NL wild card

[BobC]

Originally Posted by packs

Sorry, I don't believe that. Everyone knows a winning product is a valuable product. If an owner wanted to maximize profit they would build a winning team. It worked for the Patriots. It can work for any losing franchise.

But absent owners don't do that because they don't care about the team. They care about maximum profits on minimum budgets and that means operating as cheaply as possible and not really caring about a championship. Look at the Pirates. They've had grievances filed against them twice for not spending their revenue share money on their team. Every team also made 100 million dollars in TV contracts before even selling a ticket this year.

How a fan of a small market team can be both satisfied and wear that as a badge of honor is not something I'll ever understand.

Don't entirely disagree, but have you ever been involved with a sale of a business, any business? If a small market team owner generates losses from the business year after year, even if the result is a winning team, those recurring losses will normally drive the business' value down, not up. Do you know what EBITDA is and how most businesses are valued and sold using some multiple of that factor?

Also, I fully realize there is a revenue sharing aspect when it comes to TV/cable revenue, like with the MLB network. But there are also then local broadcast rights, and an even bigger exception to that revenue sharing concept as I understand it if the baseball team itself also owns a share/interest in the TV/cable network that handles a team's local broadcasting. For example, my understanding is the Red Sox own something like 80% of the company they have contracted with to provide local broadcasts of their games. So, if after receiving and accounting for the normal revenue they got for their local broadcast rights, let's say the company doing the broadcasting ended up making $100M for the year. That means the Red Sox have an additional $80M of revenue that doesn't get counted towards any revenue sharing, that they can potentially spend on players.

You are correct though in that ALL baseball teams are businesses, and the only thing that ALL of them have in common is that ALL any of the owners possibly truly care about is making money, first and foremost. The fact is that some teams, mostly all from the bigger market teams, end up getting so much more revenue than their smaller market brethren that those big market team owners can almost indiscriminately spend as much as they want to lure away the top talent in free agency. Those big market team owners don't really care so much about the fans either. They know they can outspend the other team owners, thereby having the winning bragging rights they can then lord over the other owners, AND still make a sh@tload of money doing it. And don't kid yourself, the bigger market team owners do want to win to not necessarily make the fans happy, but likely more so to keep the viewing numbers up so they can show those figures to advertisers, and charge them even more money.