I was wandering around the Valley River Center a few days ago and, on something of a curious whim, decided to see if I could acquire a shiny new Colorado Rockies baseball hat (plenty of good seats still available on the bandwagon, folks). After a highly scientific survey of one store, and coming up short in my goal, I got frustrated and left, but the point still remains: Below racks of Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers hats, the headwear for the hottest team in baseball and National League champions could not be found.
Shop.mlb.com ahoy, then. Still, it brings up the question of small markets in sports, and leagues’ love-hate relationship with them.
The one thing I heard last week while Cleveland and Boston were slugging it out for the ALCS crown was how doomed the MLB would be if Cleveland and Colorado were fighting for the World Series. The argument was that TV ratings would take another dip because both teams are small market – err, make that non-national-market organizations. The common assumption, correct or incorrect, is that teams not from the huge population bases get ignored, especially in championship games or series.
Take this year’s NBA Finals, between Cleveland and San Antonio, as an example. Nielsen ratings for the 2007 Finals were down 27 percent compared to the year before, and set the mark for lowest ratings – a mark previously held by another San Antonio series, in which the Spurs played New Jersey in the 2003 Finals.
Market size is the knee-jerk response; San Antonio isn’t exactly a gigantic metropolis, nor is Cleveland. But, on the contrary, Cleveland features the single-brightest star in the league, LeBron James (and the rest of the LeBrons – business is my favorite) and San Antonio is routinely held up as the poster child for how a professional sports organization should be run – from personnel choices on the court to the franchise’s relationship with its city.
Surely the league’s single-biggest star and its so-called best team are enough to draw fans both in the arenas and on TV, right? Well, only if the basketball on display is actually good, unlike the slowed-down mess that series became. But that’s another matter.
The leagues only create the small-market issue for themselves by insisting on parity. Since the NFL instituted the salary cap in 1994, a generation of anti-dynasty teams have gone by – 14 different teams have appeared in the Super Bowl since 2000 alone, and the only repeat finalist has been New England – bringing such smaller markets as Pittsburgh, Tennessee, Tampa Bay, Carolina, and Seattle into the league championship matchup. The NFL isn’t alone; the NHL, as a result of the lockout, made such parity their aim, and the NBA would love for more of their markets to be competitive. The Wild Card was MLB’s solution to the problem, and it has worked to a degree – it doesn’t prevent the Yankees and Red Sox of the world from free-wheeling spending every year, but it does give teams (like the Rockies and, in past years, the Marlins) a chance to get in and prove their worth on the field.
It’s a simple equation: When every team has a chance to make the playoffs and the finals, and some of the teams in the league are in smaller markets, you’re going to get championship matchups with teams outside of the large markets. You can’t preach unilateral league parity but quietly hope in board rooms for a return to the Boston-Los Angeles NBA Finals, or allow dynasties like the 49ers, Cowboys, or Yankees to dominate year-in, year-out.
Who’s to blame? Perhaps turn your eye to ESPN. We all know that East Coast bias is a crime, but how about “two-team bias”? It rears its ugly head most with the Sox and Yankees in baseball and the Colts and Pats in the NFL, but the overhyping of single rivalries – promoting such teams to all parts of the country – isn’t helping smaller market teams.
When so much is invested in a few top teams – regardless of the market (Indianapolis’ metro area is smaller than even San Antonio) – then fans throughout the league suffer. And when the big teams get the hype but fail to live up to it, but instead get what could have been a Colorado-Cleveland World Series, doesn’t it feel anticlimatic?
About as anticlimatic as not finding that hat in the store, and as anticlimatic as shopping through a click of the mouse.
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