Upon Expansion and Bad Sports Cities

Rather than letting this develop in the comments, I think the topic deserves its own post.

In my last post, I criticized Arizona D-backs fans for not filling their stadium during the NLCS. I said that Phoenix is not a good sports town. . In the comments of the post, one of my readers took exception to this assertion. It grew into a discussion of expansion teams and contractionThe most recent comment is copied below :

"These expansion teams exist b/c the greedy, short-sighted pigs who own mlb teams can charge huge expansion fees to some rich guy looking for a new toy or status symbol and then divide the expansion fee equally among themselves without any regard for the impact on the sport or the league-wide diminution in the quality of play caused by expansion. Then the guy who bought the team has to operate on a tight budget b/c he is already out the franchise fee and the team has no existing fanbase and finds it difficult to get a following due to the restraints on the budget caused in part by the huge expansion fee. I agree that there should be fewer teams, but the bigger problem in baseball is the lack of revenue sharing which creates the large divide between the big and small market teams. What did both Arizona and Florida do immediately after winning the world series? Dump salary and rebuild because they lost big $ in the years they won by paying salaries they could not afford. KC is not a good example of a team where there should be no franchise. KC was a great baseball town and an incredible franchise until it could no longer keep up with the changing finances of the league. KC is an example of a team hurt by the lack of revenue sharing. The fan support would be there if the team had the ability to compete, which it can't because of the lack of revenue sharing and/or salary cap. Go look up their wins and losses and attendance figures in the 70's and 80's before the big market teams really pulled away from the small market teams when they began to rake in the big bucks in the 90's with their cable tv contracts (and now their own networks). I'm pretty sure that the figures will back me up here. But I digress.

This started with my taking exception with your calling Phoenix a bad sports town b/c it couldn't sell out games. My point is that if you're gonna expand into these markets (and I agree that there has been too much expansion), it will take time for the teams to get a large and loyal following and that it's not fair to look down at the people who live in these towns until the team is strongly established there. How do you think the Yankees' attendance was when they were playing in the Giants' shadows during the first 20 years of existence? Should they have been eliminated b/c they were a loser franchise which drew virtually no fans at the Polo Grounds? These things take time.

I read several years ago that an independent study done for baseball in the 90's as to what city could best support an expansion frachise based on population and wealth in the region concluded that New York could take a third team before any of the cities without a team could take a first team. Living in a wealthy region with 18 million people does not make us better sports fans."

I want to address a few of the points raised in this comment.

• First, there is revenue sharing in baseball. The Yankees pay other teams almost $80 million each year. Add this to the luxury tax the team pays and it amounts to over $100 million. This is not a small figure by any stretch.
• In 2006, MLB transferred a total of $323 million in revenue sharing. Again, this is a huge amount of money.
• As for the Kansas City Royals: 1) their owner is the CEO of Wal-Mart. I hear that company earns a little bit of money 2) despite receiving the largest revenue sharing payments in 2004 and 2005,the Kansas City Royals reduced their payroll by 23%. other teams do the same, pocketing money which should be used to improve the team, or dumping it in to Gil Meche 3) the Royals have been out of it since approximately 1993 with the Cone dump, but really havent made an impact since 86-87. Scheurholtz killed them when he left.
• I can't see how a comparison of the Yankees in the 1910's and the glut of baseball teams now really applies. There is no other team in Phoenix to draw baseball fans with no previous allegiance away. New Mexico, Utah and Nevada have no team. Why can't they draw to Arizona? Hell, where are the 2001 bandwagon fans?
• Living in the NY metro-area does not make us better sports fans. However, I don't know if you ever see the NBA Suns games, or the NHL Coyotes games, or the Arizona Cardinal games. The Phoenix crowds are pretty poor almost across the board. Again, if you can't find 40,000 people in your major American city to go to a baseball game with the World Series on the line, you are a bad sports town.