[canadiancreed]

Originally Posted by stevebydac

Good point about it being a hockey area. But aren't "performance struggles" the fault of the club? Make the club better, and attendance would improve, no?

Possibly. Toronto baseball attendance isn't like say Chicago where you'll have folks show up regardless of how horrible the team is, they'll demand a winner. Funny enough there's a lot of those fan that will not expect the same from other teams in that market. Weird that.

Originally Posted by stevebydac

And (I'm not from Toronto) can you please explain the demographics change? How is that different from what other cities face?

I was wondering about that as well but I'd assume it's about the population of Toronto have over half of it's population being born outside the country.

Originally Posted by stevebydac

LGO, but their attendance drop coincided with their performance drop.

Actually the first year is subpar performance, they had 50k per game attendance. The next year? 39k. How did they lose 20% of their attendance per game in one year? Have a look at the year.

1994 SkyDome 50,573
1995 SkyDome 39,257

Originally Posted by stevebydac

They aren't Tampa Bay or Florida who have always struggled with attendance.

They have great attendance when they consistently win, and by win I mean pennants, world series, and what not. .500 seasons dont' cut it. They didn't break the two million a year mark until they were in contention for a pennant in 1984 (granted they still in the wind tunnel that was Exhibition Stadium), but even in the SkyDome their attendance figures were bouyed first by the novelity, then the winning of four pennants, two AL flags and two WS in five years (1989-93). The reason that we're not seeing returns to sub two million attendance figures is because with the SkyDome, your not freezing your ass off for games in April and May. That Lake Ontario breeze can get quite nippy.

Originally Posted by stevebydac

Good point about it being a hockey area. But aren't "performance struggles" the fault of the club? Make the club better, and attendance would improve, no?

Possibly. Toronto baseball attendance isn't like say Chicago where you'll have folks show up regardless of how horrible the team is, they'll demand a winner. Funny enough there's a lot of those fan that will not expect the same from other teams in that market. Weird that.

Originally Posted by stevebydac

And (I'm not from Toronto) can you please explain the demographics change? How is that different from what other cities face?

I was wondering about that as well but I'd assume it's about the population of Toronto have over half of it's population being born outside the country.

Originally Posted by stevebydac

So far we've determined that they used to be one of the top-attended teams in the league, the attendance dropped coinciding with poor baseball team building, and now you're showing they were able to spend with the biggest clubs in the league.

Some counterpoints:

1) Attendance dropped with the strike aftermath. Poor team building and inability to spend like drunken sailors has kept them there.
2) They were also able to spend with the big boys when baseball salaries for stars were a few million a year. Now when you have to spend that for average/below average players, and the revenue amount has stayed static, it's not happening. There's only one place that people will spend stupid amounts of cash on seats, and thats' down the street from the Skydome.

Also their revenue stream is not in American currency, but their salaries are. It's not an issue now due to Canadian currency being buoyed by oil and the weakness of the US dollar, but that's always going to be a concern and is a handicap that no-one else will face in the league.

So I guess my point is that your statement that they could spend with the big boys is almost two decades out of date.

Originally Posted by stevebydac

And while I was not aware that there is some anti-Toronto sentiment in Canada, there is still only one baseball club in the entire country. I'm sure good marketing could find a few handfuls of baseball fans (among 33,000,000) who aren't ready to nuke their country's largest city.

I'm not putting as much weight into the whole "we hate Toronto so we wont' root for a Toronto team over a yankee one" as the main reason for that.....well ok maybe some hardline folks in Quebec that hate anything Canada but thats' an irrelevant minority. There is baseball interest but outside central Canada the interest is split. Vancouver area has some folks that follow the Mariners. The Twins have some folks in southern Winnipeg. Southwestern Ontario has had Tiger fans that date back generations (and made for interesting family dinners in 1987 I'm told), and out here in the East Coast, they advertise getaways to fly to Boston to catch a game due to the amount of Red Sox fans here.

However the amount of baseball interest now is a pale shadow of what it was pre-strike. In the early nineties there were I cant' speak for everyone in this country, but when the strike occurred, there wasn't' one fan that was into the sport that said enough and gave up interest in the sport. The Expos debacle only helped to cement such a result across the country with the impression that MLB has pretty much given up on having Canadian markets as viable markets. For example, in 1990, there were ten Canadian teams in the MLB minor league system:

AAA
Ottawa(07)
Calgary(02)
Edmonton(04)
Vancouver(99)

AA
London(93)

A
Hamilton(92)
St. catherines(99)
Welland(94)

Rookie
Lethbridge(98)
Medicine Hat(02)

The numbers in brackets is when the teams left; some for US based locations, others for the abyss that is dissolution. As you can see within six years of the strike, 60% were gone, and the last team left after ten years(Ottawa) was, to put it bluntly, on life support and should have moved long before it did. And this is after decades of baseball being nurtured as the summer sport here, with a rich history spanning back as far as the early beginnings of professional ball. All slowly washed away with greed and slight disregard. It's not just that there's no support for Toronto, it's that there's no support for professional baseball. There seems to be some teams holding on in the independent ranks so there's hope of a recovery, but I don't' see it anytime soon.

Originally Posted by stevebydac

Using your 80% figure only boosts the Cubs/White Sox higher than Toronto (and Boston BTW). It doesn't boost the others enough. So Toronto is still, then, the 9th largest MLB market, still only one slot behind Boston.

Are you basing this upon population figures? If so, the NHL has proven that population = market isn't' an assessment that should ever be used.

Originally Posted by Johnny Canuck

It's quite true that Toronto won't be able to quite compete with the Yankees & Red Sox financially, but that is hardly the only way to success. IMHO, the Blue Jays have to be better at drafting & developing their own talent - that is the way to compete.

Indeed and it's a way that they should be very familiar with. It's largely how they made it to their zenith int he mid 80's to early 90's. A competent front office will be needed here though, and that hasn't existed since Pat Gillick left.