Baseball Journal--Yankee Rant Take 1

[I did this not once, but twice during the season. Pretty much out of nowhere, I just went off the rails ranting about Yankee baseball economics. Not the team, just the way the franchise is run and how it effects the rest of the league. I don't think I ever really came to an actual point in either. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do so here in revision either, so I'm pretty much putting these up as is. This is a big subject. Leaving baseball economics as they are will have its fans, but also has significant risks.]


5-8-12

"Don't be a Yankees fan." A co-worker told me he was planning on getting into baseball and needed to pick a favorite team. [He didn't do either.] I'm not exactly an expert on that subject, but I am sure about Yankee fans. They're bitter, really. What do you really get to enjoy as a Yankees fan? Fans of other teams accusing you of buying championships? Getting into the playoffs? Happens every year or the manager is fired. Winning the World Series? That's already happened 27 times. Winning the most World Series? You already have twice as many as the next most, the Cardinals.

Given how much your players cost and your winning tradition, winning the World Series every year is the only satisfactory outcome. Anything less is a wasted season. Better spend more in the off season. Beat your competitors via the balance sheet.

This is MLB's conundrum. The Yankees are their most popular team with the most fans. When the Yankees aren't in the Series, national ratings drop badly. I think this is largely because Yankee fans won't watch if their team isn't involved. They're not baseball fans; they're Yankee fans. So if the MLB instituted a hard salary cap and NFL-like parity, the Yankees would have to have more normal franchise up's and down's. This would irritate the large base of Yankee fans and drop post-season ratings.

But by continuing the current structure, the Yankees and other big market teams can always spend their way out organizational mistakes. Smaller market teams will briefly catch fire every so often, but won't be able to maintain success as they lose their best players to big market free agency and pay dearly whenever they make a contractual mistake. The potential popularity of these teams is being throttled.

To compare with the NFL, probably half the teams in the league have a sizable nationwide fan base. In baseball, maybe four or five teams could truly claim that. And given how long some of these teams have been around compared to football, it's truly pitiful. Professional sports sells competition. It has to be fair on some level to be interesting. If the Yankees put the rest of the league out of business, nobody's going to pay to watch them take infield 162 times a year. Likewise, a travelling road show playing against completely inferior opponents would have all the repeat entertainment value of a Harlem Globetrotters game. How many Washington Generals fans are there out there?

Every time a small market baseball team goes into a losing cycle, their fan base, down to its civic core gets razed along with it. It's very hard to build up a winning tradition and pass it along generationally and geographically. As good as the Rays have been for the last few years, they have few fans around the country and have trouble attracting them in Tampa Bay, where large numbers of transplanted and retired Yankee fans show up to root against the home team. The Rays are probably desperate enough for paying customers that they welcome them. The Marlins, meanwhile, have won two World Series almost in spite of the local population's indifference.

The Yankee's popularity is ultimately good for the MLB as a corporation, but bad for the sport in general. Sort of like how Tiger Woods is to the PGA or Dale Jr. is to NASCAR. Any sport cannot allow the majority of its popularity to concentrate on any one entity without risking overall unpopularity. Even as popular as the Lakers are in the NBA, the league makes sure they are always challenged by good teams. I'm not advocating for fewer Yankee fans, but rather for more fans of the other teams. For that, baseball needs more fans.

While the Yankees get quite a bit of exposure, not everyone has access to the YES network to see them on a daily basis. Most baseball fans or potential fans live in some other team's market. A casual or new fan is much more likely to support the local/regional team if they're winning. But if they're always bad or go boom and bust (like the Marlins), your new potential fan is much less likely to get involved in any way other than a tertiary manner. Obviously all managements and owners aren't equal, but why would potential new and more competent owners take over if certain teams are always able to outspend them because of their location and league rules?

I don't think the Yankees lose fans if all the teams in the MLB all played by the same economic rules. I do think that other teams have a decent chance of increasing theirs.

Unfortunately, this is going to be continued.