This is a bad take. KC won a WS and went back to back. Cleveland has been to multiple WS during that time and a great sellout steak. Milwaukee and Tampa Bay might be the best teams in baseball. Pittsburgh had a sustained run five years ago. There’s an ebb and flow to small market baseball organizations.
It's the poor man's/moneyball formula. Load up on cheap talent from the draft and round out your roster with lesser or relatively unknown guys with below market contracts then hope to catch lightning in a bottle once or twice over a period of a few years until your young studs reach free agency and teams with deep pockets like NY, Boston, and LA back up the brinks truck and lure away your talent with contracts big enough to practically buy some of the small teams.
Once your primo talent is gone you rebuild, start the cycle over, and hope to catch lightning again in 7 or 8 years.
And "small market" in this case is 2x Buffalo metro area plus another city of buffalo's worth of population or two.
not really. you have to incl rochester in there. pitts includes that big of an area when doing their metro...so does cleveland and so does st louis.
either way they are all small market teams.
I mentioned cleveland as a slight exception there--but you are correct i shoulda emphasized that more. KC had 2 good years and look at the horrific fall they took cuz they couldnt afford anyone.They are consistently poor. TB isnt small market...they have a third of FL. Milwaukee is great right now....thatll last a year or two.last 30 they have been downright mediocre.Which is my point.
You can't count a city 60 miles away as part of your market for baseball. Baseball is played every night. You aren't getting Rochester people driving 2 hours on a work night.
Even Rochester plus Buffalo is not as big as St. Louis. It is in the neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, but I'm not sure those towns get teams if expansion happen today.
Oh I don't know. For basketball, Oklahoma City just got in, they're only 1.3M population (metro).
Lots of oil money there.
Lots of oil/gas/wind money in Fort Worth, we're not gettin' any teams.
First off the Dallas/Ft.Worth metroplex has 4 major pro sports teams there, MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL, why would you add another??
Oklahoma City has a varied corporate market for sponsorships and there's only 1 major pro sports team there and in the state, the NBA, it's also located at the crossroads of Hwy 35 and 40, which makes it accessible for traveling.
Buffalo already has 2 major league franchises, there isn't enough of corporate sponsorships to go around for a 3rd team. Although the area is making a comeback the fact is the area is still reeling from 1970's.
I realize Fort Worth would have a hard time supporting a second major sports franchise and don't really expect it to happen. But there's also a pretty strong rivalry between Ft Worth and Dallas. The founder of Ft Worth's newspaper used to have travel to Dallas occasionally. Legend holds that he disliked the city so much that he would take a sack lunch so he wouldn't need to spend even a dime in Dallas.
As for the bolded, it cracks me up how Texans build up the state but in reality different cities (Houston-Dallas-San Antonio-Austin-El Paso-Beaumont-Austin) all basically hate each other. They're united as Texans and divided by region. Even the colleges all hate each other. The Texas-A&M rivalry split the SEC and the Big 12 as just an example of the rivalry in the state.