Quote:
Originally Posted by D. Bergin
I just don't understand the economics of baseball the last few years. All these long-term guaranteed contracts are insane.
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Funny, when I read about Brendan Ryan's new contract, my eyes popped and I had a good discussion about these salaries with a friend.
There are probably good articles/books that explain it, but my guess is they blame it on corporate tickets. Ticket prices and concessions, along with marketing contracts and television, obviously have to go up in order to support these salaries, but it all comes down to what 'we' are willing to pay. Back in the early '80s when I lived in Houston, I could afford to go to as many games as I wanted. Now I scour stub hub for bargains, and still don't go to more than ten each year, and I never pay the beer and food prices.
That leaves all those empty corporate seats. So...large American companies use cheap foreign labor to keep stock prices up and 'their' country's middle class down, use some of that money to tell us on television how much they love us, some of it to buy baseball tickets to hand out some of that love to their upper management, and the seats remain mostly empty.
And we watch the game in a bar over $2.00 happy hour Raniers. Yeah, I'm mad - you corporate management types need to give away those tickets to your underlings if you'd rather go to Ruths Chris for dinner.
Filled seats = less uncomfortable vintage baseball chat forum questions.