On the Nationals

A commenter on my blog "King of All Whites" seems to think that Montreal was robbed of its team and that giving baseball back to the Nations Capitol is a bad idea. I have written on this subject in the past, but since much of baseball is all about statistics lets really look at his arguments and compare them to actual numbers.

King of all Whites writes

"People [in Montreal] are starting to wake up to what happened to them. And don't be so smug and so sure. DC has lost the Senators not once but twice and look at how attendance and performance has been in DC.

Ok, so then the King is arguing that attendance Washington's declining attendance marks the death bell for the team and that they never should have left. But how bad is the attendance really? Let's look at the average for the Expos over their final four seasons at Olympic Stadium:

2001 - 7,935 - Rank 30 out of 30
2002 - 10,025 -Rank 30 out of 30
2003 - 12,662 -Rank 30 out of 30
2004 - 9,356 -Rank 30 out of 30

Comparatively let's look at average attendance at RFK stadium since the Nationals have been in existence:

2005 - 33,651 -Rank 11 out of 30
2006 - 26,582 -Rank 21 out of 30
2007 - 21,966 -Rank 26 out of 30

So the average attendance is going down, but that is to be expected since the team is in the process of settling in to its new ownership, rebuilding its player depth, and also building a new stadium. Even taking that into account, the nationals have double the average attendance than the Expos had at the end of their run. One would think that if Montreal was really a city that cared about baseball then at the very least their last season in existence would have seen a sharp increase in attendance. It didn't. Which leads one to believe that if people are "waking up to what happened to them" in Montreal, they are waking up and realising that they never really cared much for baseball and it took them this long to even notice that they were gone.

While it is true that DC has had a shaky relationship in the past with baseball, the area is one of the fastest growing in the country. The potential market was enough to scare Orioles owner Peter Angelos into robbing viewers of Nat's games for two years. There is no question that Washington's market potential is much stronger than that of Montreal.

Incidentally, average attendance at a Nationals games is just behind Baltimore and better than Pittsburgh and Kansas City. Granted those teams are awful this year, but surely no one would suggest that the cities they represent don't deserve to have a team.

Finally, I was unaware that Caucasians were ruled by a monarch, maybe I should be careful lest I am beheaded.

Yankees Take Two, Pavano Dies...(to me at least)...And Some Musings On Baseball in General

The Yankees took both games of a double header against the Texas Rangers last night elevating them 5.5 games behind Boston and a mere .002% points out of a second place tie.

Andy Pettitte - Unfortunately the bullpen denied Pettitte a decision in the first game, but he still pitched a decent game giving up five hits, two earned runs, while striking out five in six innings of work.

Mike Mussina - Not a bad outing for his first game back from the DL. In 5 innings pitched he gave up four hits, one run, while striking out three. I can be happy with that.

Derek Jeter - Jeter hasn't been getting much attention lately amid the A-Rod streak and the pitching disasters, but last night he extended his hitting streak to 20 games. Even Yankee hating ESPN was forced to recognize Jeter:

"Jeter, who had a 25-game hitting streak last season, is the third player
in Yankees history to have a 20-game streak in back-to-back seasons, joining Joe
DiMaggio (1940 and 1941) and Don Mattingly (1984 and 1985)."

Mariano Rivera - 2 games, 2 saves. What did I tell you, Rivera has a couple of bad showings and everyone calls him a has been. He is getting older, but the Sandman is still effective.

Carl Pavano - The bane of my existence. There are more unsubstantiated rumors that he will undergo Tommy John's surgery and miss the rest of the year. If this is true then my previous posts about rumors that he is done for '07 appear to have been true. I don't get this guy. He isn't helping himself or the team by hiding injuries from Torre and the training staff, but he must have told someone something (other than the Yankees) that he didn't think he would be a go for this year. So another year in his 35 million dollar contract goes to waste. We should have cut this guy loose for not disclosing his car accident last year, we didn't and what do we get....more of the same crap. I've given up on Pavano, even if he does come back this year in my mind he has been demoted to bum status.

Musings on The State of The Game

While the Yankees are my blood, I have adopted the Washington Nationals as my National League team. This is partially because as a kid growing up in northern Vermont I used to go to Olympic Stadium to watch the Expos, but also because I live in the District and they are local (no disrespect to Baltimore, but I can't pick you guys since you are in the AL East). Needless to say I was overjoyed when the dying Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals. It was a smart decision for baseball to move rather than expand into a growing market that was desperately thirsty for a team, and finally had a population base that could support and keep them.

It's nice to see that MLB seems to have learned from the mistakes it made expansion wise over the past decade. Fortunately the idea to move the Expos to Las Vegas was nixed (the game has enough problems with gambling), and while Portland may not have been a bad choice clearly Washington DC was the best pick. But there are still the bad choices that baseball has to live with. Case in point, both of the Florida teams. The people who live in these markets are mostly transplants or just don't care. As a result it is hard for Tampa and Miami to get a certified fan base even though the Marlins have won two World Series. It was a similar problem in Montreal, they had a base of people, just no real interest in the team unless they were doing extremely well which was rare. It's all a question of smart marketing, which baseball didn't do a great job of in the 1990's when it expanded. Miami is a Football / Basketball town, Tampa Bay is really a nothing town (none of their sports teams ever amount to much), and while the Expos had been in Montreal since the 60's, it is really a hockey town.

In the absence of some sort of salary cap, contraction would probably be a good thing for the game. In lieu of that baseball needs to think hard about some of it's bad choices and consider moving teams before they ever expand to other markets. It has worked so far moving Montreal to Washington. Even though they are cellar dwellers this year, the new stadium and ownership should provide strong guidance. Further, given that Northern Virgina has some of the fastest growing counties in the country it won't be long before the Nationals have a solid fan base.