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February 8, 2006

Offseason of Discontent

How St. Louis Baseball May Be Altered

by Will Leitch

For all the attempts by Bud Selig and his merry men to level the playing field between those teams which derive a large percentage of their revenue from their cable station and those which derive a large percentage from Hat Day, it’s still obvious that we’re a long way from the Royals beating the Yankees in a bidding war. It’s generally assumed that certain teams, thanks to population density and geography, will simply never be able to compete until even more rules are changed.

The four teams that come up the most often: Tampa Bay, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Cincinnati. Because the cities these teams reside in are so much smaller than New York and Los Angeles, and because there isn’t much relative cash in television contracts and massive merchandising deals, the thought is that they can’t compete.

Let’s take a look, for a moment, at the populations of each of these cities, plus one other:

Milwaukee: 583,624
Kansas City: 444,387
St. Louis: 343,279
Tampa (Bay): 321,772
Cincinnati: 317,361

No one ever considers St. Louis a small market team, but they’re pretty much the definition of it. Allotting for the suburban sprawl that infects all our nation’s cities, the St. Louis Cardinals are in the bottom five of all of baseball in urban population … but were sixth in overall payroll last year, at $92,106,833. Why is this? If you’ve been to Busch Stadium any time over the last decade, you have the answer to that: No fans in baseball are more slavishly devoted to their team than Cardinals fans. Sure, we’re dopey, but we Cardinals fans are the reason the team is not the Royals. It’s the best example in sports of a team’s success being owed solely to their fans.

And, if the last three months are any indicator, it’s a relationship that could be in serious trouble.