I love the game of baseball, be it sandlot, Little League, minor league, women’s softball, or best of all, Big League. At the same time, I do not love the business of baseball or the way the new owners have turned their backs on old baseball tradition and on traditional baseball fans.
I don’t like the price of ballpark tickets, the price of ballpark food, or the way they confiscate the water you’re carrying at the gate and charge you three times the normal price for a replacement bottle inside. I don’t like the richest owners buying the star players, the players jumping from team to team or the way the faces on the teams keep changing every year. Baseball was better before they divided the leagues into divisions, began interleague play, abolished the reserve clause and began paying the players more than bankers. It was better before they started selling corporate boxes, cutting the number of grandstand and bleacher seats while raising grandstand and bleacher prices and charging $2500 a game for a box seat. You’ve got to foreclose on somebody’s house before you can afford a ticket. It mars enjoyment of the game.
As sportswriter Jimmy Cannon used to say, “Nobody asked me but…” would salaries have shot up the way they did starting in the 1970s if owners had been paying players fairly? Would the Union even have been able to organize twenty different teams and five hundred competing players?
In 1968, before the reserve clause was abolished, the Union negotiated a sixty seven per cent increase in the minimum salary from $6000 per year (where it had stayed for two decades) to $10,000. Were owners treating novice players fairly during those twenty years?
Fans felt Curt Flood, the star St. Louis center fielder, was exaggerating when he likened the reserve clause to slavery. Originally, it had had a reasonable purpose--to prevent rich teams in big cities luring away players developed by poorer teams in small cities. It did that by prohibiting players from leaving the team with which they signed their first or subsequent contracts without the owner’s permission. However, owners began using it for their own benefit rather than baseball’s. They kept salaries, e.g. Hank Aaron’s, artificially low. That left a permanent sense of grievance and injustice, just as slavery did.
In 1975, before the Union got the reserve clause killed, the average salary was $45,000. Over the next eight years it rose over 500 per cent to $289,000. In 1972 Hank Aaron, who broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime home run record, earned only $200,000. Then in 1975 Stormbronxer began paying Catfish Hunter $750,000. That opened the Floodgate (pun intended.) In 1985-Mike Schmidt got $2.1 Million, 1995-Cecil Fielder $9.2 M, in 2000-Kevin Brown $15.2M, and in 2007-Alex Rodriguez $26 million. Today after thirty years of strikes, lockouts, arbitrations, fines against owners for collusion and owners bidding against each other for star players, the minimum salary is $400,000 a year; the average salary is over $3 million. Back in the golden years player salaries were twenty percent of revenues and the owners called players by their first names. Now player salaries are over fifty per cent of revenues, they have agents negotiating their contracts, and they call the owners by their first names.
Once players came to feel their interests were opposed to rather than allied with the interests of owners, many grew indifferent to the feelings of the fans. Instead of identifying with a particular team, they identified with the team that offered the best contract--but only so long as that contract lasted.
The feelings of baseball fans changed as well. They sympathized with neither owners nor players during the various strikes, lockouts, broken seasons and annual disputes over salary levels that were ten, fifty or even a thousand times what the average fan was earning. Fans came to regard owners as greedy and devious, players as over-pampered and overpaid. They picked out a few favorites, hoped they didn’t jump to another team and learned to settle for an allegiance to a team’s name rather than to the personalities, faces and records of the more or less constant group of players for whom they’d cheered during baseball’s golden years.
Neither did old time fans like the split of the leagues into eastern and central divisions with five teams each and western divisions with four teams. Making the divisions unequal in size, strength and schedule gave teams in the smaller, weaker divisions an advantage. Deciding the pennant winners by five and seven-game post-season series seemed like one more way for owners to bring in more ticket and TV money at premium prices, particularly when they added wild card teams in 1994. The very idea of deciding pennant winners by post-season tournaments rather than by the hundred-sixty-two-game regular season schedule both devalues the importance of the regular season and too often leads to the incongruous and unjust results we saw in 2008: the Los Angeles Angels had the best record in the American League; they won a hundred games; the Chicago Cubs won ninety-seven and had the best record in the National, but neither played in the World Series.
In the first round of the playoff tournament the Angels, who’d beaten the Red Sox eight times in nine games during the regular season, lost three of five post-season games. That knocked them out. The Cubs won thirty-three more games than they lost during the regular season; the Los Angeles Dodgers won only six more. The Cubs beat the Dodgers five times in seven regular season games but the Dodgers won three of five post-season games. That knocked the Cubs out. Instead of the two best teams meeting in the World Series, it was the second-best Phillies against the second-best Devil Rays. In college football they’d call a game between two such teams The Oleomargarine Bowl.
