wordygurdy wrote:
I think putting a major league team in Colorado was a mistake, just as it was to put two teams in Florida.
It's a shame that altitude makes it so hard to play baseball in Denver, because I've gotten the impression that there is strong baseball interest in the area that would support a team if only that team were decent. I've met some very avid Rockies fans over the years. If they could find a way to make the game more playable there (perhaps a very large, deep, cavernous pitcher's park with lots of foul territory might help), I think that team could thrive.
I feel quite differently about Florida, a state I lived in for nine years without ever meeting a true blue Marlins
or Devil Rays fan. Sure, I met people who went to games here and there (and I saw a fair number of games at Tropicana Field myself), but passion for either franchise is distinctly lacking.
The "Florida native" is an elusive subspecies of humanity, and most Florida natives are too obsessed with football to pay attention to baseball. Most baseball fans in Florida are transplants who still root for their old teams (as I was when I lived there), and you can't expect the Devil Rays to succeed just by drawing Yankees and Red Sox fans when their teams come to town. Even if they could, it's an insult to the game to have a franchise subsist as a straw man for visitors to beat on.
As for the Marlins, a team that can't build a fan base despite winning two World Series in its first decade of existence clearly has no future at all, and says a lot about the state's total lack of an appetite for regular-season baseball.
So I think a fix for Colorado is possible, but I think it was a mistake to put
one major league team in Florida, let alone two. Bud Selig is living in denial if he still truly believes that MLB has a future down there outside of spring training.