Baseball Prospectus: Still Fact-Free!
Earlier this week, Will Leitch of Deadspin wrote a guest article for Baseball Prospectus. The article—How St. Louis Baseball May Be Altered—was a meandering mess, starting out with some discussion of market sizes, but finishing by complaining about the St. Louis Cardinals and their offseason moves. It’s the opening discussion about market sizes I’d like to address here.
Will starts out by claiming that St. Louis is one of the five smallest markets in MLB. In fact, he claims they’re the third-smallest:
Let’s take a look, for a moment, at the populations of each of these cities, plus one other:
Milwaukee: 583,624
Kansas City: 444,387
St. Louis: 343,279
Tampa (Bay): 321,772
Cincinnati: 317,361No one ever considers St. Louis a small market team, but they’re pretty much the definition of it. Allotting for the suburban sprawl that infects all our nation’s cities, the St. Louis Cardinals are in the bottom five of all of baseball in urban population … but were sixth in overall payroll last year, at $92,106,833. Why is this? If you’ve been to Busch Stadium any time over the last decade, you have the answer to that: No fans in baseball are more slavishly devoted to their team than Cardinals fans. Sure, we’re dopey, but we Cardinals fans are the reason the team is not the Royals. It’s the best example in sports of a team’s success being owed solely to their fans.
Did you see the sneaky thing Will did there? He glossed over the varying sizes of metropolitan areas in a throwaway sentence (in bold, above). But, if we actually look at the size of metropolitan areas, the data tell a different story:
| Market | Population | MLB Rank | U.S. Rank |
| New York* | 21,199,865 | 1 | 1 |
| Los Angeles* | 16,373,645 | 2 | 2 |
| Chicago* | 9,157,540 | 3 | 3 |
| Washington-Baltimore* | 7,608,070 | 4 | 4 |
| San Francisco Bay* | 7,039,362 | 5 | 5 |
| Philadelphia | 6,188,463 | 6 | 6 |
| Boston | 5,819,100 | 7 | 7 |
| Detroit | 5,456,428 | 8 | 8 |
| Dallas (Texas) | 5,221,801 | 9 | 9 |
| Houston | 4,669,571 | 10 | 10 |
| Toronto | 4,647,960 | 11 | — |
| Atlanta | 4,112,198 | 12 | 11 |
| Miami (Florida) | 3,876,380 | 13 | 12 |
| Seattle | 3,554,760 | 14 | 13 |
| Phoenix (Arizona) | 3,251,876 | 15 | 14 |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul | 2,968,806 | 16 | 15 |
| Cleveland | 2,945,831 | 17 | 16 |
| San Diego | 2,813,833 | 18 | 17 |
| St. Louis | 2,603,607 | 19 | 18 |
| Denver | 2,581,506 | 20 | 19 |
| Tampa Bay | 2,395,997 | 21 | 21 |
| Pittsburgh | 2,358,695 | 22 | 22 |
| Cincinnati | 1,979,202 | 23 | 24 |
| Kansas City | 1,776,062 | 24 | 26 |
| Milwaukee | 1,689,572 | 25 | 27 |
(from the 2000 U.S. census and 2001 Canadian census; * indicates two-team market)
To be sure, St. Louis is a not a huge market, but neither are they one of the five smallest in MLB. They come in as the 19th largest market (24th if you count each two-team market twice). But, they’re hardly a smaller market than Milwaukee, as Leitch claims: St. Louis’s market is 54% larger than Milwaukee’s. Put another way, “the reason the team is not the Royals” is because the St. Louis metro area is 47% larger than the Kansas City metro area—and I haven’t even taken nearby secondary markets like Memphis, Tenn. into consideration.
Baseball Prospectus is a site that claims to be all about statistical analysis, but they can’t even get their writers to use the right data for their articles. Yet again, their editorial staff has shown it is either unwilling or unable to do any fact checking. And this is supposed to be worth $40?
Addendum
For those interested, here are the rest of the top 30 U.S. metropolitan areas (plus two fairly large Canadian markets):
| Market | Population | U.S. Rank |
| San Juan (Puerto Rico) | 2,450,292 | 20 |
| Portland (Oregon) | 2,265,223 | 23 |
| Sacramento | 1,796,857 | 25 |
| Orlando | 1,644,561 | 28 |
| Indianapolis | 1,607,486 | 29 |
| San Antonio | 1,592,383 | 30 |
| Montreal | 3,380,640 | — |
| Vancouver | 1,967,480 | — |