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Thanks for this post. You nailed it!
For those folks who say, "Blow up the team, we have no chance of contending this year," you have to realize that rebuilding really becomes a ten to fifteen-year process.
You first have to rebuild your team, and then rebuild trust with your fanbase.
EVIDENCE!
http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/CLE/attend.shtml
Check out Cleveland's attendance leading up to their rebuilding--for six years they stayed between 3.1-3.5 million people for six years when they were going to the playoffs. They had one middle of the pack year in 2002 where they drew 2.6 million. From the point of their rebuild in 2001 onward, however, they have struggled to hit the 2 million mark. They won 93 games in 2005 and 96 games in 2007, but still have only managed at best to draw 2.2 million in a season--and that year they went to the GD ALCS!
Fanbases lose confidence in the team when it loses too many games. It takes years of winning to recover the lost revenue after a rebuild. It will always be the most advantageous strategy--in the long and short term--for a team to win as many games as possible (without gutting a farm system, of course). Maintaining a steady fanbase helps ensure a steady payroll in the future.
Bringing in the Moose is the right thing to do. If the M's can pull back up to .500, there will be a lot more excitement and a lot more paying customers heading into next year.