I liked Field of Dreams a lot less when I learned that Joe Jackson actually batted lefty.
Which is probably an apt metphor for the way some people cling to their illusions.
Baseball was not invented by kids in a sandlot next to farm. It was an urban pastime which from day one was heavily associated with gambling. Player-owner strife, including strikes, holdouts and all the rest dates back to the 1800s. Competitive and economic imbalance has often been worse than it is now (see 1950s) Several times, teams teetered on bankruptcy while the Yankees and Dodgers made fortunes.
By any measure, and accounting for all factors, the major-league game is more popular than it was 20 or 50 years ago. Everyone makes more money, more people watch it on TV and go to the parks. The 1990s style of play isn’t to everyone’s taste (including mine) but the players are better far atheletes, and many if not most of them work harder at the game than players used to.
Which isn’t to say that nothing needs work, or that most of the good things didn’t happen despite oftern-incompetent ownership. Or that Bud Selig isn’t still a lying sack of feces who would rape his mother for a buck.
Nice post, furt.
As a kid growing up in the 1950’s, I was enchanted with baseball. I lived in So. Cal and we had the minor league Los Angeles Angels and Hollywood Stars*. They were colorful, entertaining, and though minor league provided some good baseball. I’ll stick with my memories, they’re a darn sight better than the reality now.
Furt, I don’t doubt most of what you say, but popularity would be hard to prove. F’rinstance we don’t have many of the minor leagues that we had years ago. But we probably have more high school, college and little leagues, which might account for some of the popularity, but much of that is local and may or may not translate to the major leagues.
The major league style of play does not please me either, but there are other factors also. It used to be discussed at least in my neck of the woods by guys interested in baseball. Now we have 3 piece suiters on ESPN or Fox discussing it as though they know anything about baseball. We have ex-jocks who can’t hardly talk, doing play by play. Tickets to a game cost a small fortune and it’s almost impossible for the average family to attend a game. Day games and doubleheaders are a thing of the past. MLB has a commissioner who is a frickin owner (something that wouldn’t have been tolerated not too many years ago). The game is being marketed but I’m not buying.
Hey, aluminum bats aren’t far behind. :rolleyes:
[sub]*The other 6 teams in the PCL were:
[ul]
[li]San Diego Padres [/li][li]Oakland Oaks[/li][li]Hi Opal[/li][li]San Francisco Seals[/li][li]Portland Beavers[/li][li]Seattle Rainers[/li][li]Sacramento Solons[/li][/ul]
Hey, I rememberd 'em all! ;j [/sub]
I agree completely. That’s why I was careful to say that “the major-league game is more popular.” I think the way the minor leagues have died or been sold into slavery is horrible. I wish for a return in force of the free minors that existed as recently as the 60’s, and are now starting to creep back.
The game as a whole may well have lost some ground to basketball etc, but seeing as how the majors have had growth (at the expense of the minors), and the majors is where the labor conflicts are, I don’t think it follows that the MLB labor problems are what’s hurting the minors.
I think the minors died for 2 reasons:
- Major-league games on TV
- The slave status of the minors. (Existing not to compete but as player factories.)
The first won’t change, and the second has a only slim hope. 
**
You are aware that most of those guys are ex-players and coaches, right? And what did Vin Scully, Ernie Harwell and Red Smith have for qualifications?
Prediction: There will never again be a professional team named Solons. Beavers, on the other hand might work if someone wants to get funny… 
While I love baseball as much as anyone, and would be happy to discuss the relative popularity of the various leagues through the years, that’s not really why I started this discussion.
If we could please get back to the point, which is figuring out to what extent to punish the Yankees for having a history of winning, and being in a huge market, and finding revenue streams better than anyone else 
I’ve seen suggested several times that any sort of increased revenue sharing and/or salary cap be tied to a MINIMUM salary cap. This is to prevent people like Selig and Pohlad from just taking the extra revenue and pocketing it, while continuing to field the cheapest possible team. I think a plan like that would work, and work well, but of course the owners are going to be against such a plan.
Hey, my first GD post! I feel so…deflowered!
Well, if I’m interpreting the figures cited in the Doug Pappas articles correctly, then Herr Selig’s cockamanie, absolutely arbitrary 60/40 plan should do just that.
How to fix this imbalance? I’d start with basing revenue sharing payments not on MLB’s definition of “low-revenue franchaise” (Pappas, page six), where those teams getting the greatest payouts are not necessarily the teams from the smallest markets. Instead, the current system seems to be rewarding franchaises that are poorly run (Bonifay’s Pirates, for example) rather than those who are actually disadvantaged by a factor (population base) which is out of their hands.
