A baseball question - 10 clues added
 

I'm guessing payroll or attendance - the specifics of which I have no idea
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It looks like Raymond needs a clue which has been provided by editing the OP.

Hope this doesn't make it too easy.

Don't worry...it didn't

Populations of cities that have teams, possibly arrange by division?

Incorrect, but I am adding another clue to the first post.

This is all I can figure out:

The relationship between the first number in each set of six is that the second set's first number is lower than the first set's and the third set's first number is lower than the second. This is true for the first, second, fifth and sixth numbers in each set.

For the third number in each set, the succeeding set's third number is more than the previous set.

For the fourth number in the first set, the second set's fourth number is lower, but the third set's fourth number is higher than the second set's.

...so much for numeric patterns...
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I'm headed to the medicine cabinet now...my brain hurts.
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The asterisks are important. Take two asterisks and call me in the morning.;)

If it wasn't for the fourth number in each set being so high, I would lean toward attendance figures with the lowest numbers being strike years.

The only number over 7 million I can think of associated with baseball would be an individual player's chronological numeric assignment - as in Joe was the 7,891,957 ML player, etc.
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I don't HAVE 13 years.
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It was bothering me so I looked it up, but I will not spoil it for anyone. (I may not even be right)

2,479,015

The total distance, in feet, of Mickey Mantle's 536 home runs. :p

....or 2,071,605 - projected total of empty seats at 2016 Braves' games. :eek:
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Clearly population figures. Probably a list of the same cities at different points in time as the numbers are relatively close. 7 million has to be NYC. 3 million has to be Chicago. Moon must mean one is LA. Ashburn must mean one is Philadelphia. In general, the asterisks seem to reflect a decline from the above list. But that does not explain the asterisk in the first list.

7,891,957 (1st group, fourth number listed), 7,781,984* (2nd group, fourth), and 7,894,862 (3rd group, fourth)
do indeed represent the official population of New York City in 1950, 1960, and 1970, respectively.
That's as far as we've gotten.

Asterisks represent number enhanced by steroid use.

Frank is Cicada3301.

Frank - I do hope that the answer, when it is finally revealed, is not so obscure as to make any effort to find it fruitless.

In the 1990's my soon-to-be-ex-wife convinced me to attempt a sports trivia contest over the phone- well, anyone could have seen that result coming down main street...the first three or four questions were easy enough, but the fifth asked for the total points scored by all NFL teams in the 19xx playoffs...

As much as I enjoy a good challenge...

Frank...if it's like that, please just apologize and drop the mike...
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Population figures for 1950 1960 and 1970 for six cities -- Boston Chicago Los Angeles New York Philadelphia St. Louis. Why those cities? Only major league cites to have two teams. The asterisks reflect years when the city did not have two teams.

The reveal
 

Peter pretty much nailed it. Six cities have had or have American and National League teams at the same time. All the changes (relocating teams) occurred between 1952 and 1965. The six cities have been correctly identified and are in alphabetical order showing their population in the 1950, 1960 and 1970 census which spans the 13 year period. The city received an asterisk in any given census if they only had one team at that time. A fourth list would not change the asterisk distribution in either direction. In the 16 team major league baseball of the early fifties all games were played in only 10 cities, as New York had three teams in the early fifties in addition to the 4 cities with two. The Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953. The Browns became the Orioles of Balimore in 1954. The Athletics moved from Philadelphia to KC in 1954. The Giants and Dodgers left New York in 1958. The Los Angeles Angels were formed in 1961 and originally played at Dodger Stadium before their move to Orange County. Their name was changed in 1965 to the California Angels, so technically there should be an asterisk by the LA population in the third list, because Anaheim is not Los Angeles. (This is the mistake I was referring to before the list of the clues.) The Mets were formed in 1962 amazingly returning New York to the two team city list. The pairs of players are players who played in the same city, but in different leagues during the first or last year of the dual occupancy. Dizzy and Sugar Cain were the aces for the two '35 St Louis clubs. '35 is a dyslexic '53, the Browns' last year of existence. I imagine that the scheduling to a large extent was created so that only one team in each city had a home game on any given day, but at least in the case of New York with three teams, there was frequently more than one game in a day in town. I believe that there are still days in Chicago when the Cubs and the White Sox play games in town on the same day. Ernie Banks was of course referring to playing a double header, but i wasn't in the clue. Finally it appears from the data that once the population drops below 800,000, it is unlikely that a city can support two teams. Football is a different story of course, where the entire city of Green Bay can fit in Lambeau Field even if a few of them would be in the Standing Room Only section, and that franchise is over 90 years old and going strong.;)

I don't think anything comes close to East Rutherford, NJ, population 8,900, home to 2 NFL teams :)

A 50 mile radius from Lambeau adds more cows than than people. The same is not true of East Rutherford.:D

Frank - you need a hobby

Technically, clue #3 ' Did you know that numbers can be alphabetized?' was bogus as it was the city names, not the numbers that were alphabetized - thought even more technically, the actual name of individual digits could be alphabetized, though they were not in this case.

So, we take half a point off for that...and I still would not have been able to figure it out - though I did, in fact, spend several minutes attempting to make sense of '8' being 'Eight' preceding '3' 'Three' and then '1' 'One'...etc.

My loose ties to logical numeric sorting - part of my Computer Science Coding experience - led me up that alley.

I'm easily confused these days...still have to get that check in the mail to that Nigerian Prince.
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