You’ve been lied to. Not in a vague, “take it with a grain of salt” kind of way. In a deliberate, coordinated, financially motivated way, the MLB teams manipulate narratives around market population. And if you’ve ever sat in the stands — or on your couch — watching your team lose for the third straight season while the announcer solemnly intoned something about “the realities of a small market,” you felt that lie settle into your chest like a truth you had no choice but to accept.
That acceptance is exactly what it was designed to produce.
The “small market” narrative in Major League Baseball is one of the most successful public relations operations in American sports. It has survived decades of scrutiny, outlasted commissioner tenures, and been repeated so many times by so many credentialed voices that it stopped sounding like spin and started sounding like economics. Geography as destiny. Market size as fate. Losing as a structural inevitability rather than a financial choice.
At VDG Sports, we don’t accept inevitabilities without first examining who benefits from them. And when you look at who benefits from the small market myth — really look — the geography stops being the story almost immediately.
What “Market Size” Actually Means — And What It’s Being Used to Mean
Let’s start with the term itself, because the language is doing enormous work here and almost nobody stops to interrogate it. “Market size” as an economic concept refers, broadly, to the population base a small-market MLB team can draw customers from. Larger metro area, larger potential audience, larger revenue ceiling. That logic holds in a general sense — of course a franchise in a massive metropolitan area has a larger raw addressable market than one in a mid-size city.
But here’s what gets quietly swapped in during ownership conversations and league press briefings: market populationgets conflated with franchise revenue capacity, and those are not the same thing when considering the disparities between the New York Yankees and smaller franchises. Not even close. A franchise’s actual ability to generate revenue is shaped by factors that have nothing to do with how many people live within a certain radius — factors like ownership investment in the product, the stadium experience, local broadcast deal structures, merchandise strategy, and perhaps most critically, whether the team on the field is actually worth watching.
When a franchise in a so-called small market draws poorly, the narrative machine immediately points to geography. But the more honest question — the one that rarely gets asked on a broadcast that relies on league access — is whether the organization has made the investments necessary to make the product worth buying. Attendance follows winning. Winning requires investment. Investment requires willingness. And willingness is a choice, not a market condition, especially for free agents deciding between big-market teams like the L.A. Dodgers and smaller ones.
The conflation of population with revenue capacity isn’t an accident of lazy analysis; it’s a tactic used by franchises to justify their World Series aspirations. It’s a rhetorical shield. It allows ownership groups to present the predictable consequences of underinvestment as if they were the unavoidable conditions of geography.
The Revenue Sharing Mechanism Nobody Wants to Talk About Honestly
Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining structure includes a revenue-sharing system — a pool of funds redistributed from higher-revenue clubs to lower-revenue clubs, ostensibly in the name of competitive balance. On the surface, this sounds like a reasonable mechanism for leveling an inherently uneven playing field. And if the dollars flowed from the pool directly into competitive payroll, that’s exactly what it would be.
But that’s not what the system requires.
“The small market narrative doesn’t just excuse losing — it transforms losing into something fans feel obligated to accept, even defend.”
Ownership groups receiving revenue-sharing funds are not obligated, in any structurally meaningful way, to reinvest those dollars into player salaries or competitive infrastructure. The money comes in, especially for teams like the Yankees and Dodgers, overshadowing smaller franchises. What happens to it next is an internal business decision. And in an environment where franchise valuations across baseball have grown dramatically over the long arc of the sport’s economic expansion, that money has plenty of places to go that have nothing to do with a pitching rotation.
Imagine, just for a moment, what it would look like if a government relief program designed to help struggling small businesses was routinely used by business owners to build personal equity while the business continued to underperform. The outrage would be immediate and justified. But in baseball, the equivalent dynamic gets laundered through the small market narrative until it sounds like responsible stewardship. The team is struggling, the story goes, and so the owner is being prudent. Geography demands austerity.
What the narrative carefully omits is that the owner’s net worth tends to tell a very different story than the payroll does.
Franchise Valuation vs. Competitive Payroll: The Question You Should Be Asking
Here is a simple analytical exercise that cuts through more sports media noise than almost anything else: find any franchise currently operating under the small market label, then look at two numbers side by side. The first is the team’s current payroll relative to league average. The second is the ownership group’s estimated net worth and whether it has grown during their tenure.
If the franchise is genuinely resource-constrained, you would expect to see stress across the organization — an ownership group stretched thin, making difficult choices, investing in areas that show clear prioritization of competitive performance even when the dollars are limited. What you more commonly observe in these situations is the opposite: payroll suppression paired with rising franchise valuations, which themselves represent the accumulation of wealth that would — in almost any other business context — be available to reinvest in the core product.
Broadcast rights deals complicate this picture further. Local media partnerships and regional sports network arrangements represent revenue streams that can be substantial even in markets that wouldn’t qualify as major media centers by traditional metrics. The architecture of how baseball broadcast money flows means that a franchise’s revenue picture is frequently much richer than the “small market” framing suggests to the casual fan. When ownership groups negotiate these deals — and then continue to suppress payroll — the geographic excuse becomes not just thin but actively misleading.
Ask a simple question the next time you hear a broadcaster explain your team’s losing record in terms of market size: is the ownership group getting poorer? If the answer is no — and it almost certainly is no — then you are watching a business decision being dressed up as a geographic constraint.
