Iwritecode

I flipped on SportsCenter last night because I didn't see the game but knew that they had won and just wanted to see a few highlights. Instead I saw the highlights for the Pats/Steelers, the highlights for the Lakers game, a few more basketball highlights and I think a hockey game was in there. Never even mentioned the Bears game at all. Maybe it's because we all see how the Sox are ignored by the national media and it seems like the same thing happens when it comes to the Bears as well? Although I'm not really a huge Bears fan or really a big football fan in general so I can't say I notice it as much...

The counter-point to this argument is that these guys only get to do their job for 20 years at best. Many for a lot less than that. And a majority of them aren't getting 100 or 200 or 300 million dollar contracts. The average salary for an MLB player is "only" 4 million. But the average career span is only 5.6 years... So these guys have to take what they can get, when they can get it.

Except the Sox where that would only bring the payroll up to around 60 million or so. They'd still have a ton of money to make more moves.

I know of one site that has all the Chicago teams on it, including a Cubs board. Not sure what the rules are in regards to posting links to other sites though.

First rule of mod fight club... Got it.

mod fight?

This actually explains a lot.

So where would the second team be? Vegas?

Not necessarily. I spent about 15 years as a mainframe programmer using mostly Cobol and PL/1. Now I'm in a job where I'm using mostly Vb.net and SQL, although I didn't have much experience with either when I first started. Now we are switching to a system where I'm going to have to learn some C#. There are some things that are different, but once you have the basics down, most programming languages are pretty similair. I once took a free online class to learn Python and picked it up pretty quickly.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/24230a3a-677b-4646-977a-d03921bc49eb

I bought the DVD when it came out and haven't even opened it yet. I was kinda the same way with Rogue One. Never really in much of a hurry to watch it. Now with the Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, I watched them as soon as I was able to. I really wanted to get to the theaters to see them but never did. I'm not sure if it's because the other movies aren't part of the "main" story or what. I've never really gotten into any of the expanded universe (books, comics, TV shows, etc...) either.

Our adult/youth league ended a couple of weeks ago. I think I ended up with a 199 or 200 average. I'd have to look it up again. We ended up middle of the pack, which is pretty good since we were bowling scratch. The averages of the bowlers in the top 5 teams were all 200+. Now HS bowling has started up again. Had tryouts the last 2 days and first practice is tomorrow. First tournament is the Friday after Thanksgiving. Our girls have a lot to live up to being the back to back state and national champs. Although I guess the publicity is good since they had 19 girls trying out for the team this year. That's the most I've seen since my daughter has been part of the program. Some of the other schools can barely get half that number to try out for their teams.

Stan Lee

I'm sure that's what they were referring to. They do a list like this every year but sometimes some of their "facts" are a real stretch.

There was?

In 2006 the Sox had just under 3 million fans and the Cubs had just over 3 million. If both teams are good, there are plenty of people willing to go to the games. It took the Twins opening a new stadium to break the 3 million mark for the first time ever. And that quickly wore off as they've gone down almost every year since.

The Sox are absolutely in a major market. But the fan base is simply a typical fan base. You can't simply compare us with other major market fan bases because they they've all had a lot more recent success. You have to compare us with every other team in MLB (except the anomaly that is the Cubs). And when you do that, we really aren't any different. Team is bad = lower attendance. Team is good = higher attendance. I'm not even sure what we are arguing anymore...

The Red Sox and Cardinals aren't really anomalies though. Historically, their attendance falls pretty much in line with the success/failure of their teams. But they've have a lot more success than failure over the last couple of decades, and their attendance figures show that.

It's the same type of fan base a lot of teams have.

Which should be not be surprising at all.

My question is how do you propose to fix it? How do you make people want to show up and spend money on a team that hasn't won anything for a long time? AFAIK, the Cubs are the only MLB team that managed to do it, but they are the exception, not the rule. If it takes being owned by a major newpaper and having their games played on an nationally televised super station to do it then it's probably not going to happen.

As the Cubs have shown over the years, the location of the stadium and how many fans fill it every year doesn't correlate at all to how good the team that plays inside it is.

I'd call 4 consecutive years in the playoffs and one WS championship pretty successful. Also the Astros who went through a similar rebuild are in their 3rd playoff appearance in the last 4 years and have a shot at the WS again.

I was just supplying additional information to the post. Also Cleveland played nearly 50% of their games against the ALC. The Sox only played 20% of their games against the ALE. So it's not much of a comparison.