Should a Baseball Team Win or Entertain?
Red Hot Mama wants to know what’s wrong with the A’s. She’s coming at this from an unusual angle — it’s not the winning she has a problem with, it’s the apparent failure of the franchise to capture the imagination of Bay Area baseball fans:
There’s no doubt that the A’s have had a prodigious number of wins with the resources they’ve had in the Moneyball era. But what has it gotten them? A baseball team is an entertainment business; a group of professionals putting on a show while patrons spend money on concessions and souvenir t-shirts.
I can’t presume to speak for anyone else, but I don’t go to the ballpark for concessions and T-shirts. I’m pretty much there for the game.
She does raise an interesting question: What is the goal of a big-league franchise? Is it to reach the playoffs on a regular basis or to sell merchandise? Or maybe it’s a little of each.
In Red Hot Mama’s view, the Oakland A’s are “so concerned with putting together 90 wins a season that they aren’t noticing that they had less than 2 million visitors during the regular season.” In my view, as a fan, that’s exactly where I want their focus to be. The team’s marketing department can figure out how to pitch the club after the front office has taken steps to ensure that there’s a product worth marketing.
I’ve also got an issue with the contention about the A’s that “they’re so dependent on the aggregate in their playing philosophy that they can’t win when it actually matters.” I’m not sure that a particular philosophy is keeping this club from winning consistently in the post-season. More likely, it seems to me, is that they’ve been victims of the fact that anything can happen in a short series.
The A’s “playing philosophy” didn’t prevent Jeremy Giambi from sliding into home against the New York Yankees in the 2001 ALDS. And it didn’t cause the Detroit Tigers’ pitching staff to dominate A’s hitters this post-season. Sometimes (Albert Pujols, are you listening?) you just have to give the other guy credit for doing a good job.
Red Hot Mama concludes by asking folks whether they would “rather have a team that’s fun but can’t win or a boring team that makes it to the postseason” and answering her own question in the same way I would:
I want both. The teams that are a success–not just division winners, but also winners of the hearts of fans–are exciting as well as effective.
This is a great sentiment, and one that I think just about any fan can endorse. Unfortunately it does leave open a few questions (which you are, of course, free to answer in the comments):
- Assuming that most organizations aren’t in a position to deliver both division winners and also winners of fans’ hearts, which side should they err on and to what degree? (Hint: Think about which aspect a club has most control over.)
- Assuming that the team you’re a fan of isn’t in the “both” category just yet, how long are you willing to wait for that to happen? What steps would management need to take (or avoid) to ensure that you don’t jump ship mid-journey?
- What is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
As always, I look forward to your thoughts…
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