissed it away.
Baseball: Chicago Cubs. A rich franchise that produces nothing year after year. That is true not only in their history but, even with ownership changes, recent years have been a joke. Their south side neighbors that work with much less revenue have been much more successful.
Hockey: The Toronto Maple Leafs. Geez, they have everything going for them and can’t put it together.
Football: The Detroit Lions. I grew up a Lions fan. They have a great history. I want to love them. They have been to the depths so they have been able to get good draft picks. Yet, they can’t put it together. Too many major decisions blow up in their face. Recently the owner died (RIP). Maybe they can find a new start.
The Yankees and Dodgers of the early '60s are not good comps since they’d won WS championships in their recent past. But when I got to college in the early 70s I was curious if my perception was slanted, (because of my youth when the Sox won the pennant in '67) and searched out fans of the White Sox (WS losers in '59) the Reds (losers in '61) and their memories of their reactions were similar to mine.
The Sox survived a hotly contested, 4-team pennant race in 1967 to win the AL. They then lost to the Cardinals in 7 games, where the deciding factor was that their ace (Lonborg), had to start on 2 days rest vs Bob Gibson.
It’s not that the World Series was perceived as icing on the cake, it’s just that winning the regular season pennant was perceived as more of an accomplishment. The 2001 Seattle Mariners won 116 games, but were dumped in the first round of the playoffs, and no one, outside of the Northwest will remember them. The 1954 Cleveland Indians won 111 games (in just a 154 game schedule) and got to the World Series. They were swept by the NY Giants, but Baseball Historians still talk about Garcia, Lemon, Wynn and Feller.
No, they lost the ALCS. They won the first round against Cleveland.
This hijacks the thread but I really don’t get the “cheapening of the regular season” argument at all when we are so recently removed from the excitement in Pittsburgh over the Pirates’ playoff run. That just happened. Are you seriously telling me Pirates fans just saw the 2013 team as one of 29 losers, and not somehow dramatically different from Pirates teams from 1993 to 2012? You speak of Seattle; do you think Mariners fans do not still fondly speak of the wonderful 1995 stretch drive and the miraculous ALDS against the Yankees? Just one of 27 losers that year? Pshaw. Believe me, if the Blue Jays somehow make the playoffs this year, I will not write them off as just another loser if they blow out in the ALCS.
Making the playoffs, as opposed to not, MATTERS to fans. Making the World Series matters, even if you lose.
Up until 1969, MLB was the only major team sport that didn’t have a playoff tier. Of course, they cheapened the regular season, a bit, with 4 six team team divisions. Then they cheapened it even more when they introduced the w/c in 1998. I think that’s indisputable. And while the playoffs involve more teams and fan bases each year, what remains unsettled, is over time, fan bases of teams going through long World Championship droughts are no longer placated by playoff appearances or even WS losses.
The 2004 Red Sox tried to build a team that would be successful in the playoffs, rather than be dominant in the regular season. Outside of baseball, the aging 1968-69 Celtics, limited playing time for it’s old guys down the stretch, finished 4th in their division, and then had just enough to win the playoffs.