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We also tell our children to not say anything they don’t mean and to share and share alike.
If only the second-richest man in Minnesota were able to heed these few simple adages as well as the little boys and girl in kindergarten classrooms all across the state.
Mr. Pohlad’s continual wolf cry that the Twins are located in a “small market” should be regarded at minimum with the same skepticism used to assess the fairness of Russian elections, if not discredited as an outright lie.
The U.S. Census Bureau has rated the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington metropolitan area as 16th largest in the nation. Among metros with a Major League Baseball franchise, the Twin Cities is also 16th largest (the larger “Inland Empire” of Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario in California does not have a major league team due to proximity with Los Angeles, but Toronto does).
Prominent metros smaller than the Twin Cities with resident MLB teams include San Diego County, Greater St. Louis, Tampa Bay, Baltimore, Cleveland, Kansas City and Denver’s National League Champion Colorado Rockies.
Additionally, the nation’s three largest metros New York, Los Angeles/Anaheim, and Chicago all have two MLB teams. In fact, if divided equally between the Cubs and White Sox, Chicago would yield two teams with roughly the same local market share as Boston’s Red Sox.
However, the comparatively “small market” Red Sox outspent either Chicago team in 2007 by more than $35 million.
This sort of analysis can be easily expanded. New York City is roughly the size of two Chicagos. By virtue of a twice as large market share, one might expect the Yankees and Mets to spend twice the amount the White Sox and Cubs, but this is not the case. Rounded to the nearest million, the Yankees opened 2007 with $190 million in player salaries, the Mets $115 million, the White Sox $109 million, and the Cubs $100 million. To put the entire picture in high relief, Boston’s market is less than a quarter the size of the local market in New York City, and yet the relatively “small market” World Champion Red Sox outspent the Mets (who missed the playoffs entirely) by $28 million in 2007.
What this all suggests is that market size is not a valid means to assess a team’s ability to afford premium talent, a conclusion further backed by Major League Baseball’s policy of revenue sharing between clubs.
Pohlad has for years preached the exact opposite while essentially extorting his team’s fan base. Two years ago he finally managed to obtain public funding of a new, half-billion-dollar ballpark to be built in downtown Minneapolis after various attempts to sell, move or liquidate the franchise. This public subsidy of Pohlad’s private business had been lobbied for by Mr. Pohlad as the great equalizer, the hen that would lay golden eggs, allowing the Twins to retain their star players and attract new ones in order to remain competitive.
Pohlad’s new ballpark is now under construction, but it appears that Pohlad is already dropping his end of the bargain, seeking out a way to ditch the best pitcher in baseball — Johan Santana — before he is due a new, much larger contract. The expected size of Santana’s new deal is $150 million over six years. Multi-billionaire Pohlad’s paltry personal contribution to the new building that will house his team beginning in 2010 will ring in at around $130 million.
If, as illustrated above, market size is not a limiting factor for a team as Pohlad has claimed, why can’t the Twins retain Santana, far and away the best pitcher the franchise has had since Walter Johnson played 80 years ago?
The answer is simple — Pohlad is disinclined to spend much more money on his team than he does already in order to simply maintain the team’s ability to compete. Pohlad has taken the adage “a penny saved is a penny earned” to heart while disregarding the slogan “you have to spend money to make money.” Pohlad, the richest owner in baseball, could spend the owners of the Red Sox and Yankees under the table and retain nearly half a billion dollars in net worth. The combined fortunes of the Steinbrenner family, along with Red Sox owners John W. Henry and Tom Werner amounts to $2.7 billion, while Pohlad’s private vault is estimated by Forbes to contain $3.1 billion. If the Twins’ market does not limit the team, and the contents of Pohlad’s coin purse do not limit the team, then the only remaining option is his willingness to spend enough money to keep the Twins competitive is what truly is limiting the franchise.
The size of the Twins’ local market — that is, the population of the Twin Cities metro — is unlikely to fluctuate drastically in the two and a half years until Pohlad’s corporate welfare ballpark opens. What might change radically is the percentage of the market willing to follow and support a team run on penny-pinching budget, a team that refuses to utilize the more than adequate resources at its disposal in order to retain the best pitcher in the game, a team that has misled the public about financial constraints in order to scare up public funding for a new corporate headquarters/mint.
Perhaps this decimated fan base is the fabled small market of which Pohlad has so often spoken. It would seem that this small market is very much of his own making. If he succeeds in avoiding making a large payment to keep Santana a Twin, he will have put the finishing touch on more than a decade spent pursuing every possible way — from threats of sale, relocation and contraction, to this latest attempt to back out on his commitment to keep his team competitive — to truly limit his team by threatening and insulting that team’s fans. It is not the size of the Twin Cities metro, or even the state, that is to blame. It is Pohlad’s infamous avarice and contempt for his customers that has made Minnesota a small market for his wares.
Winona native Wyl Schuth was recently honorably discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps. A veteran of the war in Iraq, he has returned to civilian life and is double-majoring in English and Slavic Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He accepts
correspondence at swedish.rhapsody@gmail.com
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yarnivek wrote on Dec 17, 2007 12:16 AM: