Attendance news is good for Major League Baseball this year.The average crowd size at the halfway point of the season, according to a USA Today report published July 7, was 29,906 per game, compared to 26,842 at the same point last year – an 11.4% increase.

“With all the tight races and the parity we now have, we’re going to set an all-time attendance record,” Commissioner Bud Selig told USA Today.”By any criteria, the game has never been more popular than it is today.”

I hope that’s true, but I’m a bit less optimistic than the Commissioner. When dealing in aggregate numbers, attendance is indeed up. Most of that is concentrated in a few cities, though, and some of the more notable gains, while impressive in relative terms, are less so in absolute ones. The news is good, but the commissioner would do well to temper his enthusiasm.

As Selig would have it, the attendance increase is due to great pennant races.

“We had what you’d describe as a magical postseason,” he told USA Today, “and that’s continued into this year. There are still 20 or 21 teams in contention for the wild-card or division races.”

Selig’s assertion that there is anything special about this year’s pennant races is equally suspect. Since 1995, 14 teams, on average, have been within five games of a playoff spot on July 12.The number has gone as high as 16, in 2000.

This year, 19 teams are within five games of a playoff spot, but that’s not as impressive as it looks.The three clubs behind the Phillies in the NL East and the four clustered together behind the Cardinals in the NL Central are essentially .500 teams; a larger-than-usual group of mediocre clubs chasing the wild card is not quite what is usually meant by a “tight race.”

But what’s most irksome about Selig’s recent pronouncements is that they come on the heels of years spent selling the notion that there was no “hope and faith” for the vast majority of teams. In 2000, he could have been trumpeting the fact that 16 teams were in contention; instead, he chose to claim that the likes of Minnesota, Oakland, and Florida simply could not compete.

Not only did Selig do real damage to the fan bases of those “small-market” teams, his implication that competitive balance was a problem in baseball was demonstrably false.

Oakland and Minnesota are perpetual playoff teams; even the Expos might have seized playoff spots had MLB allowed them anything like normal resources the last two years. The last three World Series have been won by Florida, Anaheim, and Arizona, none of them a perpetual powerhouse. There simply isn’t much reason to think that anything except poor management is keeping any team from competing.

Instead of recognizing this reality, the commissioner now wants to spin parity as a victory for the revenue-redistributing 2002 collective bargaining agreement. It’s well and fine for Selig to encourage the fans of 19 teams to dream of a championship parade, but he’s also peddling the much more dubious notion that we are seeing a resurgence in the success of smaller markets, which he implies by linking “parity” and “attendance.” The facts, unfortunately, don’t entirely support this idea.

Take the Marlins. Through Sunday, their average attendance was 22,432, as compared with 14,303 after the same number of games in 2003.That 57% increase can be viewed as a great rush of ticket purchases due to their surprise World Series win in 2003; in truth, those ticket sales are still unimpressive for a championship team, and that should be as worrying as their increased popularity is encouraging.

Similar stories can be seen all across the country. Like Florida, the vastly improved Tigers and Devil Rays have seen good relative gains, but are still drawing miserably (21,991 and 17,055, respectively) when judged by an absolute standard. Many other small and mid-market teams are drawing about what they did last year at this time.

Attendance in places like Milwaukee and Baltimore has risen, but at the same time it has fallen in Seattle and Arizona as those teams decline after recent success. Minnesota, despite continuing to win with an appealing, enthusiastic team, has seen attendance drop by 5% since last year.

It’s little noticed, but Atlanta has essentially become a mid-market team, ranking in the bottom half of attendance. And Canada, for a variety of reasons, continues to be the biggest missed opportunity in the game.

In short, instead of a resurgence of small markets, we’re seeing a reorientation of power and the rise of teams that had not previously tapped their full potential. Competitive balance should mean more than Philadelphia taking Atlanta’s spot among rich teams. Ideally, a well-managed team like Minnesota should be able to ascend into the sport’s elite. That’s not happening.

Instead, it would be fair to look at this year’s attendance as evidence that the game is starting to tilt in favor of large cities. The teams that are prospering most from increased attendance are situated in seven of America’s eight largest markets – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Philadelphia, and San Diego.

Only in baseball’s bizarre economic structure could the renewed success of Philadelphia or San Diego count as evidence of the rising power of small-market teams. Bud Selig may think of this as parity and evidence that increased competitive balance has brought broader appeal to the game. I do not; at least, not yet.