For over ninety years, baseball had kept teams in the two leagues separate from one another before the World Series. Only in October did the wall come down and then the best team in the National League played the best in the American to decide the championship of the world. Neither team had faced the other during the season; neither had faced any third team. The separation was part of what made the World Series exciting, the climax of the sports year, the only sporting event that rivaled a heavyweight championship fight.
Not anymore. In 1997 the owners gave another thumb-to-the-nose of baseball tradition by starting interleague play. Now fans no longer have to wait until October. Interleague games begin in May. It may sell tickets but it’s the equivalent selling bullfighting aficionados tickets to a Thursday afternoon practice session between the bullfighter and the bulls he’s scheduled to fight Sunday evening.
These and other changes initiated by the post-golden years owners have damaged baseball as a sport, but what have they done for baseball as a business?
In the last couple of years, the Yankees, Mets and Washington Nationals all got new stadiums at a taxpayer cost of over 3 billion dollars. That seems trifling now that Treasury has agreed to dump thirty-five hundred billion down the rat hole they’ve renamed ‘the abyss,’ but at one time three billion was considered serious money.
The Mets call their new stadium Citi Field courtesy of a $400 million marketing agreement with Citibank. (Citibank claims that they didn’t pay with any of the dollars they received in TARP, bailout or loan guarantees. They paid with different dollars.)
News reports say the Yankees have been unable to sell tickets to many of those $2500 per game box seats. According to the YANKEE TICKET INFORMATION AND FAN GUIDE, those unsold seats are “comfortable cushioned suite seats, elegantly constructed, with teak arms.” To make matters worse, the unsold seats are visible to TV audiences watching games on the Yankee Cable TV Channel. They ‘re an embarrassment to Yankee management.
Imagine! Comfortably cushioned. With teak arms. Not just built, but constructed, and they’re empty. What do fans want?
The empty seats become especially noticeable when batters hit foul pop flies and the infielders run over to the stands to try to catch them. One marketing consultant proposed that infielders not be permitted to chase foul pop-ups close to the stands, but that was vetoed. Stormbronxer might have persuaded Yankee infielders to go along but would have had trouble with visiting team infielders.
Now they’ve hit on a new scheme. Sensing that some fans felt $2500 was too much to pay for a seat, they cut the price to $1250—a fifty per cent discount. It looks like Stormbronxer is making a real effort to get back in touch with the feelings of the average fan.
With all the negative perceptions of Stormbronxer, one must feel a little sorry for him. According to Forbes Magazine, although the Yankees drew close to 4.3 million fans last year and in 2007, and although their 2007 revenues were $327 million, they lost $50 million on an operating basis. (The Mets made $33 million, the Washington Nationals $44 million.)
Part of the Yankee’s profit problems are player salaries. They have the highest payroll in baseball--$253 million in 2007-over sixty per cent of revenues. The Red Sox were second at $200 million. They lost only $20 million. No other team came close to the Yankees and Red Sox in player salaries, but salaries are only part of the problem. The Yankees and Red Sox also suffer from high attendance, high gate receipts and high won/lost records. With those three factors working against you, it’s hard to make a profit in Big League Baseball.
The reason for that is that a decade ago the owners voted to begin a revenue sharing arrangement under which one third of team and league revenues are contributed to a general fund. That general fund is redistributed or “shared” equally among all the teams in the league. Naturally, the teams with the highest payrolls get the most star players and bring in the highest revenues from tickets, local TV and merchandise sales. Under revenue-sharing these teams contribute much more than they get back, while teams at the opposite end of the spectrum get back much more than they contribute.
The secret of making a profit in Big League Baseball is low payrolls, low attendance and high revenue sharing money. Having an inferior stadium is a plus, as are other attendance-discouraging characteristics. For example, if one of your players gets so good he asks for a raise, shop him off to one of the successful teams and get a cheaper player in exchange. If attendance and ticket receipts start creeping up, get rid of your best pitcher. You start winning too many games? Take corrective action. Dump your .300 hitters. There are three Golden Guidelines: 1-ticket receipts under $50 million; 2-payroll expense under $65 million; 3-won-lost percentage under .470. Always remember: The Worse You Do, The Better You Do.
Until last year, perennial high profit performers Florida, Tampa Bay, Pittsburgh, and Washington showed great discipline in following the guidelines. During 2008, however, both Tampa Bay and Florida won more games than they lost. Tampa Bay even let them themselves get involved in the World Series. They rose from fourteenth and last in attendance to twelfth. They even changed their name from Devil Rays to Rays. The profit figures haven’t been published yet, but if I were a stockholder I wouldn’t feel optimistic.
None of this is intended to denigrate the business sense of today’s owners. The whole idea of revenue-sharing is based upon principles established by the Congress of the United States and implemented by the Internal Revenue Service.
Herb L
oldtimewriter.com
