I quickly want to summarize the baseball happenings of the last 24 hours, and I'm going to do so without linking you to various stories because that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is to tie in to a discussion we had on here a little over a month ago.
To recap:
The Phillies are getting Roy Halladay (once the trade goes through)
The Mariners are getting Cliff Lee.
The Blue Jays get a lot of prospects.
The Red Sox signed John Lackey.
The Red Sox signed Mike Cameron.
The Angels signed Hideki Matsui.
The Yankees are entering the talks for Jason Bay.
The Mets and Angels remain frontrunners for Jason Bay.
Now....what's missing from this list?
How about reports about the Pirates, Rays, Reds, Padres, Royals, and Twins. Let's look at some of the signings for smaller market teams in the last couple of days:
The Brewers re-signed Craig Counsell.
The Astros re-signed Jason Michaels.
The Blue Jays signed Ramon Castro.
The Nationals signed Scott Olsen.
The Indians signed Adam Miller.
For some reason, they just don't seem to stack up.
Again, I don't know that this is necessarily a major problem as we discussed last month, since baseball is more than happy to have their big market teams in the playoffs. But when all the big name free agents are going to the same teams over and over again, and more than half the teams don't even have a chance at signing guys like John Lackey and Hideki Matsui, that's an issue.
Because of this, I feel that baseball is rapidly losing fans in middle America, and I don't think losing fans in places like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and other similar cities is good for the long-term future of the game.
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