I’m about to lawyer Slate.
The Location of the stadium:
South Florida has a lot of things, but one of the things it doesn’t have is a major rail infrastructure to move massive amounts of people around. The truth is that South Florida is the most excellent example of urban sprawl I can think of. Everything is far away from everything else and if you want to get somewhere you either have to drive a car or take a bus. Now this alone doesn’t mean that a team will fail but it sure doesn’t help in their attendance. Slate suggests that moving the stadium to a “better” part of South Florida will result in an increase in attendance. I argue that the Dolphins already play in the apparent cesspool that is Land Shark Stadium and manage to draw very good crowds. If the stadium isn’t the problem then what is?
Maybe the product that the team puts on the field is the problem. But wait, this Marlins team, this lowest attendance numbers of any National League team, has won not one but TWO World Series titles in its short life. How can this be?
Good attendance when they are winning?:
Simply put even when the Marlins put a quality team on the field the fans don’t show up, and you can’t blame that on the stadium because we know that another pro team plays in the same stadium and is able to draw capacity crowds. In 2003 the year that the Marlins won their second World Series the Marlins only beat two teams in terms of home attendance, the Washington Nationals and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. So even when the Marlins manage to put a quality team on the field the fans still stay away and that is something you cannot blame on the stadium.
The finances of the team:
Another argument that has been presented is that the Marlins struggle to draw crowds because of the oppressive contract they have with the stadium. Well, research being something I tend to do before I simply go off on tangents, I decided to look at what the Marlins spend on salary and what they received from MLB’s revenue sharing agreement. I feel that this site explains what the Marlins do best by examining what the Marlins did in 2006 ”By shedding these stars, Florida was able to cut its payroll down to $14.9 million in 2006, which is less than 20% of the Major League average of $78 million. It was also less than half of the $31 million in revenue sharing dollars the team received that year. So, rather than using the money to retain or attract on-field talent, the owners took it as part of the team's MLB best $43 million profit in 2006.” You can’t blame a bad contract with a stadium for simply refusing to spend money on players, what this telling statistic tells us is that even if the Marlins were getting 100% of the money being spent at the stadium they still wouldn’t have spent it on payroll, and when it is clear the team is not in it to win it why should the fans bother to make the trek to the stadium?
The finances argument fails because it is clear that the Marlins ownership group won’t spend money, not that they can’t. Maybe that was just that one year? Nope, this article points out that this kind of thing has been going on for a long time. So, I’m sorry to say, the claim that the Marlins have no money to spend is simply not true. They have money to spend they just don’t do it. So even if the fans would come to the game, which they don’t, they won’t spend any money on putting a quality team on the field anyway.
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