Idea that the Cardinals are in a small market is a fallacy. They own the Midwest, have a humongous TV deal and revenue base.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Confirmed: <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Astros?src=hash">#Astros</a> catcher Jason Castro loses arbitration case. Will be paid $5 million instead of $5.25 million</p>— Mark Berman (@MarkBermanFox26) <a href="https://twitter.com/MarkBermanFox26/status/697126179896037376">February 9, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Agree. My grandfather played for the Cardinals in the 50s. He grew up in the panhandle, and the Cardinals were THE TEAM to follow back then. I imagine they still have an impressive geographic reach.
Hence why I said they have a rabid fan base. But even with "owning the midwest", the amount of TV-watchers in their "home market" would still fall well below the top 10 media markets. Their TV deal is not one of the top 10 overall TV deals (but it is big, given their market size). But yes, a small market team that consistently sells out 81 regular season baseball games is going to have more revenue than a mid-to-big market team that struggles at the gate.
Fans, yes. But those fans in the panhandle and Idaho don't directly impact their TV deal (unless somehow, FSMW is being broadcast out there).
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/23/upshot/24-upshot-baseball.html?_r=0 Here's a baseball map from a couple years ago.
People shouldn't confuse fan-base with market size. The Cardinals have one of the biggest fan-bases in baseball... still doesn't make them a big market team.
I really wish I could be a fly on the wall at these arbitration hearings. It must be interesting to hear the case of a guy like Jason Castro. The funny things is I would expect some of the arguments from Castro's team would reference some of the newer, less accepted statistics (things like tracking how well a catcher frames pitches, etc) to draw attention away from his piss poor hitting stats. And Luhnow and his group probably will draw as much attention as possible to those piss poor hitting stats which are much more commonly known (avg, OBP, SLG, RBI, etc) even though when they do statistical analysis for prospective players they probably put far less emphasis on those things in favor of the more advanced metrics. That's my guess, anyway. Edit: I should clarify that I don't believe that there is any advanced metric that in any way indicates that Jason Castro was even an average hitter last season. I fully expect they all show he stunk.
Their market is still big. I consider it to be St. Louis plus the surrounding regions that get their games on a 162 basis.
Advanced stats aren't allowed per the CBA from what I've heard. Castro did finish above average in homers for catchers.....Arbitrators dig the long ball. Granted...Castro had every other old school stat going against him which is likely why he lost.
A lefty is needed, but Harris can get lefties out. We don't have a spot for another reliever unless we trade Neshek or Fields. Right now our bullpen goes: Giles Gregerson Sipp Harris Neshek Fields Feldman (long reliever and spot starter) I think we are going to use at least 10 starts from Feldman so we keep McCullers from pitching a lot of innings this year. Castro Stassi Singleton Altuve Valbuana Correa Marwin Gonzalez Rasmus Gomez Springer Gattis Marisnick Duffy as the number 25th guy. A lefty would be a better option than Feldman, but, he is signed for 1 more year and is a nice option to pitch in the rotation for 1/3 of the year more or less and give days off to McCullers.
I will be shocked, if Singleton breaks camp with the Astros this spring. Shocked, I tell you. Singleton has to win the spot, which aint ... ever ... going ... to ... happen.
That's not that populated of an area... and pretty much an hour out of St. Louis, you start getting hoards of Chicago fans. And we also need to stop confusing a large fan base/large wide-spread area with "big market". Big market = population/TV viewers. St. Louis has a billion dollar TV deal... the Texas Rangers have a $3 billion dollar TV deal because they have more TV viewers in their metro area.
They definitely don't own the midwest. If there's one team that does, it's probably the Cubs. There's too many teams in the midwest for one single team to really "own" a region.
