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I've argued quite a bit about the need for baseball to do a better job of revenue-sharing in order to provide some balance to the wide disparity between a market like New York vs. a market like Kansas City or Milwaukee. It will be tough to do given that TV and radio deal in baseball are done on a local level and often those contracts are given to stations that are sister companies of the team itself, thus providing an opportunity for owners to cook the books on the true value of those deals.
All that said, what gets glossed over in these debates about "small-market" and "big market" is a reasonable definition of what really constitutes each. How exactly is Miami and the Miami region classified as "small-market"? The Miami/Ft. Lauderdale market is the #16 media market in the country (and ahead of St. Louis BTW), and it's the 5th largest urban area in the country by population. Just because the residents of the Miami region haven't capitulated to public extortion attempts to finance a new stadium for the Marlins doesn't mean this isn't a major market. If the owners of the Marlins, both Loria and Huizenga before him, were willing to swallow some yearly losses from time to time, they could've kept both World Series winning teams largely intact.
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