Braves draw over 3 million. Have 41 sellout crowds. Have done/are doing a great job locking up their key guys contract-wise. Farm continues to produce top young talent year after year. Free agent signings pan out.
Am I envious? Yep. What are we doing wrong?
Attendance wise, the Braves relocated from a ballpark that had plenty of years left in it to a place that they thought would maximize attendance. Ownership here has appeared extremely reactive when it comes to fixes that would mitigate the site drawbacks (the “people will just take Metro” sentiment expressed by planners when the parking question came up in the planning phase, along with choosing a site along one of the least used lines for the fanbase and a station size that remains problematic for handling capacity for decent size crowds).
Recall all of the fails when it came to ownership making sure that they had late-game service agreements with Metro back in the days when Metro actually functioned. Then recall how when the new construction around the ballpark was finally filling in around 2019, Metro went into frequent shut down and reduced service mode, which continues to persist. Where was the city / Events DC and ownership leading up to the ball park footprint development filling out? Where were they as far as proactively handling things such as citing more crowd – centered garage structures that could serve both the Nats and DC United, as the notion that Metro was ever going to be adequate to handle high capacity crowds there seemed more wrong than ever?
Going to the team side, we go back to the ownership decision by committee issue that seem to slow down things. We go back to the apparent initial priority of saving money by deferring sinking much more money into the club over the initial buy-in fee and taking payroll levels to below what they were when MLB essentially owned the club, despite the free gift of a ballpark and much if the revenue from activity within the ballpark.
Tampa, the Marlins, and even the Expos were already doing things on the personnel side that showed ways to build and be competitive by investing in scouting and staying consistent organization wide with the philosophy. Did new ownership prioritize landing and keeping some of the personnel in place to do that versus saving costs there as well? In lieu of spending on the payroll and free agents at the start, did they instead initially sink their money into international signings of comparatively lower cost? Did they target what would’ve been relative bargains as far as signing players over slot while they still could have, which would’ve landed them Trout instead of Storen, which some discussed at the time only to have club priorities apparently emerge?
Even beyond the early years, how much have they invested in there training and medical staffing throughout the organization as well as coaches, scouting, etc. versus getting entrenched with Boras and get into the deferral games? Had they sufficiently done the former, they could’ve still gone in on their window from 2012 to 2019 yet conceivably had at least some serviceable options that could’ve let them stay somewhat competitive and reload rather than have to gut everything.
Of course, having the MASN matter hanging over everything cannot be dismissed as a factor. However, it was one of the realities that baseball had created going into it, and along with Selig’s essentially fixing the price of the team at a threshold by reportedly capping the sales price, it appeared to limit the initial price versus what it would have been had the team been able to have their own RSN.
