By Mike Steffanos January 2, 2021
Now that we've left 2020 behind, I hope that some of the players and teams resolve to not let January be as boring as December was, and that the hot stove season can finally live up to its name. The only sparks of excitement so far have been courtesy of the San Diego Padres, who have made themselves into one of the best teams in baseball by building a very deep farm system and being aggressive using it. For all of the deserved credit that the Rays get for making their voodoo work, it's good to see a team in a relatively small market like San Diego making a bold and aggressive push in a much different way to challenge the Dodgers in the NL West.
I found an article on BaseballAlmanac.com on baseball markets, and the San Diego market is in a category of 2-3 million people alongside places like Minnesota, Cleveland, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and, interestingly enough, Tampa Bay. Of course, the Padres have a beautiful modern park in a great location and the Rays have an ugly old one in a location that's not ideally situated in their metro area.
The 2019 Padres finished 17th in MLB in attendance in 2019, averaging just over 29,500 per home game despite losing 92 games and finishing last in the NL West. The Rays, in the same size market, finished second to last in baseball behind the Miami Marlins, averaging about 14,700 per game, despite finishing second in the AL East with 96 wins. Clearly there is potential in San Diego that doesn't exist in the current situation in Tampa Bay.
The Padres have conclusively demonstrated to their fans how serious they actually are in trying to win, which can only maximize their potential to draw once fans are allowed back. I wish 2021 could be a normal year to see how that exactly plays out, but it doesn't seem likely at all that the turnstiles will be clicking for some time into the year. In a way, that makes what the Padres are doing even more impressive to me.
When looking over Baseball Almanac's market piece, it occurs to me how much of a difference there is between teams in the same market size as the Padres. The Cardinals draw a ton of fans for the size of their market by earning the trust of their fans and putting a consistently good team on the field and having so much history and tradition behind them. Cleveland has been really good for several years and consistently competes, but winds up in the bottom third of MLB in attendance, anyway. The Indians are a victim of the problems their city is enduring that go way beyond baseball competitiveness.
The Pirates were very successful for a stretch from 2013-2015, but then got pretty bad again. Really, other than that one stretch they've been fairly consistently bad. They play in one of the most beautiful ball parks in all of baseball, but their track record kills them. They went from 1993-2012 without making the playoffs at all, then made it 3 straight years — but the last two were one and done Wild Card game losses, and they haven't been back since. Not even that ballpark can save them from that record of not competing and, if you're a Pirates fan, it's hard to have faith that the team can sustain winning for any substantial length of time — or is even really committed to trying.
I know there are other factors at play here. Old midwestern working class cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Milwaukee struggle to remake themselves while losing population to warmer places with more going on. But looking at how aggressive the Padres are being makes me wonder why so many other teams elect to play things so conservatively. A huge part of building a successful sports franchise is making the fans buy into it, and nothing generates more excitement than watching a team really go for it. If I'm a Padres fan right now, I can't wait for 2021 to start.
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