That was exactly the argument against awarding Arizona a baseball franchise. Our metro area wasn't big enough to support the game -- at the time I believe we were No. 17. Now we're about No. 13 or 14, but it's exactly my point. Attendance was about what the experts predicted: ~20K a game. You could have made a profit on that if you had grown the organization the way EVERY baseball expert said they should do, which is to build through the organization. Almost instantaneously he went on a Yankees-like spending spree that by any reasonable account violated his most basic fiduciary responsibility to the team and its actual investors (Colangelo has never owned more than 1 percent of any team he's been in charge of). He was certain the team would make the money back by packing the house and selling merchandise -- I've actually stood face to face with him and heard him say that at the time. Instead, he broke the organization's back. There was a time, if they could have got out of their arrangement at BOB, they might have simply folded. But they had too much debt they couldn't get out of and MLB wouldn't allow it.
