Are the Pirates Really a "Small-Market" Team?

In today's posting on the Pittsburgh Baseball Club blog, Pirates Columnist Dejan Kovacevic takes issue with those who call Pittsburgh a "small-market" team.  He cites a list of US television markets ranked by size to show that there are a number of teams based in smaller markets than Pittsburgh.  Using that same list and simply dividing by two when a market has two teams, we end up with the table below of teams ranked by TV market size.  The Pirates rank 25th out of 30 teams.

It seems to me that ranking at the 17th percentile in terms of market size would merit the term "small-market".  To make matters worse, a number of teams below the Pirates have sizable fan bases in nearby large markets. The Orioles have a numbers of fans in the DC/Hagerstown and Norfolk/Portsmouth/Newport News areas and the Reds have fans in the Columbus and Nashville areas.  All four of these markets are made up around a million households or more.  What other large market contains a significant number of Pirates fans?  Harrisburg?  The closest team above the Pirates are the Cardinals, who have a number of fans in nearby Memphis.  In short, the only teams that I'm confident don't have more people within their area of influence (or "country of baseball") are San Diego, Kansas City, and Milwaukee.  Even if it's the case that these three teams are in smaller markets, that doesn't disprove the notion that Pittsburgh is a small market -- remember, it's small market; not smallest market.

In terms of his other points, I agree that market-size is not a huge issue for the Steelers and Penguins -- partially due to salary caps in their respective leagues and partially due to the immense popularity of the two teams -- and that a market, to some extent, is what a teams makes of it.  I guess the demarcation is between saying that the Pirates are hampered between being in a small market and saying that the Pirates can never compete because they're in a small market.  The former is demonstrably true, while the latter is demonstrably false.

Rank	Team	Designated Market Area (DMA)	TV Households
1	Yankees	New York, NY (/2)	3,746,765
2	Mets	New York, NY (/2)	3,746,765
3	Phillies	Philadelphia, PA	2,955,190
4	Dodgers	Los Angeles, CA (/2)	2,829,585
5	Angels	Los Angeles, CA (/2)	2,829,585
6	Rangers	Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX	2,544,410
7	Red Sox	Boston, MA (Manchester, NH)	2,410,180
8	Blue Jays	Toronto (est*)	2,400,000
9	Braves	Atlanta, GA	2,387,520
10	Nationals	Washington, DC (Hagerstown, MD)	2,335,040
11	Astros	Houston, TX	2,123,460
12	Tigers	Detroit, MI	1,890,220
13	Diamondbacks	Phoenix, AZ	1,873,930
14	Mariners	Seattle-Tacoma, WA	1,833,990
15	Rays	Tampa-St. Petersburg (Sarasota), FL	1,805,810
16	Cubs	Chicago, IL (/2)	1,750,505
17	White Sox	Chicago, IL (/2)	1,750,505
18	Twins	Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN	1,732,050
19	Rockies	Denver, CO	1,539,380
20	Marlins	Miami-Fort Lauderdale, FL	1,538,090
21	Indians	Cleveland-Akron (Canton), OH	1,520,750
22	Giants	San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA (/2)	1,251,700
23	A's	San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA (/2)	1,251,700
24	Cardinals	St. Louis, MO	1,249,450
25	Pirates	Pittsburgh, PA	1,154,950
26	Orioles	Baltimore, MD	1,093,170
27	Padres	San Diego, CA	1,073,390
28	Royals	Kansas City, MO	941,360
29	Reds	Cincinnati, OH	918,670
30	Brewers	Milwaukee, WI	901,790

notes: Dividing markets in half when that market has two teams results in misleading numbers, both because fan bases aren't split 50/50 and because most of those teams have geographic bases that cover other markets (e.g. the Yankees and Hartford, the Giants and Sacramento, and the Mariners and Portland (OR)). The figure for Toronto was estimated based on the fact that Toronto's metro area of 5.5 million people is slightly larger than the metro area for Atlanta.  I don't know what their actual Nielsen-equivalent number of households would be, but it's clearly much larger than the Pirates.