Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Cardinals–Royals rivalry (3rd nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was redirect‎ to Major League Baseball rivalries#Show-Me Series: St. Louis Cardinals vs. Kansas City Royals. Daniel (talk) 02:41, 13 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Cardinals–Royals rivalry

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This doesn't appear to really be a significant rivalry, as evidenced by a lack of significant coverage. Perhaps this can be redirected to Major League Baseball rivalries#Show-Me Series: St. Louis Cardinals vs. Kansas City Royals. Let'srun (talk) 17:12, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Sports, Baseball, and Missouri. Let'srun (talk) 17:12, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect per nom seems reasonable, if there's enough source material to support that section at the other article (probably delete if not). "Two teams have played against each other a lot" doesn't amount to a "rivalry" in some encyclopedic sense, and I have a strong suspicion that other articles of this sort need to redir to sections like that one, or to sections at articles on the individual teams. Even where there's lots of quick-mention coverage that a "rivalry" (whatever that really means) exists, that doesn't make it a stand-alone enyclopedic topic unless the source material is in-depth about the rivalry as a thing unto itself rather than just as a routine aspect of team coverage. As the entire nature sports is competition, "rivalry" seems just an intrinstic quality of a team's relationship to another team it may compete against. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:48, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
PS: Been over the previous nominations. Some stand-out comments: "Every local newspaper will mention any team playing each other as a rivalry", "facing each other in the World Series is not a rivalry", "Columnists needing to find something to write about does not make this a rivalry". Since the 2nd nomination in 2012, the article has been twiddled around with a whole lot [1], but the sourcing in the interim hasn't much improved. Added were a whole lot of primary-source references (stats, schedules); these are meaningless for notability purposes. Sourcing summary (in top-to-bottom order):
- The cbssport.com article is about Royals and their gameplay; it mentions the word "rivalry" but is not about a rivalry.
- The nj.com article verges on damning, as it is about a much looser sense of "rivalry", and opens with "When Interleague play was adopted by Major League Baseball in 1997, it was done partially with an eye towards building rivalries between nearby teams in separate leagues." But obviously this sort of "this team is within X miles of some other team at all" sense of "rivalry" is of no encyclopedic relevance at all; this is about a marketing ploy to get fans invested more in local games, nothing more. While the article is arguably in some depth about rivalries, in that sense we shouldn't care about, as a concept, the coverage of this specific "rivalry" is a trivial mention that actually suggests the two cities are more of a football-town versus base-ball town situation.
- And that's it for cited sources that aren't primary. Dumped in "External links" are the following:
- A tiny kansascity.sbnation.com piece that says there is a rivalry "much like brothers fighting ... for the annual bragging rights in the state of Missouri", which is to say they're just in a vague competition to be more popular with the home-state baseball fanbase. Well, sure; major-league sports is a business, and there's money to be made.
- Next is an NYTimes piece that, like the nj.com one, is about baseball rivalries in general; Cardinals–Royals is mentioned once in passing, in the same this-is-not-a-discrete-encyclopedia-topic "these are nearby teams in the same sport" sense of "rivals".
- Next, stlouis.cbslocal.com mentions the word "rivals" but then writes an article entirely about players and their stats, not about rivalry.
- i70baseball.com finally writes a piece about this alleged rivalry; but this is local, self-published/UGC blog material and not independent of the subject (the entire site is "covering MLB with a focus on the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals").
- Last, a mlb.mlb.com piece mentions "rivalry" but is about the teams and key players and managers and schedules and stats, not about rivalry (and also not independent of the subject, since MLB has a fiscal interest in promoting the notion of team rivalries to jack up ticket sales out of a localized variant of the "patriotism" urge).
- In fairness, the 2012 version had another link to a galesburg.com article titled "Royals slide past Cardinals in rivalry game" (which cannot be recovered through Internet Archive), so one other article (at a minor newspaper) at least had the word "rivalry" in it.
This was weakly kept twice, on the presumption of improvement, but it hasn't happened and looks unlikely to ever happen. Given the enormous popularity of MLB stuff as a subject, this tells me that the reason is that this isn't improvable. If there were not a redirect target for this, I am confident that the decision would be delete, as it probably should have been the first two times. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:43, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

PPS: If you want to see a real sport[s] rivalry, an encyclopedic one, a topic that has a life of its own and massive coverage, and is not just a sports-journalism buzzword tossed in to flavor up routine coverage of a team's players this season, see Liverpool F.C.–Manchester United F.C. rivalry. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 18:56, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
It's certainly a good comparison, especially when a primary source acknowledges its existence. Plus, this rivalry is a C-class, so it stands to reason that rivalry pages don't need to be perfect, but outside of WP:LOCAL, need to cover GNG. Conyo14 (talk) 22:41, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Redirect per nom. I'm always an advocate for the main rivalry collection page for these substandard rivalries to exist in. Even if the FANCRUFT exists for the two teams, there isn't enough SIGCOV for its own article. As SMcCandlish pointed out, there are some articles that show something, just don't exist anymore. Conyo14 (talk) 22:44, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Weak redirect per nom and source analysis by SMcCandlish. Willing to reconsider if additional sources are made available, so please ping me. Frank Anchor 13:43, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.