You get what you pay for: the AL/NL discrepancy

[Triumph36]

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I think if you put an exciting product on the field, the fans will show up. Boston and Atlanta are 2 good examples of that. In the early 90's, Atlanta had an extremly exciting team to watch, and the city became a baseball city seemingly overnight. As the team got older and more predictable/less exciting, the fans stopped showing up in hordes. A similar situation happened in Boston in the late 90's, but they've managed to keep an exciting team on the field for a long time.

Teams like NYY and NYM will always have a huge fanbase and tons of money/resources. You can certainly make up for lack of a huge payroll by having superior talent evaluation/development at the minor league level, teams like Minnesota, Oakland, and the Brewers(to a much lesser extant than the other 2, but I have a feeling they are going to continue to improve) have shown that over the years.

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this just isn't true. atlanta stopped selling out playoff games - would that happen in new york or boston? while atlanta certainly went crazy over the braves in the early 90s, there just wasn't that lasting impact.

furthermore, both the NYY and NYM have had attendance issues in the last 20 years, when they were awful. while it's unlikely that either team will be that bad again in the next ten years, the attendance will sag when the team starts to lose.