Quote:
Originally Posted by Charley575
I generally agree with you but there IS an issue with roster continuity in the smaller markets. Essentially, the smaller market teams serve as a kind of AAAA level whose function is to expose prospects to major league competition so that the TRUE major league teams will know what they are bidding on 4-5 years later. Fans in these markets can have no attachment to players because they will be gone in a few years, and I DO believe that these 5 year tear down and rebuild cycles are the primary driver of all the empty stadiums you see in the smaller markets.
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I hear this, sort of, but in practice what I see is not so much small market teams being shut out but teams that made bad decisions being shut out for a while due to the relative slowness in which things change in baseball. The biggest example of this is Miami. I'm sorry but on no planet is freaking *Miami* a small market. They're poorly run and as a result can't draw flies but no, they're not small. Kansas City is small and they are terrible right now but 4 years ago they won the World Series. Baltimore really isn't all that small and is terrible now but as of 2016 they'd made the playoffs in 3 of the previous 5 seasons. Probably the "best" example of this is the Mariners, but as a Mariners fan I can tell you that a. when they did win games they were the largest-market team in the league, and b. they went through two horrible GMs and yeah, that's what mismanagement gets you.
Anyway, all of that is more of an argument for better revenue sharing than contraction. Contraction is not so easy to undo once you do it and right now I feel like we've got a good ratio of teams per population. Both the NFL and NBA do fine with similar numbers of teams (the NBA in particular could probably expand to twice its size if they set up a promotion/relegation system a la European football, but that's pie in the sky thinking). Moving a team out of a city creates a ton of resentment and disbanding that team altogether creates even more. I think that's a lever that should be pulled only under extreme measures - the Pilots in 1969, for instance, or the Expos in the early 2000s (in both cases the league relocated the teams but that's kind of my point - those are the closest situations we had over the past 50 or 60 years, and they were still kind of far off).