MLB to Contract 4 Teams?!?!?!

[USSoccer]

How many Indy league teams are there? Maybe forget the AAA issue (affiliations and option clocks would make that really hard to manage), but if there are 15-20 Indy league teams, it coudl work...

 

No it couldn't. The Newark Bears, the Atlantic City Surf, the St. Paul Saints, the Sioux City Explorers, the Camden Something or others. Does anybody really think MLB would be better off if the Lancaster Barnstormers replaced the Pittsburgh Pirates next year?

 

The stadiums are far too small. The media markets are miniscule. The talent is almost non-existent.

Yep. And if/when a struggling team is cast down the food chain and cut off from MLB revenues how is it supposed to get better?

 

BK, like I said, I was mostly kidding around and being snarky, but i suppose the threat of being relegated would be enough to get certain owners/GM's to behave differently.

 

also, it would be less about preserving current teams, than making the league more competitive overall. so you'd lose tradition for the sake of competition.

 

As others have pointed out, it would require overhauling everything. so it's never going to happen.

[ToupeeOnFire]

They should just relegate teams to the minors and promote minor league/indy league teams to the majors a la soccer. Then you'd see an improvement in some of the more terrible organizations.

Bill James floated this idea in one of his books (not in the Abstract I don't think, but one of the post-abstract Baseball Books). It made sense then and it makes sense now. Unfortunately, the idea has never gained any traction.

 

I would be OK with contraction, as long as they started with Cardinals and White Sox. :wink:

[katway]

They just signed the lease on a new DC park, so the Nationals appear to be safe...

 

The Nationals are also economically viable. They pull in a profit and baseball will probaby make at least 200 million plus on the eventual sale of the team to a buyer.

[Jehrico]

Florida, Tampa Bay, Minnesota, who else?

 

Minnesota is not a bad organization. They used to be, but they've been pretty good for quite some time now.

 

Hard to put a recent WS winner on there right now, and they weren't bad last year. You have to wait a year to see if they are running the franchise into the ground.

 

KC and TB are definitely on the list. Pittsburgh, Detroit (although they're at least trying not to be bad), St Louis :wink: , Cincinatti, Colorado also are not good organizations. Washington's an easy answer, as it has no real ownership group. LA hasn't always been that bad, but they're run by a bunch of incompetent boobs, and should be considered too (if not for their market).

 

Black horse for contraction: Baltimore. All owners stand to lose a little if Washington got folded. Taking Baltimore out of the picture would hike the Nat's value considerably and enrich the other owners. I could see the other 28 owners go for that.