Kinda. Naperville is a lot closer to Chicago than San Francisco is to San Jose. ETA: Then again, if we're including Valpo in Chicago's DMA... it's not a lot closer, it's 15 miles closer, and it ignores geography. saying san jose isn't part of the san fran-oakland metro is like saying evanston and tinley park are not part of the same metro area You say just 15 miles, I say over 40%. Evanston and Tinley Park literally border the city in question, so that's a gross simplification. You can certainly combine them and we are talking about baseball in this case, but it's not that cut-and-dried. The US Census applies a similar approach to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Detroit and Ann Arbor, Buffalo and Rochester, Baton Rouge and Lafayette, Austin and San Antonio, Denver & CO Springs. it's not a gross simplification; it's pointing out the silliness of excluding san jose from the discussion, especially for the purposes of this conversation. the methodology used by the census creates a distinction that is irrelevant here; because the bay area is a multi-nodal population network doesn't make it any less of a unified population area than the houston metro. but that's why i pointed out the statistical area construct, because it's the more appropriate reference point