JensenGregory

Which is totally fine if they can find the guy who can do it effectively. The Twins didn't have a dramatically worse OPS or OPS+ compared to a team like the Yankees, which employs former Twins hitting coach James Rowson, and the batting average between the two teams was nearly identical this year. The biggest problem from my view was that the Twins lineup over the past couple of years would be the hottest team in baseball for a few weeks then fall off a cliff the next few weeks. Hopefully, they can find someone who can help level that out a little bit more (how that's done, I have no idea).

OK? 1) This still doesn't reflect capacity percentages and 2) It doesn't account for literally any other factor beyond that. Until proven otherwise, the evidence that attendance is highly correlated with consistent competitiveness is much stronger than whatever you've shown me.

"I'm going to make a claim without anything to back it up and then roll my eyes when someone asks for the slightest bit of evidence."

Where's the attendance and viewership data to support that notion?

These numbers mean absolutely nothing without capacity percentages and compared with wins/losses on a per-season basis. You'll see that Milwaukee's attendance ebbs and flows like the rest of the league based on how well the team is doing.

What evidence has been posted and where?

Again, I just don't agree with that at all. There are no teams I can think of that consistently pack the ballpark and draw good viewership numbers unless they're legitimately competitive. Yes, every single team has rebuilding years that see fan engagement dip, but you sustain longer-term interest in teams when you show that, time and again, you're trying to win. It's why the Minnesota Vikings have one of the most passionate fan bases in the country, especially in Minnesota. They can fall short on their championship goals time and again, but it's so incredibly obvious that the Wilfs want to win football games. It's also why teams like the Tampa Bay Rays, bad in-person attendance notwithstanding (which can be attributed to a bad ballpark in a bad location), consistently have high TV viewership ratings.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Competitive windows stay open for a while and then they close for a while for rebuilding. Depending on how smart a team's ownership/front office is, those windows can stay open for a long time, or they can stay closed for a long time. Literally no team in any sport is immune to the disengagement that happens to fans when the team isn't winning at any given time. Even the Yankees and Red Sox face lower attendance and TV viewership when their teams aren't championship-bound. And if those ownership groups want fans to buy in again, they do everything they can to put a more compelling product on the field. Again, winning fixes everything.

Are you under the impression that people get tired of watching their sports teams win?

I agree with your initial sentiment but disagree with the second part of your statement wholeheartedly. Time and again, it's been shown that winning fixes everything.

The Brewers and the Cardinals don't have to behave in a "transactional" manner because their priority is usually in putting a truly competitive product on the field. The Twins have to market the hell out of their players and whatever ticket offers they've got going on because they won't just invest a little bit more into the roster to show fans they care about wins, not just showing up at the ballpark. I love the Twins more than any other sports team I follow, and I invest countless hours into watching games every year, and I am beyond frustrated with the Pohlads this year because there really is no secret sauce to getting people to buy into your product. Make it clear you're there to win more than a wild card round at best -- take risks in your roster construction (like they did by trading for Pablo) if you think it'll make a real impact in your competitiveness. Even if your plans don't work out by season's end, fans show up in droves just because they want to feel the hope that this year could be the year, and they want to hang onto that feeling for as long as possible during the fleeting days of summer. "If you build it, they will come."

Let's agree that momentum does exist but there's not yet been a metric developed for it (that doesn't mean it's impossible to quantify it). How do you qualify when momentum is/is not on a team's side in a game? How does one determine when momentum is impacting the game's outcome?

Calvin didn't just "say stupid things." Quit minimizing what he did.

I think you're being too hard on some of the players, personally. Due to some injuries throughout the year, but primarily due to the lack of payroll that would have allowed the front office to stock the team with reliable veteran depth, a lot of pressure was put on the young, developing players to be something they weren't ready for. I personally think the younger players will be better in the long run for what they had to go through this year, but ownership also did them a disservice in the short-term because their tightened finances required them to be ready now when, in reality, it was pretty unreasonable to expect all of them to be ready to carry the load themselves.

Your belief that momentum exists, especially within the context of a game where teams can only score runs on a specific half of an inning, is probably why you posed such a bizarrely framed question.