I am, by no means, versed in economics whatsoever, but I wonder if a successful system might be one wherein teams with lower-than-average population bases and winning percentages that, say, are better than .500 would receive the highest revenue allocations. Of course, this would have to be coupled with a corollary clause that prevents owners from pulling a Carl Pohlad and pocketing the money for themselves.
I might add that any successful plan would obviously first require Bud Selig to meet his untimely demise. Such a process, one can only hope, would involve blistering pustules of some sort.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Could you elaborate a bit?
Frankly, I don’t think population is all that useful as a basis for revenue reallocation. Yes, there is a correlation between population and team revenue, but it’s frankly not all that good a correlation. The Milwaukee and Seattle areas are pretty near equal in population, 900,000 to 1,000,000 people each. Yet the Mariners and Brewers are nowhere near each other in revenue. Compare the Angels and the Dodgers too, which works especially well since they’re both in pretty much the same geographic market.
If it’s going to work decently, every team should be on equal footing when it comes to revenue sharing. No team is an island. Without those other teams, there would be no revenue in teh first place. A 50-50 team/league split on all (and I do mean all) revenues makes a lot of sense to me, with each team in the league then sharing equally in the pooled revenues. Each team then retains a strong incentive to maximize its own revenues, while still recognizing that the teams are all in it together.
Actually, if anyone could point me to a breakdown of team revenues (preferably the Forbes numbers) that doesn’t already include the existing revenue redistribution, I would be pleased to run the numbers this evening to see where they all come out under my idea.
Well, you have to remember, the Mariners have been better than the Brewers for a long time, too. It wasn’t all that long ago that people were assuming the Mariners would be moved from Seattle because they “couldn’t make money there”…the 1995 (?) playoff victory over the Yankees is supposedly what saved that franchise.
The Brewers, on the other hand, have been run terribly for years. (The fact that Bud Selig ran this team for years will of course not escape mention).
But, basically, the Mariners make more money because they’re a better team - ie, run better. Why should they have to throw more money into a revenue-sharing system than the Brewers just because they have smarter management?
That seems to be a horrible disincentive for investing in your own product. A team shouldn’t be penalized for maximizing the revenues available to it in it’s market just because it’s dumber relatives in comparably-sized markets can’t or won’t do so.
Also, minty, there’s a chart of local revenue and revenue sharing payments/receipts in Part Six of the above-linked Doug Pappas articles, about 2/3 of the way down the page.
Id assume this doesn’t include payments from the MLB TV deal, although I’m not positive on that.
And yet the Mariners play teams like the White Sox and the Devil Rays just as many times as they play the Yankees, Dyno. Each team makes a roughly equal contribution to the financial well-being of the Mariners. Why should those teams not get an equal share of revenue that would not exist at all but for their competition?
Thanks for the cite. I petered out around page three when I looked at it last time, but I’ll try to run the numbers tonight.
Bud Selig ran that team for years.
I disagree with your assertion that every team makes an equal contribution to the well-being of the Mariners.
I’d bet that the Yankees and Red Sox and the like make a much greater contribution to the profits of other teams in the American League, than, say, the Devil Rays or Tigers do. Would you rather go to see Giambi, Jeter, Clemens, and the like, or…umm…it’ll come to me in a minute…or not…
As evidence for this, I’d wager that the average attendance on the road for teams like the Yankees is greater than that of the Devil Rays. Whoever’s hosting the game can most likely get higher advertising revenues for televised games versus the Yankees as well.
Plus, by their mere existence, the large-market teams have already enriched the smaller-market ones simply by making the national broadcast rights for the game more valuable. You see an awful lot of Yankees and Mariners games on ESPN. How often do you see the Royals or Devil Rays if they’re not playing one of the aforementioned teams?
In addition - would you propose that the revenues from playoff games also be split between the team and the league? Or is getting to keep all that money perhaps part of the prize for reaching the postseason?
The obvious answer to your playoff revenues question is that they should be shared equally between the playoff teams. The Devil Rays make no discernible contribution to playoff revenues, aside from laying down against the Red Sox something like 20 times this season, allowing Boston to take the wild card while the much stronger AL West teams slug the shit out of each other. (I hate this “balanced” schedule.)
And certainly, game attendance is greater when the home team is playing a good team than a bad one. (Broadcast rights are sold as a package, not on a per game basis, so your inquiry falls apart there.) But who’s hot and who’s not are cyclical. The Yankees stunk like Coney Island at low tide basically every year from the early 80s to the mid 90s. Now they’re the hottest ticket around. The Royals were a great team and a hot ticket for many years in the late 70s all the way through the 80s, and just ask cmkeller how many people walk through the turnstiles at a Royals game now. Adjusting team revenue shares each year based on how much revenue they created for other teams would be a conceptual and accounting nightmare. I’ll stick with my 50-50 plan, thanks.
