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Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.Monday, July 06, 2009The Cleveland market is not the problemI've been beating the Eric Wedge and Mark Shapiro drum quite a bit lately, including this morning, when I wondered why in the heck one or both of them haven't been fired yet.Cleveland Frowns, however, says that the problems lie elsewhere: But before becoming too shaken up by the prospect of either of these men hanging on to their jobs here in Cleveland, we recommend considering just how much we should expect from them and our baseball team that plays on the low end of what is unquestionably an uneven playing field . . . There's more to it than that -- some numbers talking about market size, mostly -- but the gist is that it's market size rather than Wedge and Shapiro that lies at the root of the Indians' losing ways. I guess I'd be more willing to buy that if (a) the Indians' biggest problem was losing its superstars as opposed to not even having their less-than-star-studded club play up to its potential; and (b) if the Indians' didn't field multiple enormously successful clubs since 1994 or so, with all of those teams playing under the same basic business dynamic as today's club. More generally, the Frowns' article makes a big effort to explain away much of the success of smaller market teams in the past couple of decades, discounting the Rays because they had so many high picks, discounting the Cardinals because they play in "the best baseball town in America" (never mind that it's a smaller town than Cleveland), both the Cardinals and Blue Jays because of new stadiums just prior to winning their titles and removing the Marlins and their two titles from consideration altogether because they were "unquestionably weird." Frowns doesn't explain how those titles were "weird" apart from the fact that their example cuts against their argument. I think the final nail in the coffin of that argument is the resort to football and basketball: Or, you might also protect yourself from such bad feelings the way we do here at Frowns, that is with a growing sense of apathy toward Major League Baseball as a whole, and especially in comparison to the NFL and NBA, leagues that understand that meaningful competition requires a level playing field. Number of teams who have won the World Series since 1990: 12 Number of teams who have won the Super Bowl since 1990: 12 Number of teams who have won the NBA Finals since 1990: 7 Level playing field, indeed. Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 1:33pm Comments
Cleveland Frowns said...
Craig, thanks. To address your comment in pieces: —- “I didn’t ignore the footnote, I simply missed it.” Sorry about that. I understand that there is a difference and I shouldn’t have assumed that you “ignored.” —- “The confluence of successful drafting in the dark years after his sell-off, with Loria’s willingness to spend big bucks for some high priced free agents” sounds like anything other than “weirdness.” It sounds like a pretty good game plan for any small to mid market team.” Agreed, but my point is that such a plan is difficult to execute at a Championship level, and the Marlins were aided by two strange things that made it easier for them to do it: One, the unprecedented fire-sale after the 2007 title (that in addition to high draft picks landed Burnett, and Derrick Lee among others), then two ownership changes that resulted in a new owner in 2002 who would spend bigger bucks to bring in the talent that put them over the top. This happened over three different regimes, not one regime “doing it right.” —- “The Indians, more than almost anyone else, showed that you can win without going crazy. They did so in 1995 and 1997 and 2007 and many many years in between. They showed that, yes, you can compete over the long grind of a 162 game season if properly constructed and properly coached.” Right. Again, the exception, not the rule. Which is why I’m inclined to stick with Shapiro and Wedge. —- “I’m sorry, but it wasn’t payroll that kept the Indians from winning the title in 1997, it was Jose Mesa and Tony Fernandez. That #### just happens. Same with 2007. Boston has a bigger media market, but a bunch of screaming New Englanders didn’t will them back from 3-1. Random chance in a short series was mostly responsible. This is where you’re the most wrong, of course, because everyone knows that it’s the Curse of Chief Wahoo that’s really behind Cleveland’s misery. http://www.clevelandfrowns.com/2008/06/curse-of-chief-wahoo.html /*had to* Thanks again for the link. Posted 07/06 at 05:54 PM
Cleveland Frowns said...
Also, Bartman! Can’t forget how Bartman figured into that second Marlins title. Posted 07/06 at 05:56 PM
Colin Wyers said...
Toronto is one of the top five MLB markets, looking at the MSA and media market data, IIRC. But really, is there any evidence that salary caps improve competative balance? Looking at some of the academic research on the topic, such as this: http://sandcat.middlebury.edu/econ/repec/mdl/ancoec/0402.pdf suggests otherwise. Posted 07/07 at 01:18 AM
Cleveland Frowns said...
Colin: As best I can tell, that study only measures balance of the league in a given year, and does not at all track individual teams’ mobility from year to year, which is the kind of “competitive balance” that’s more desirable as far as I’m concerned, the kind that was the subject of my post, and the kind that’s more endangered by the lack of a cap. I don’t find that study particularly useful, and find it interesting that, with all of the talk about stats proving that salary caps are ineffective, that this is the best that folks have come up with so far. Posted 07/07 at 07:47 AM
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PS: Just want to clarify that we only “attempt to explain away” the success of the Marlins and Cardinals after including them in the original calculation that yields an average media market size of 7th for WS winners since 1990.
After taking those two statistical outliers out of the analysis (for what we suppose are at least decent reasons, as stated) then the number goes down below 5th, just further illustrating the point.
We didn’t have media market numbers for Toronto vis a vis the U.S. markets, but we don’t think it’s unfair to assume 1) that it’s a bigger market than Cleveland, and more importantly 2) that the opening of the Skydome in Toronto was a truly extraordinary event that allowed the team substantially more freedom to spend on its roster than it would have otherwise had.