THOME CAN YOU HEAR ME?: Unlike Minnesota, it was a great sports weekend for Philadelphia. First the Eagles beat the reeling Rams despite starting Mr. McFeeley at quarterback, and then this morning the Phillies signed the year's #1 free agent, Jim Thome, to a six-year deal. The deal means that the Phils will likely be a contender in the NL East in 2003, and also that they will probably be referred to from now on as a "large-market team," as though a million people suddenly moved to the city overnight.
Despite Philadelphia being the fourth-largest television market in North America, I've never once heard that phrase to describe them. I have, however, heard it used numerous times to describe Thome's former team, the Cleveland (Baseball Team) Indians, even though Cleveland as a city is considerably smaller than Philly. This is because the sports media is lazy, and doesn't know the difference between "large-revenue" and "large-market. Throughout the '90s Cleveland and Baltimore (along with New York) were almost universally called large-market because they made lots of money from new stadiums and thus always signed major free agents and competed for championships. Philadelphia didn't have a high-revenue stadium and never signed free agents or fielded a competitive team after '93, so they never got the large-market label despite being, literally, a large market. Maybe now that the Phillies are improving and the Indians and Orioles are reeling, the sportswriters can start to get it right.