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Thursday, December 01, 2011
CBA: Are the Cardinals a small-market team?
As I linked to the other day, the Cardinals are one of the teams that qualifies for the lottery pick. The qualification is to either have a low-revenue team or a small-market team. Revenue is easy enough to calculate, and the Cardinals are comfortably in the top-half there (not bottom 10 as required). That implies they are considered a small-market team. We see from this old Zumsteg article that the Cards are 7th smallest in terms of “MSA”. But what we really care about is the size of the population times the affinity for that product or service. That’s the true market. Keith Woolner came up with one such method, and the Cards came out to an obvious non-small-market team.
We can also use a simple method I have here, that calculates the “base attendance” for each team (attendance you’d expect if the team played .500). It’s based on its past attendance. Theoretically, we can derive an “affinity index” by comparing the attendance to its population size, so that we can do what Woolner does: multiply the affinity index by the population index. In any case, I have the Cards as the 8th largest baseball market.
So, it’s quite surprising that:
a. the CBA has been negotiated to allow the Cards to be considered a small market
b. the other teams not griping about this
One interesting one in comparing Woolner’s to my list is the Diamondbacks. Arizona has attracted plenty of people to their park, but Woolner considers them a very small market. Since Zumsteg has them at just below-average in market size, Woolner must have given them a below-average affinity index in order to get them as a small-market.
In any case, I would have hoped that something more than simply population size would have been used, and given the creativity MLB and MLBPA have shown in other facets, it’s odd that it was left as it was. I’m all in favor of the sniff test, and the Cardinals as a small market is not one that passes that test.
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