Pittsburgh fans looked orgasmic the other night watching their Pirates defeat Cincinnati in the National Conference wild card play-in game. Forty-thousand Pittsburgh faithful watched in person. So where were they during the regular season?
Out of 15 National Conference (NC) teams Cincinnati ranked 10th in attendance, Pittsburgh 11th. What the heck? That's success? At least it's not as embarrassing as the attendance ranks of the American Conference (AC) teams in last night's do-or-die play-in game in Cleveland: Tampa last, Cleveland second to last. Even Houston in its first season in the AC was higher despite 111 losses and only one sellout, the final game against ... the Yankees.
And yet we are subjected to the usual drivel:
Small Markets Find Ways to Compete
By TYLER KEPNER
Published: October 1, 2013 New York Times
Commissioner Bud Selig ... can add another bullet point to his career résumé: the 2013 baseball playoffs include more teams from the bottom 10 in payrolls than the top 10.
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Nice system, Bud. Combined, the two starting pitchers in Cleveland last night won a total of 13 games. The winner should be swept in the first round by top seed Boston, fourth in AC attendance.
So is this really a nifty form of competitive entertainment or a game for suckers to think they can beat the house, the house here being the Major Baseball League (MBL), which "levels the playing field" by manipulating rules to introduce more randomness in determining the wild card team? Ironically, this system so weakens the eventual wild card team that the one seed has a big advantage and there is less randomness overall.
The national pastime depends increasingly on socialism, making it all the more odd that people in a place like Pittsburgh would revel in the result. Was Pittsburgh being abused when it was expected to compete without handouts or is it being abused now? The origin of each Yankee revenue sharing dollar goes not from the Yankees, but from a Yankee fan, to a small market team. Not all Yankee fans are running hedge funds. Just like not all Pittsburgh fans are working in steel mills.
The objective of the MBL is to have as many people for as long as possible think (hope) that their team can win. It's largely a sucker game.
Many Yankee fans are in despair that the team will follow through on its plan to get the 2014 team payroll under 189 million dollars. That would probably be the highest in the AC, exceeded only by the Dodgers. This is really where the "level playing field" metaphor comes in. From The Times article:
“It’s not easy, and the playing field’s not level, but a team like Pittsburgh can never use that as an excuse,” said Bob Nutting, the Pirates’ owner
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Nut man, just mentioning the "level playing field" means you're making an excuse. Grow the heck up. Why should Yankee fans send their hard earned money to you via the Steinbrenner Kids? As I've said many times about this issue: there's a reason it's called the big leagues.
Get rid of all this junk: player draft in reverse order of record, revenue sharing, national TV money sharing, merchandise money sharing. Who are we kidding about that national TV money? Pay the teams based on their TV rating when televised. What's that, some teams are on TV more that others? Yeah, there's a reason for that: people want to see them, even if it's just to root against them.
I don't see how anyone can characterize the system a success when the two teams, Cleveland and Tampa, in last night's game were dead last in attendance. Can you? Maybe their fans realize that their teams are mediocre and not likely to defeat the one seed in the upcoming five game series. Maybe those fans are not such suckers after all.
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