I don’t care how smart the Brewers are, there just isn’t the revenue potential in Milwaukee that there is in NY—even if you put two teams in the city.

I’m aware that not everything in life is fair, but we generally try to minimize unfair advantages in sports. We wouldn’t let the Yankees hit with aluminum bats, play with 26 roster spots, or get 28 outs in a game—why would we do nothing as they sit on top of a gold mine that at most three or four other teams can stake a claim to?

At some point, I think you start to disillusion fans in legitimately smaller markets. I’m sure that Brewers fans would have loved to keep CC around, but they had literally no chance at re-signing him as long as the Yankees have that much more money than the Brewers. And I have trouble blaming the Brewers until you add at least about 8 million folks to the Milwaukee metro area. So small market teams get run like farm teams for NY, Chicago, and LA. The system is balanced just enough that the small market teams occasionally have a good 2-3-year run, but it seems like eventually fans in the smaller markets will get disillusioned if this continues forever.

As for Tex, consider this: what if the Expos had moved to Brooklyn instead of DC? Would the Yankees still have been able to outbid the Orioles?

Tampa has shown that this is possible.

As I noted above, Tampa has shown that this is possible when you average 97 losses a season for a decade. Can we agree that no fanbase actually wants to sit through that?

Once the Rays have to draft at the bottom of the first round for 3-4 seasons, they’ll be the Minnesota Twins. Which is fine if you’re looking to average 84 wins/season (which is what they have over the last decade) in a weak division, but every offseason you watch teams from bigger markets take quality players away from you. Even knowing that that’s the right move, that is not a fun fan experience. Over that same period, the Yankees have won 96 games/season and I would have a really difficult time buying that Brian Cashman could have won 96 games/season on Minnesota’s budget.

The best case scenario for small market fans is that 90% of their good players will finish their careers elsewhere, and they will get an occasional playoff run while averaging about .500 in the long-run—if they are run really intelligently. If they are run poorly, then they’ll be nearly unwatchable.

Let’s take Steve Phillips with the Mets as the benchmark for a bad GM with a big payroll. (Since as far as I can tell, a lot of people consider Phillips to be a bad GM.) Phillips took over in ‘97 and was fired in mid-2003, so let’s say that he was more or less responsible for the Mets from ‘98 to 2004. Over that time period, the Mets averaged 82 wins a season and had a WS berth. And they’ve had a winning record every season since then despite mediocre-at-best management.

Obviously I can imagine a big payroll being mangled even worse than that, and I can imagine a small market team being more successful than the Twins over the last decade, but it sure seems to me that a very good case scenario for a small market team is a very bad case scenario for a NY team, and that doesn’t sit too well with me.

that’s a pretty good indication that the draft isn’t as much of a crapshoot as you seem to be insinuating.

they had a really bad stretch from the mid 90s to mid 00, but recently they been doing fairly well, Cano / Wang / Chamberlian is better than what many teams have churn out recently. and they still have Hughes and guys like Cabrera / Kennedy / Gardner / a boatload of RPs. after 06 they dumped Sheffield and RJ for some prospects (non of them has truely panned out though, Ohlendorf was bad and then traded for Nady / Marte was the best result so far , though there’s still hope they get some RPs out of the bunch)