THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I remember as late as 1984, it seemed like there were no Blue Jays fans yet.  The Expos were Canada’s team, a few years removed from a heart-breaking loss to the Dodgers in the playoffs.  The Jays’ playoff run in 1985 changed all that.

It’s like the San Francisco-Oakland dichotomy.  The A’s and Giants have essentially had the same record over the last 42 years (A’s a little better) and the A’s have had much more playoff success.  And while the Giants played at Candlestick, the A’s outdrew them.

Now the Giants pack their park even when they’re awful, while you can get walk-up tickets for an A’s playoff game.

As someone who attended a few hundred games in the Kingdome in the day, I’ve never been to a more depressing place for baseball than the Big O.  We came by Metro and you never even walk outside.  It had all the charm of an indoor rodeo arena.  The fans were passionate and knew baseball and loved their favorites, but the seats were uncomfortable, gave a terrible view and it was about 75 and sunny outside and going inside to that contraption to watch baseball required a true fan. 

Clearly no town was as badly served by the 1994 labor problems in baseball, but just as clearly the fix had to be in.  The Expos and Mariners in 1994 both played in crappy stadia in cities Bud Selig had declared unfit for baseball (the M’s were on the road trip from hell after the Kingdome roof tiles fell in when the season ended), yet in 1995 the M’s were baseball’s darlings and the new stadium got approved, while the Montreal situation made Bleak House sound optimistic.

As Dave Pinto noted at baseball musings, the 1994 strike killed the Expos.  We were headed for a Expos - Yankees world series that year, which would have been great for the sport and would have picked things up for Expos fans, crappy stadium and all.  Both teams at the time had some pretty exciting players.

Of course, the other year the Expos were really good was 1981, the other strike year.

I’m not sure you can get away without having a domed stadium in Canada, but at least make the roof retractable, like the Rogers Center.

If baseball expands, they should look at putting another team in Canada, but I would look more at the western provinces, whcih are growing in population and have something of a resources boom, and are also more Americanized and probably mroe receptive to the game.

@3: I think the West would be a tough place to sell a baseball team.  Edmonton and Calgary are too small, so the team would go to Vancouver, which has an awful domed stadium with its own structural issues.  Vancouver has 2.5 million people, so it would be one of the smallest markets in MLB.  The Grizzlies were never a big draw before they moved away, which I think would give league owners pause before they gave an expansion franchise to anyone.

I used to live in Vancouver and there isn’t a lot of interest in baseball out there. Back in 1999 Vancouver actually lost its team in the Pacific Coast League, and I believe the reason was that there wasn’t enough interest in bringing Nat Bailey Stadium up to AAA standards. Great park to see a game though.

Also before the Blue Jays came to town, people in the Toronto area could follow the Tigers and Yankees, and Toronto had a team in the International League for years. But Vancouver doesn’t really have the same history—no big league baseball within driving distance until the Mariners arrived, and no good teams to follow until 1995. Vancouver is wholeheartedly Mariners country—not a lot of Blue Jays/Expos fans out there.

Do you think a Canadian barnstorming team would work?  Think of say the F-1 race, or PGA or Tennis.  Those are, essentially, barnstorming leagues… they play once in your home town, and you follow the rest of their games on TV.

Imagine say you have games in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax.  Each city hosts 10-15 games (one month each basically).

Vancouver and Calgary would host all the games against the west, etc.  Selling season ticket packages like that, I would think, would be very doable (like CFL, basically).  It would be, truly, Canada’s team. 

Or, are we saying that a baseball team requires a home base identity, something not required for F1, golf, and Tennis?  That a team sport can’t travel its own home base the way an individual sport might?  And why would that be the case?

I actually was thinking Edmonton, though you would need a domed stadium.

Vancouver is not too good because of the proximity to the Mariners, and also as a city, it has the problem that there are usually better things to do than to watch baseball (the California teams also have this problem)!

Alberta is in the middle of an oil boom that should last for a decade or two, and without the oil they have a decent agricultural based economy.  Edmonton is a small city, but is growing fast.  A team there could market themselves regionally.  Its really no crazier than putting a team in Denver.  And no MLB teams around for hundreds of miles.  I don’t think there are even many Blue Jays fans there.

Montreal is a great city, but you are in the position of marketing an American sport to the least Americanized city (in terms of culture) in the Western hemisphere.

I guess with barnstorming you only get X% of the gate plus maybe some TV money, but also major travel/hotel expenses and no stadium revenue. I don’t think it costs too much to set up F1 or tennis. I mean, it’s probably expensive, but doable, whereas there aren’t many 30,000-seat baseball stadiums dotting the landscape.

I’d love to see, in Canada or anywhere, something like a European league structure with promotion/relegation, but extending right down to the local community level. Maybe that would take 10 or 15 layers of leagues, where “Division 15” only required a $25 entry fee or winning a tournament. If your team won division 15, you’d be promoted to division 14 etc. Maybe that promotion/relegation process could take place four times a year. There’d be some nice storylines if teams worked their way right up from Division 15 to Division 1 over three or four seasons, and I’m sure lots of unknown talent would be discovered.

Montreal is a great city, but you are in the position of marketing an American sport to the least Americanized city (in terms of culture) in the Western hemisphere.

Through 1994, this was no problem, anymore than it was a problem in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago (Whitesox).  And better than Florida.

I’ve said this before, on Primer, every time the topic comes up, but the baseball boom of the 1990s really passed Montréal by. As Tango has shown, in the 1970s and 1980s the fans there turned out in numbers comparable to the equivalent-sized markets in the United States, but the tide turned about the time Bronfman sold the team. It wasn’t simply a case of an absolutely declining turnout, but a relatively declining turnout, too. Which made it look even worse.

Then, the problem with the Montréal TV market is structural, with the bilingual audience. Unless the same company owns both the French and English broadcaster, the audience for each is too small to claim the kind of revenue that a similarly sized largely unilingual city can. (Although the Marlins seem to make it work in a bilingual city.)

The sad thing is that some really rich people had shares in the team, but wouldn’t spend money while Brochu was in charge to keep one or two of the stars. That might have helped, and they might still have the team and even a new stadium by now. Penny wise, pound foolish.

I stumbled on this, but it seems my question to Bill started it so…

I really think it all coems down to TV coverage. The Blue Jays became Canada’s team when TSN launched and brought regular Jays coverage to the rest of the country.

My grandfather was an Expos fan and out in Victoria, B.C., he followed games by tuning into RDS (a french language version of CBC) and turning down the sound.

As a Jays fan I could watch most of their games with full coverage.

Which team are most people going to follow?

Rusty - good point.  Though I do remember the process starting even before TSN.  You used to get a ton of Expos games between CBC and CBC French, and then CTV started showing a lot of Jays games.  Gradually the Expos got fewer and fewer broadcasts.

There is also a fluke of timing - imagine the Expos win 1992 World Series; Jays are in first place in 1993 and the season gets canceled, and they don’t win two in a row.  Baseball looks completely different in Canada as a result.

I missed Rusty’s last post.  Yes, I agree, when the TV contracts were being done, it was a huge deal in terms of losing appeal to Expos.  Montreal really needed the TV contract.  They need to know that there’s stuff going on. 

Rather than “it’s on TV, let’s stay home to watch”, it’s more like “man, look what’s on TV… we should BE THERE”.  Montrealers are always looking out for some entertainment to go to.  Having the Expos invisible like that really hurt them.