New Baseball Teams for New York and Boston?

I whole-heartedly disagree with adding another team to baseball anywhere. Although the revenue/per-capita numbers might support it, it does little to fix the true problems with baseball, which are:

1. Outrageous salaries - MLB should look to the NFL as an inspiration for how to run a sports league. NFL has labor harmony and a salary cap. That makes each team competitive. Who would have thought the Bengals would be doing so well or the Packers so poorly? In baseball, it's an expectation that a handful of teams will make the playoffs. Mets? not likely. Devil Rays? NO WAY! Yankees, perennial SHOE-IN.

2. Attendance costs - the plethora of new stadiums the past couple years has allowed owners to raise the ticket costs to levels that are cost-prohibitive to many people. Taking a family of four to a game is easily $200 after parking, ticket prices, food, drinks, and beer. I'm aware that the NFL is more expensive, but there are less games so it should be more, IMO. With the rise of HDTV households, I expect MLB attendence to decline even faster in the future.

Wes,

Actually, my solution would help your problems, especialy if broadly applied. More competition would lower the revenues of the richest team. In all likelihood, that would lower average salaries, which might also lower the need to boost ticket prices as well.

Besides, Boston could use a new team.

Who would be fans of this new team?

Yankees fans would never jump ship. Mets fans must be loyal or they would be Yankees fans. What about Northern Jersey you ask?

Well, the Devils have done nothing but win in the NHL and they can't hold a candle in popularity to the Islanders and the Rangers for the local hockey fan.

Could you seriously build a 2 mill/year fan base with the passions for teams already there?

Parity arguments that cite the NFL are plain ol' silly. "Anyone can win" in the NFL primarily because they play one-tenth the games that MLB does. If you had a sixteen game MLB season, you'd get crazy stuff like the Rays and Jays in the ALCS.

Wes,

The NFL does NOT have better parity than MLB. The Patriots have won 3 of the last 4 Super Bowls because they are the best team in football. But the best team in baseball is much less likely to win the World Series because of the randomness involved in short series is much greater than any one football game.

Only 8 teams make the MLB playoffs while 12 teams make the NFL playoffs. That creates an illusion of better competitiveness -- making the playoffs -- not real competitiveness.

The NL has had 8 different World Series teams in the last 8 years -- that's half the league! Even in the Yankee-dominated AL, there have been 4 different World Series teams in the last 8 years. By the end of next week, FIVE different teams will have more recent championship rings than the Yankees.

Also, the Mets were in the World Series only 5 years ago. How can you possibly use them as an example of a team usually "not likely" to make the playoffs?

And the Yankees didn't feel like such a "shoe-in" most of the season. Their spot was far from guaranteed right into the last week of the season.

As for the Devil Rays, they finally fired perhaps the worst G.M. in baseball. Stupid teams SHOULDN'T make the playoffs. Check them out again in a couple years.

As for ticket prices, they'll go down when people quit paying them. So far that hasn't happened. For overall MLB attendance to "decline even faster in the future" first it will have to start declining. And as long as people are willing to pay the ticket prices that support salaries, it seems unfair, from a business perspective, to call the salaries "outrageous" (except Eric Milton's salary, that really is outrageous - I'm a Reds fan).

Sorry to go on so long.

"Yankees fans would never jump ship."

HAHAHAHAHAHA

How about moving KC to Brooklyn? Call them the Kings County Kings. Keep the colors and the logos. Just need a stadium and no King George in the way!

Well im a yankess fan...i think it would make sense start a team somewhere in New Jersey...maybe Newark, because they are currently building a soccer stadium there...what you have to understand about NY "City" teams is that a big majority of their fans are actually from New Jersey...People work in the city but most of them dont live there...they live in the jersey burbs....So i think they should start a team here and slowly over time...maybe 20-30 years, jersyians would grow to accept a new team.

Boston/New England could easily support a second team.

Now granted, all these numbers have changed in the past 4 years, but if you factor in that "Boston" is essentially everything North of Hartford and East of New Haven, you're talking about a much bigger slice of the pie. And you do have to factor in that Boston is sports CRAZY - New Englanders show up for batting practice and leave when the bars close.

And now about Yankees or Mets fans never switching: Go and ask all the old season ticket holders that just got priced out or FORCED out of their team's new palaces how an extra 50,000 seats in Brooklyn in NJ would sound...