Angels Small-Time, Not Small-Market

In itself, revenue sharing for major league baseball is a fine idea, lined with good intentions. It is baseball’s welfare program, designed to help those who cannot help themselves, but as with America’s welfare program, there are those who would abuse it by simply trolling for a handout.

Not to name names or anything, but when George Steinbrenner wondered aloud how the Angels of Orange County could be classified a “small-market team,” I had to nod in agreement.

This was a first-time life experience for me.

“My geography teacher must not have taught me very well,” George says, and the almanacs, encyclopedias and baseball media guides must all be screwed up as well.

The Angels play in a county with a population base of 2.3 million, the sixth-largest in the United States, with one of the 10 highest per-capita incomes.

Their games are carried on the same television station, KTLA, as the “big-market” Dodgers.

They have drawn at least 2 million in home attendance for 12 consecutive seasons, surpassing 2.5 million seven times.

Last year’s total attendance--2,057,460--was the Angels’ lowest in a non-strike season since 1978, yet it still ranked the Angels 18th out of 28 teams overall, pretty much in the middle of the pack.

Yet, Jackie Autry has cried poverty.

Her team receives the seventh-smallest revenue in baseball, she claims.

Well, whose fault is that?

There’s a difference between a small market and a mismanaged market. How does a major-league baseball team go starving in Orange County, Land of 10,000 Batting Cages, where every male infant (and a good many female) is assigned a bat and a glove at birth, right after being swatted on the rear?

By running the best and most popular players out of town, year after year after year?

By throwing away $3 million in 1994 on an over-the-hill third baseman who was released in 1993?

By finishing under .500 six times in the last seven years?

By losing 181 games the last two seasons?

By systematically turning your single greatest resource--the ready and willing disposable income--into a rabid supporter of ice hockey?

If the Angels were an OPEC nation, they’d be petitioning the U.N. for humanitarian aid. If they were Columbia Records, they’d have trashed their compact-disc division in order to bring back the eight-track tape. If they were CBS, they’d have lost professional football to Fox.

This is why the “big market” teams held out so long before relenting this week on the issue of revenue-sharing. Why should we have to pay for your boneheadedness, they asked the Angels and the Padres. Revenue-sharing ought to help the truly disadvantaged--the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Milwaukee Brewers, the Minnesota Twins. But fritter away a gold mine? Don’t come begging to us.

Still, baseball’s ownership finally gave in, because it believes it needs revenue-sharing as a lure to get the players union to bite on a salary cap. (Good luck on that.) As a result, eight “big-market” teams will annually assist in the bailing out of the neediest eight, which is expected to change every year.

In 1994, those lucky recipients, who stand to divide $55 million or so, would include Milwaukee, Minnesota, Montreal, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Seattle and the Angels. I know what you’re thinking: Where was this plan when Bryan Harvey was around?

In a related move, three-division realignment for 1994 has been made official, again to the Angels’ good fortune. Just like that, the Angels moved up from sixth place to fourth. And look at the division they’re in--two teams, Seattle and Texas, have never made the playoffs and the third, Oakland, is coming off a 68-94 finish.

Last year, these four teams combined to play .474 baseball. Texas would have won the division with 86 victories--and the Rangers have since lost Nolan Ryan, Rafael Palmeiro and Julio Franco. Seattle would have placed second at 82-80--and the Mariners have no bullpen.

Imagine what the Angels might do in this division with revenue-sharing coupons. An additional $7 million would bring their payroll up to $26 million, about half of Toronto’s, which means they could afford to pay Harvey and Jim Abbott, which means they wouldn’t have to take out classified ads to fill out their pitching staff.

Other winners and losers this week in Ft. Lauderdale included:

--The Dodgers, who get rid of Atlanta in the NL West, but now will be required to help pay the bills for division rival San Diego.

--Philadelphia, which now gets to bang heads with Atlanta in the NL East, some reward for winning the pennant in ’93.

--Houston, which finished 19 games behind Atlanta in last year’s NL West, but would have placed a close second, two games behind St. Louis, in the new NL Central.

--The White Sox, whose primary competition in the AL Central this season figures to come from Cleveland.

No one, however, gained more than the Angels. Now they get to play in a diluted division, easily the weakest in baseball, while being subsidized by the Yankees, Dodgers and Blue Jays.

If the Angels can’t contend under these conditions, they ought to move the franchise.

To the Pacific Coast League.