CKNW Editorial
for July 31, 2000

My eye was caught by a fascinating editorial in the National Post on Saturday called Baseball Economics. It pointed out that only teams in the top quartile were able to survive, quartile being the fancy name for dividing baseball into four levels of economic achievement for the year. Moreover, the top quartile teams are the only ones, for the most part, to get into the World Series and they always, without exception, win it. Only three major league teams made money last year.

Baseball is, by its own admission, sick. You simply cannot survive with many teams losing bundles of money each year and the vast majority of teams having as their only forlorn ambition on the field to make one of the wild card berths. Home run races like Sosa and McGwire’s battle three years ago aren’t enough to keep the game going. They are now trying to come up with solutions though it doesn’t take rocket science to figure that equal TV revenues would go a long way towards fixing things.

You can only keep fans of, say, Minneapolis-St Paul happy for so long with gutsy, talent short teams that once in awhile, at home, thrash the Yankees. It takes awhile but sooner or later it dawns on the fans that they are relegated to also-rans simply because they can’t compete with the checkbook.

It got me thinking. The very same editorial could have been written about hockey. The top teams financially are now starting to appear in the quarter finals with regularity and they will soon be joined by the richest of them all, the New York Rangers, when Glen Sather gets his multimillionaires all using the same play-book.

The lowest quartile certainly include the Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa teams with Vancouver probably in the third Quartile, Montreal in the lower part of the second with Toronto firmly in the second. What this means is that three Canadian teams will never be competitive except as Cinderella teams that every so often squeak into the play-offs and beat someone they shouldn’t. No matter how hard the estimable Ron Bremner beats on the good burghers of Calgary to buy season’s tickets they will always have that "young team of great promise" which will produce free agents to be picked off by richer teams. What has developed, when you think about it, is a farm system within the NHL where fat cats give up draft choices to the also-rans who train them to be hockey players only to see them then go as free agents to the teams with money.

The Vancouver Canucks are no higher than the third quartile, though perhaps at the top of that level, and are doomed to having little boomlets of excitement at the end of any season where, with pluck and luck, they might make the playoffs.

Baseball may address this by some leveling of revenues including gate receipts and TV income … though their fat cats will be looking for a system that makes the bad teams more competitive without unduly disturbing the Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Braves, Mets and Indians which command television’s almost undivided attention.

If some mind is paid this problem by the NHL you can be dead certain it won’t help Calgary, Edmonton or Ottawa. Those cities, frankly, ought never to have had a franchise in the first place … their markets are just too small. Some relief might come to Vancouver and Montreal, a franchise that even the American teams would be reluctant to see go under but not enough for real winners to be built.

Unless there is a conversion putting to shame that of Saul on the way to Damascus, the Vancouver Canucks are doomed to be the Minnesota Twins of hockey – some decent players from time to time, the odd visit to the second round of the play-offs and no more. That despite what Bozo Burke would have us believe.

The NHL is for the rich and the very rich at that … Vancouver will always be at the owners’ table with a begging bowl for enough grub to keep it going a little longer.