March 24, 2007

The challenges of Cincinnati baseball

With Griffey Jr moving to right field and a pitching staff that's being held together with sticky tape and glue, baseball here in Cincy can be tough enough, but now Baseball Prospectus is piling on with this article.

The article looks at the size of the various television markets in major league baseball, and it turns out that Cincy is among the smallest markets in the league - coming in at third from the bottom in terms of population according to the US Census Bureau. The matro area (which now officially includes Middletown and will probably include Dayton in the next decade) gained 60K in the last five years - putting it in the seventh smallest gainer in the league.

Luckily, though the people in Cincy are a rich bunch of buggers - to make up for that small number of possible fans - but wait, the Cincy/Middletown area has the fifth lowest per-capita income among league markets, with a small growth rate in that area relative to the league.

Oh, and Cincinnati has the third smallest television market, too, with barely over a seventh of the televisions in New York.

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