Yanks Don't Buy Championships

I was barely born that year 1981, wasnt that World Series not taken very seriously because of the strike?

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Originally Posted by OldYankFan

Pick a point say, 1981 when those two teams met in the Series. Why, from that point, couldn't the Dodgers have done better than the Yanks?

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Dodgers fans have the reputation of only caring about the team when things are going well, and maybe not even then. Perhaps this is undeserved...but if the fans don't come to see the team when it is not doing well, then the ticket revenue is not there to rebuild the team with. Also, I doubt that the Dodgers could get their own TV station in LA, but I could be wrong on that too.

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Originally Posted by HoustonGM

KC had a decent team in the strike year, but what's doomed them since is certainly a terrible front office. I don't know what sort of effect the strike had on them, but they've still made terrible moves all along. The only team that I believe was truly, significantly affected by the strike was the Expos.

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kc needs to go back to turf and build a team of speed again, what they had was impressive speed on astro turf

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Originally Posted by Jeffy25

kc needs to go back to turf and build a team of speed again, what they had was impressive speed on astro turf

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I'd suggest that they just need to stop being incompetent.

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Originally Posted by RobToxin

I'm not throwing the fan base under the bus. But the media base. What killed Montreal? Wasn't the final nail in the coffin the lack of a television contract?

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Here's how it went: Bud the Slug cancelled the Series. The fans got rightfully pissed. When they came back from the lock-out, almost all the good players were auctioned off, which can work in the long-term, but given that they'd just had an awesome team and hadn't been able to enjoy the fruits of that awesomeness, the fans were livid.

Think of how much worse the Miami market would've been had the lock-out come three years later when the Marlins won it all and then absolutely gutted the team for the 1998 season. It's bad now, but they would've been the ones in Washington had the lock-out happened three years later.

Then, Jeffery Loria, master of scorched earth baseball 101 bought the team from Claude Brochu in 1999 and went to work on killing it off for good/getting it contracted/preparing it to be moved to another market. I don't know what happened with the media stuff. Maybe nobody stepped forward to pay for the rights because the numbers for 1999 were in the toilet. Whatever the case may be, he couldn't get a TV or radio deal and then when he failed to get support for a downtown stadium that was just about all she wrote. The attitude of the government was probably why should we support a stadium for a sport that screwed us? Then the 2002 contraction vote came and Minnesotans to their credit fought it tooth and nail. By then, we were eight years removed from the lock-out, no games had been on the radio or TV in 2 years and I'm pretty sure that except for the die-hards, most Montrealers greeted MLB with great indifference. Wouldn't you?

The final nail in the coffin was MLB allowing John Henry to own two teams at once (Florida and Boston), parachuting Loria out of Montreal and into Florida and bringing its own brand of incompetence to running the Expos starting in 2002. Omar Minaya (he of the Bartolo Colon from the Indians for Cliff Lee, Brandon Phillips, and Grady Sizemore stroke of brilliance: ask Nats fans how they feel about that one) was made GM and basically tore the team to shreds. Yet, if you ask guys like Michael Barrett and Brad Wilkerson who were there at the bitter end, they'll tell you that those that hadn't been turned off by the groundswell of s**t during the decade I've just laid out for you were as passionate as ever about the Bleu, Blanc, et Rouge. Surprisingly enough, their numbers weren't strong enough. I wonder why? Perfect storm, gigantic clusterf**k, whatever you want to call it, they didn't stand a chance.

Maybe those last few years of each front office person doing the work of four people will benefit the only baseball team left in Canada though. Our current GM got his start as an intern there working for Dana Brown, who now works for him and current director of player personnel Tony LaCava once worked there as well before moving onto Cleveland and assisting in the raping and pillaging of the Expos/Nats farm system. I doubt that will do anything to ease the pain of the Expos fans left in the wake of the tsunami of 1994-2004 though. :(

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Originally Posted by Mizerak

Dodgers fans have the reputation of only caring about the team when things are going well, and maybe not even then. Perhaps this is undeserved...but if the fans don't come to see the team when it is not doing well, then the ticket revenue is not there to rebuild the team with. Also, I doubt that the Dodgers could get their own TV station in LA, but I could be wrong on that too.

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Miz, every team's fans have that reputation. Check out the Yankees attendance figures in the 1980's despite their "Tradition of Excellence" or their brand. Fans are fickle. Fans don't care about the brand or the traditions, they just want rings.

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Originally Posted by actionjackson

Miz, every team's fans have that reputation. Check out the Yankees attendance figures in the 1980's despite their "Tradition of Excellence" or their brand. Fans are fickle. Fans don't care about the brand or the traditions, they just want rings.

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Understood...but only Dodgers fans (to my knowledge, only) have the reputation of arriving late and leaving early, even when the team and the game are good.

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Originally Posted by Mizerak

Understood...but only Dodgers fans (to my knowledge, only) have the reputation of arriving late and leaving early, even when the team and the game are good.

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True dat.