The only way teams like the Tigers, or the PIrates or Royals or Rockies for that matter, could effectively compete on an ongoing basis is if MLB were to substantially delocalize baseball as both a fan pursuit and an industry.
This is something the NFL and NBA have done very effectively. The NFL did it through pooling television and licensing revenues among the teams, and even though all teams keep their local money, because practically all 32 teams sell out every week, the local money is pretty close to the same for everybody. This is in large part how the NFL can have the teams in Green Bay (#68 ranked DMA in the country) and Kansas City (#32) be considered among the elites in their sport, while franchises can survive and even thrive in small markets such as Buffalo (#54) and New Orleans (#50)
The NBA has effectively delocalized their sport via the strategy of marketing players over teams, a tactic that by nature has generational appeal (i.e., young fans are more attuned to players as personalities than older fans are). That’s how Oklahoma City (#48) can come to be considered THE elite NBA team for decently long periods of time, as well as the league being able to support franchises in Memphis (#51) and, again, New Orleans (again, #50).
Of course, there are also key structural differences when it comes to baseball versus football and basketball. Football is a sport dominated by a quarterback personality who controls the ball for roughly half the entire game; plus, as a once-a-week event, every NFL game is considered a spectacle worthy of national or super-regional broadcast practically regardless of which teams are playing. Basketball is a sport where one guy out of five can take over and control an entire game or stretch of games or even a whole season, touching the ball and making magic happen practically anytime he wants; plus, the games are also somewhat locally event-like in that there are only one or two games in town in any given week, and since the arenas are relatively small and similarly-sized, there cannot be vast attendance differences among the teams.
Baseball is practically the opposite of all of these things. In terms of players, even a superstar comes to bat only four or maybe five times in a game, and he hardly ever touches the ball on defense (not that you would want many of them to do, anyway). As for pitchers, superstar starters pitch only once every five or more days; and superstar relievers, who already have short shelf lives career-wise, are in the game for only one inning at a time, if they come into the game at all. Plus, while the stadiums are humongous all around the league, the attendance differences are vast between team groups such as the Yankees/Dodgers/Cubs versus the White Sox/Marlins/Rockies. (Baseball even has two teams playing in literal minor league stadiums right now!) Low attendance versus stadium capacity occurs in part because a team will play at home every day for a week and a half several times a year, almost eliminating the possibility that games could be considered must-see events. No amount of marketing can change the effects on the business of any of that.
MLB could go a long way toward fixing this inequity among franchises by, again, delocalizing the money part of the sport by pooling all revenues—national broadcast and maybe even local broadcast, licensing, digital media, perhaps even ticket sales and other gameday sales—into one pool and dividing it evenly among the 30 teams, with perhaps some minor concessions to local cost of living differences (e.g., a touch more to New York teams, a touch less to St. Louis). They could also implement and enforce a narrow band of payroll, marketing, and perhaps even infrastructure spending, requiring a low ceiling and high floor of spending to ensure that none of the 30 teams have a substantial spending advantage over any of the others when it comes to attracting and keeping top players—something the NBA does right now, and very successfully. That would go a long way towards equalizing opportunities to compete among the 30 MLB franchises.
The dirty little secret, of course, is that there is exactly zero appetite for any of this at either the team level or the league level. The league makes much, much, much more money overall when the Big Six teams (Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, Giants) are successful on the field versus when they are floundering; and too many small franchises are only too happy to spend next to nothing on players, fielding 90-plus-loss teams year after year, and pocketing the money from whatever revenue they do get, while franchise valuation continues to skyrocket and gives them attractive parachute options when it’s time to cash in on that.
So, really, the only way fans of franchises outside the Big Six could enjoy seeing their teams rise to the level of contender for multiple seasons at a time is to go through natural cycles where they compete for a few years and then have to reload for a few more years, because they simply can’t generate the revenues needed to compete for decades on end like the Dodgers and Yankees do; or like the Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, or Giants all could if they were simply smarter organizations when it came to the actual on-the-field baseball stuff.
