You are absolutely right. And, as a publicly traded company, they have a fiduciary duty to grow revenue by any/all means at their disposal. This includes, but is not limited to, the promotion of sporting interests in markets other than those that currently rake in gobs of money.

I have listened to ESPN radio jockeys often enough over the years to have caught numerous snippets of admission out of them that their location and their employees are a large part of the reason that the Red Sox have grown so much in national stature. They make no apologies for this, nor should they. But what they should do is realize that this result is repeatable and works in favor of their revenue AND IS THEIR JOB.

Because they are not privately held, it is inappropriate to spend corporate income in such a way that is limited to cherry picking the easiest stories and making the employees’ jobs a lot easier. Their job is to take that revenue and make a serious effort to grow it. The fact that they have built the Red Sox into a major revenue stream is all the evidence that investors need to know that such market development and growth is possible and ignoring other opportunities is a reflection on poor executive planning. Ignoring them because they are located in Bristol Connecticut IS provincial.

So, in theory (and using Neyer’s example), if the Royals and Pirates were to meet in the World Series clearly something significant of sporting interest was occuring on those teams throughout the season that culminated in that success. But, because of the prevailing attitude at ESPN in favor of cherry picking markets and cherry picking news and not developing their market base beyond New England, the national sporting audience would have been denied much of that interest and most of those stories. Therefore, the national audience for such a World Series would have little reason to engage and the ratings/ad revenue be dismal. Practically a self-fulfilling prophecy.

They give all the coverage to those teams, it is no wonder they get the high ratings for those games.

If they gave the Cubs exactly as much NEWS time (not game time) as the Yanks, Sox, anyone, there would be more Cubs hats all over the country on every yahoo casual fan.The cart leads the horse.

Each pitches 3 innings, if they can go that far. If Santana cannot last 3, Escobar comes in early. Otherwise Santana for 3 and Escobar for 3. Then to the pen.

Keep that up until each pitcher stretches out their arms and increases their success against MLB hitting and MLB umps. When they can both go 4+/4+, then slot Excobar into the frontline rotation.

The possible downside to this is that it costs the team a slot as long reliever, since Escobar takes that pen slot but is linked to every 5th game. However, since Escobar is acting as a long reliever, it would be possible for him to be available for the game mid-way between Santana starts and mitigate that challenge slightly. The other point is that there are pen guys who Sosh does not use for days and days already. For all intent and purposes, during those times the pen is down an arm anyway, therefore my concept is not untenable.