How Sports Media Became the Myth’s Most Valuable Amplifier
Sports broadcasters are not neutral observers. They are businesses with contractual relationships — broadcast rights agreements, league access arrangements, sponsorship ecosystems — that create powerful financial incentives to maintain positive relationships with the very institutions they’re notionally covering. This isn’t a conspiracy; it’s a reflection of how small-market teams are often overlooked. It’s just how access journalism works, and it works the same way across industries.
When a broadcaster holds league broadcast rights, they are simultaneously functioning as a media outlet covering that league and as a business partner of that league. Those two roles produce fundamentally different editorial instincts, and in practice, the business partner instinct tends to win. The result is coverage that explains ownership decisions charitably, repeats league talking points without interrogation, and treats the small market narrative as established economic reality rather than strategic self-presentation by ownership groups.
The broader media ecosystem reinforces this dynamic. Reporters who need locker room access, team-credentialed interviews, and ownership cooperation for the stories they want to tell are structurally incentivized to avoid the stories that ownership groups don’t want told. This isn’t about individual ethics — many sports journalists are genuinely excellent at their craft. It’s about the institutional logic of an industry where access is the currency and accountability is the cost, particularly for NBA and NFL franchises.
The small market myth thrives in that environment. It is an ownership-originated narrative that media partners with league relationships, such as the NFL and MLB, have every incentive to repeat and zero structural incentive to challenge. When you hear it stated as fact during a broadcast, you are not hearing journalism. You are hearing the product of a system optimized to protect the people who own the game.
The Emotional Manipulation Hiding in Plain Sight
Beyond the financial mechanics, there is something more insidious happening in the relationship between small market franchises and their fan bases, and it operates at a deeply psychological level. Fans of chronically underperforming franchises are not simply accepting losing — they have been carefully conditioned to reframe losing as a form of loyalty and identity.
Picture the emotional architecture that gets built over years of this narrative: the team loses, and the story delivered is that this is what life is like for a team from your city, your region, your community. The implicit message is that frustration should be directed outward — at the big market spenders, at the system, at the luxury tax threshold — rather than inward at the organization’s own investment choices. Fans become advocates for the very ownership posture that’s failing them, defending payroll suppression as fiscal responsibility, celebrating small-market ingenuity as a kind of working-class virtue.
This is audience management, not sports culture. It is the deliberate cultivation of a fan identity that shields ownership from accountability by making accountability feel like a betrayal of the community the team supposedly represents. The team isn’t your local institution being victimized by market forces. The team is a private business making private financial choices and using your emotional investment in your city as cover for those choices.
When that framing fully crystallizes — when you see clearly that the “we’re just a small market team” story is a managed narrative rather than an economic fact — the frustration you feel isn’t cynicism. It’s clarity. And clarity is the beginning of asking better questions.
The Questions Every Baseball Fan Should Be Asking from Here Forward
This is where the VDG Sports mission becomes personal for fans of small-market teams. We’re not just here to tear down comfortable fictions — though we are absolutely here for that. We’re here to hand you an analytical framework that makes you impossible to mislead the next time a broadcaster, a beat reporter, or an ownership spokesperson tries to sell you on geographic inevitability.
When your team announces it can’t afford to retain a core player, ask who is getting richer while the payroll stays flat. When revenue sharing gets mentioned as evidence of a level playing field, ask whether those shared revenues carry any reinvestment obligations. When local media covers an ownership group’s “difficult decisions” sympathetically, ask what contractual relationships exist between that outlet and the league. When a losing season gets framed as the natural outcome of market realities, ask whether the owner’s investment portfolio looks like a person constrained by geography.
These are not complicated questions. They’re just questions that the current sports media infrastructure has very little incentive to ask on your behalf. That’s the gap VDG Sports exists to fill — not as a contrarian exercise, but as a fundamental act of sports media accountability that fans deserve and almost never receive.
The small market myth isn’t a story about geography. It’s a story about power — who has it, how they protect it, and what narratives they deploy to keep fans from looking too closely at the ledger. Once you see it that way, you can’t unsee it. And the moment you stop accepting “small market” as an explanation and start treating it as a prompt for further investigation, you become exactly the kind of informed, demanding, accountability-oriented fan that this version of sports media was never designed to produce.
That’s the version of you we’re building this platform for.
Stop Accepting the Story. Start Demanding the Truth.
At VDG Sports, we exist to dismantle the narratives that the sports media machine was built to protect. Every losing season sold to you as geography, particularly for teams in the MLB that struggle to compete with larger markets. Every ownership decision explained away as fiscal responsibility. Every broadcast that launders the ownership line without a single hard question. We track it, expose it, and give you the framework to see through it yourself.
If this piece made you angry — good. That anger is accurate. Subscribe to VDG Sports and make it part of your regular media diet. Because the most powerful thing a sports fan can do in this environment is refuse to be managed. We’re here to make sure you never have to be again.
→ Follow VDG Sports. Question everything. Especially the comfortable narratives.
Vince Douglas Gregory is the ‘petulant puppet master’ of a sports media landscape addicted to scripted rage and performance art. As the architect of VDG Sports, he bypasses the corporate talking heads to expose the unfiltered truth behind the narratives.
An unstable thinker and astute scholar, Vince thrives on dismantling the mediocre click-bait addicts who trade reality for engagement. If you want boring stats, go elsewhere. If you want the raw reality of the game, you’re in the right place. Consider yourself warned.