The Small Market: Life and Death of the Sporting World (Part IV)

Preserve your product, small-market owners. You are not the product. If fans turn against the players, they turn against the sport (once again: if you’re an NBA fan, you know this). Shoot, MLB fans know it too: MLB owners - NFL owners too, to an extent - were just smart enough to frame their grievances in a manner that didn’t hurt the game. They blamed large-market owners…which isn’t much better, but is much more palatable…because it doesn’t hurt the product.

Shoot, an argument could be made that it helps. Fans rally around their teams as the David vs. Goliath narrative takes over. Everyone gets involved and picks up their slingshots. Easy stories to write, interesting plotlines to develop…win-win.

The Small Market: Life and Death of the Sporting World (Part III)

Seriously, what costs more: one good scouting person or five good players?

No one, but no one, gets this better than the Tampa Bay Rays (please let someone be smart enough to get that team a stadium in Westshore or Channelside). Draft, groom, bring them up, sign the best ones, and trade the rest for more players who they can…groom, bring them up, sign if they’re good enough, and so on. That’s how you compete with a low payroll….which could be higher if owners weren’t greedy.

The Small Market: Life and Death of the Sporting World (Part II)

It’s these fans - and fans like them in other cities - that keep the sports world going. Fans in places like Milwaukee, Orlando, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Kansas City have as much to do with the success of sports franchises as fans in the cities mentioned above. They go out and they support their teams…

“…no. they don’t. No one goes to the games in the small markets and that’s why their revenues are lower…”

Anyone with half a background in business or economics knows that the statement in quotes is patently false. Many factors contribute to sports team revenues, and in the cases of some teams they make a profit before they sell one ticket thanks to their leagues’ revenue-sharing policies. People stay away from games for one of two reasons: either the team isn’t good or the prices are too high - and it’s more the latter than the former. This is a rather basic concept in economics: teams charge the highest amount that the largest number of fans will pay for tickets. If the ticket prices are low enough, people will come. If the team is good enough, people will come.

There are exceptions, but there are also reasons for those exceptions. I would list some, but this is going to be long enough as is. I’ll instead jump into the main reason why small-market attendance is down in many cases, and also introduce that group as the entity that works as hard to ruin sports as small-market fans do to keep sports going…and they won’t have to look far to find this group.

I’m talking about small-market owners.

Small-market owners want to have their cake, eat it, and have the cake be provided for free. The obvious poster child for this is Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, who’s made a complete [donkey] of himself in the past year and a half. By the way, honorable mention goes to the Spurs owner (whose name I forget) for singing the woes of the small market while being blinded by the four titles his team has won since 1999.

I could talk about individual small-market owners all day, but I’m at about 900 words so…small-market owners complain that they can’t make money, can’t win, and/or can’t keep their best players. The NBA has a unique problem that I’ll avoid for the sake of brevity (a concept which quickly - and often - goes out the window when I write, but whatever), but generally speaking these owners go about the process all wrong.

If you know you’re basically being subsidized by your league, give the fans a break. I don’t know the core financials of any sports teams, but I will say that no team whose subsidy exceeds its expenses should charge fans more than $50 for any ticket. You’re already making a profit: give the fans the maximum opportunity to enjoy your team. You still get that bit of ticket money, not to mention the added income that comes from other gameday functions. To do anything else is to simply be greedy.

As far as winning goes…put some money in your scouting departments. This is obvious in baseball, but it works in football and basketball as well. Getting good scouts is by far the easiest and most cost-effective way to save money on talent. Even large-market teams get this: look at the Dallas Cowboys. After dealing with Roy Williams’s incompetence, they gave a chance to a small-school guy. Small-school guy ripped shop and became one of the league’s better WRs. His name is Miles Austin. This season, Austin gets hurt. The Cowboys (with help from Norv Turner) have this other small-school guy…who rips shop and may well become one of the league’s better WRs. His name is Laurent Robinson. Meet the new Miles Austin, same as the old Miles Austin. Not only is Robinson good, but he’s cheap. Obviously, not every team can then sign a guy to a long-term deal like the Cowboys did with Austin. That’s cool: s’why there are things called trades. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Seriously, what costs more: one good scouting person or five good players?

The Small Market: Life and Death of the Sporting World (Part I)

*This was originally finished a month and a half ago (as people will notice with the mention of the Packers as Super Bowl champions), but never released. Sigh.
 

I’ve been trying to think of something to write. I’m about tired of talking about dating/relationship topics and I haven’t felt like delving back into the one big topic I was writing on at some point (perhaps this would be a good time to pass on what I’ve already written on that to my prospective collaborator, but I digress). So I racked my brain and thought - what better to write about than…

…sports.

I try to stay away from sports on here (especially football, since I do something on that every week), but I think there’s an interesting topic on which I can come up with a few words…and maybe it’ll have some non-sporting application.

(Ed. note: there are four parts due to the length of the piece.)

The Whitney Houston Post

I originally planned on writing about Jeremy Lin and the craze involving him...and I will, assuming that circumstances still warrant in about a week. However, that all changed when news broke tonight that Whitney Houston died.

In the last two and a half years we've lost the two biggest black musical voices of the 80s (I'm only using race as a divider because Madonna would likely be the biggest female voice). I'm not going to write about the parallels between Michael Jackson and Whitney, even though there are quite a few. This is going to be all Whitney - well, it'll be all Whitney as far as my memories.