The Chris Moeller Archives

Packer Nation

Congratulations to the NFL Champion Green Bay Packers. I don't root for the team as a habit, but they were a more likable team than the Steelers at the glamour positions and they're a fine advertisement for socialism.

There's a system of revenue sharing among clubs in the NFL that is to be envied by other professional sports leagues and the Packers have aptly demonstrated that the owner is the most superfluous member of any pro team, but the small market praise for the Pack always rings hollow for me and I'm not awed by the stories about the long waits for season tickets.

Let's not pretend that such a situation is even possible in baseball that a city roughly half the size of Des Moines could compete with the Chicagos and New York Cities of North America at the highest level of competition, but the difference is structural, not economic. Football is largely a television game because of its scheduling slate and a club on the gridiron only needs to fill its stadium eight times a year. In baseball, television viewership from game to game is diluted because of the large number of games overall, and the home parks have to be filled for 81 homes games a season.

We could place a community-owned, non-profit baseball team at the mouth of the Fox River in Wisconsin, displace the team downstate in Milwaukee as well as one of the two teams in Chicago, and give our new Lake Michigan West Shore baseball team the same terms and percentages of the current NFL television contract (plus the weather for fans would be better because northern Wisconsin summers are much more pleasant than northern Wisconsin winters), and that baseball team still wouldn't be able to make a go of it financially. There just isn't enough population in that part of the continent to fill all of those potential seats-- 45,000 seats multiplied by 81 games. Couldn't happen.

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Today's the day it dawned on me, after almost 36 years of life, that the Green Lantern and the Green Hornet are not the same figure in pop culture. The details of this discovery are not important, but suffice to say, I had never heard the two referenced together before.

posted by CM @ 10:10 PM