First of all, my comparison of the populations of Seattle and Milwaukee was flatly wrong. I was going off county census data, which I figured was representative of total metro population, but Seattle actually appears to have roughly twice the population of Milwaukee. My bad. A more accurate comparison would have been Seattle and Miami, which still makes the same point I asserted above.
Seond of all, I’m afraid the numbers on page 6 of the Pappas article don’t quite work for what I was talking about earlier. The first chart shows only net income, and the second shows only local revenue, apparently leaving out league-wide revenue from national broadcast rights and other assorted income.
Nevertheless, I think I can work effectively with those numbers, since local revenue is the great majority of team income. Major league teams had a combined $2.8 billion in local revenue last year, according to the team’s own numbers. Under my idea, half of that would go straight into a community pot and be divided on a per capita basis. That works out to $47 million per team in revenue sharing. Each team would then retain, on top of that, one half of all the income it generates locally, including broadcast rights, ticket sales, parking, and concessions.
So what would it mean for the teams? Let’s take a few examples. None of the figures include amounts redistributed under the current revenue sharing plan.
The Yankees had $218 million in (local) income last year. They keep $109 million of that, then add in the $47 million revenue sharing, giving Satan $156 million to work with. Not too shabby.
The Diamondbacks had $107 million in local revenue. Under my plan, that works out to $100.5. Slight drop, but they deserve it for spending so wildly on free agents.
The A’s had $51 million in local revenue, which should conclusively demonstrate that the people of Oakland should not say one damn word when the A’s move elsewhere in a few years. My plan nets them $72.5 million. Suddenly there are still two Giambis still in Oakland.
Almost inconceivably, the Dodgers reported local income of $119 million, which tells me Rupert Murdoch got a great bargain for broadcasting his own games. Under the minty green revenue sharing plan, NewsCorp gets $106.5 million to waste on private jets for pitchers on the DL.
The Brewers come out slightly ahead, at $91.5 million versus a current $89 million. The Reds are big winners, raking in $70 million versus current $46 mil. And of course, the poor little Expos gain big, taking in $52M versus current $10M.
I humbly submit that if the Expos can’t field a competitive team with $52 million in revenue, they need to get out of the business. Oh, wait, they already have. And if Steinbrenner can’t buy pretty much any free agent he wants with $156 million in revenue, maybe he ought to think about selling the life estate on his soul in addition to the remainder interest he already hocked.
The server may not have registered it in the “Last Reply” column, but I want it noted for the record that I have indeed followed up on my promise to play voodoo with the numbers. 
Promise noted as completed
I’m still not sure I like the idea, though. I find it distasteful enough when owners won’t spend money they’ve raised locally on improving their team. How do we think it’s going to play when the next poor schlub who gets his owner’s-fraternity initiation hazing by having to run the Expos decides that pocketing the $42 million in revenue sharing is a much better idea than actually improving his team? It’s not like this is unheard of. Just ask the poor folks in Minnesota and Montreal. Steinbrenner would have a seizure, and rightly so.
While this would undoubtedly be entertaining, I don’t think it’s what we’re going for.
So, how do we deal with this? Do we add a salary floor (which I seriously doubt the efficacy of - we don’t need everyone turning into the Dodgers, after all)? Do we tie receipt of funds into improvements in record?
This, I should add, is one of the reasons I really liked the plan I linked to in the OP - low-revenue teams who work to win get more than those who don’t.
minty green:
Actually, that’s not true. While they didn’t finish in first place in any of those years, consistent second and third place finishes (with genuinely stinky years few and far between) actually made the Yankees the winningest team in baseball during the 80’s, believe it or not.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Why does everyone feel the need to reinvent the wheel with baseball’s financial situation? TV $$$ are just as important to baseball as any other sport, only the real money is in the local deals. Split ALL TV revenues, set an min and a max salary cap, and you’ve gone a long way to remedying this situation.
Of course, this will never happen. Why? The Player’s Union is a pr machine. Every other union has allowed for a cap. Yes, they are weaker Unions. But also, these caps have been good for the popularity and marketability of the LEAGUES. Competition, whether you are in a poorly run team or not, is better across the board. Yet the owner’s can barely mumble salary cap before the Union makes them out to look like slave owners. There is a lot of greed involved in baseball’s financial situation, and I think the players get a free ride on it. The owner’s have learned by now that they will win no popularity battles with the players in tough negotiations, and also that losing the popularity battle means losing fans. Until the media and the American Pop Opinion make both sides come to the table on equal terms, this is going to go on forever. Since '94, the players have had nothing to lose and everything to gain.