Wednesday Rockpile: Clint Hurdle Arlington bound as Rangers hire him as hitting coach

easy to put a 30 min or hour and a half edition of BBT and show live look ins of current games. My point was that the network chooses 8:00pm EST to show a game as their best chance of getting a baseball audience. 30minutes is not a big difference from that. There were plenty of games where there was only one baseball game on, that started at something like 8:05 EST. If a national network is going to show a game, they’re not going to lose their audience in 25 minutes.

rather than Ji MEN ez?

No history, no big city, and no dynasty, just star players winning one World Series. My point is that winning it all can make people change their perceptions much quicker than you would think, and the Rockies have the pieces in place to become quite a franchise in the next few years.

And they’ve won more than once. And I still don’t think the D’backs can be considered “A-list.”

I think the problem is there are differing interpretations of “A-list.”

Teams are always changing.

The Red Sox had no fans in the late 50’s and early 60’s. The Yankees were no where near an A list team for most of the 80’s and the early 90’s. The Braves were losers in the 70, and the Cubs had mediocre attendance at for several decades in their history.

Check out attendace figures for any team here. (I realize attendance is only one measure of an A list team and that the Rox were not an A list team in the 90’s)

http://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/attendance.htm

If you define A-list team as a franchise experiencing sustained success (not necessarily having to require WS rings, per se), sustained popularity, and sustained media coverage….

Really, if you want to look at the decade as a whole, it comes down to the Royals, Reds, A’s, Dodgers, Orioles and Yankees (and the Yanks at the bottom of that list, as the franchise was pretty much crap from the mid 60s through ’76.)

In the 80s, you have to give it up for the Cardnals, Red Sox, Dodgers, Twins, Tigers, and to a lesser extent, the A’s and the Orioles.

This isn’t sabr or stat-based…this is going from my own recollection, is all.

RhodeIslandRoxfan is correct, for many years, the Red Sox were a complete afterthought. Heck, much of the Yanks/Red Sox rivalry doesn’t really go back before the mid 70s, even. And as for the Yankees, from 1973 to 1995, they had about a handful of good years, and before their mid 90s resurgence, averaged as little as 29,000 attendees a game.

Now, if you want to look at A-list franchises, which I define differently from teams, which can have mid-term valleys, I think you really have to consider only those few franchises who have had bouts of real success, real long-term fanbases, and constant coverage, at multiple and varying occasions during their overall histories (or some varying combination of the three)

Using that criteria, the list is really small, limited to the Yankees, Cardinals, Orioles, Giants, Dodgers, Reds. I’d actually put the Red Sox a slight notch below all the others.

Going back to the long-time franchises, the A’s, White Sox, Indians, Braves, Cubs, and Pirates went through many many long stretches where their franchises were considered jokes, hence the term “second division”.

All imho.

People in the Midwest would be insulted. The I 95 crowd is cut from a different mold. (Louder, more aggressive, more obnoxious) Go to each reigion and you will find that they are drastically different.

yeah I would agree with you there then. Denver sports fans can defintley be very passionate but they are also very bandwagony when teams start to stink except for the Broncos because of their history. Take the Nuggs for example before Carmelo no one went to the games and they pratically had to give away the tickets. Once the Nuggs started winning the atmosphere completley changed. So I would agree if the Rocks keep winning it won’t take 30 years to acheive the level of fandom that the cards have but if they have losing seasons it will turn around quick.

Thats why I think Cleaveland might be a good example they were just kind of a mediocre team in the 80’s but then they started winning the AL Central Dvision every year during the mid 90’s and their perception changed to a lvl below the Yanks anr Red Sox, but above most everyone else in the AL