Since we are talking about baseball, I found this interesting,
the data is 10 years old though. Reading it more deeply I am not sure exactly what they are measuring.
I was looking for total TV/media view and Fans in the stands by numbers, but the results are nebulous and subjective in a way. No real Raw data.
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/...by-market-size
Power Ranking All 30 MLB Teams by Market Size
MATT TRUEBLOOD
JANUARY 13, 2012
The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are obviously big-market teams. The Kansas City Royals and Pittsburgh Pirates are notoriously small-market clubs.
....
27. Milwaukee Brewers
5 OF 31
Wisconsin is a strange place. Though none of the state's three key metropolitan areas are within even the top 30 of all U.S. cities, its sports teams receive excellent, even overwhelming support.
The Green Bay Packers are the most noted and best example, but the Brewers are an equally salient one.
Miller Park is a nice place, but not the league's best and brightest cash cow. The media market available to the team is tiny, as it's penned in by the Chicago teams to the south and the Twins' market to the west.
No element of the Brewers' economic situation favors them, really, other than that they have masterfully marketed and monetized their brand and now draw some three million fans every year.
...
10. Chicago White Sox
22 OF 31
Though Chicago is a huge market, the White Sox are dominated therein.
Even since the 2005 World Series title the Sox brought home, Chicago remains a Cubs town, and the Cubs will always gobble up most of the tourist money, merchandise money, ad revenue and prime media real estate in the city.
That's one element of the problem here. Another is that U.S. Cellular Field is a bit of a dump, by modern ballpark standards. It has relatively little character. It sits in a poor South Side neighborhood, where the expected economic impact has never developed.
The revenue exclusivity of the area helps in a way,
but the removal from downtown Chicago is a disadvantage, too. The Sox are no poor cousin, but
they're functionally a mid-market team, albeit the richest once imaginable.
6. Chicago Cubs
26 OF 31
While it's still a joyous place to take in a game, Wrigley Field is not the ascetic baseball temple (or tomb) it once was. And that's a good thing.
With so many things making the park impossible to raze and replace, the Cubs needed to make it work better for them financially. That does not mean trampling its charm with splashy and ill-considered advertising; it does mean making the park modern, branded and self-contained.
In other areas, the Cubs anxiously await a chance to re-jigger their current broadcast rights contract, as their current arrangement worked better in the baseball economy of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
They will be able to draw more fans to the park and more money in from TV viewers under the terms of some new deal and should be capable of running $175-million payrolls within the next five years.
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