Remember that Chuck said that Yankee fans are “supportive”?? Under baseball’s system of revenue sharing, the Yankees (and their fans) are extremely supportive.? The Yankees and their fans support baseball’s poorest teams in baseball’s smallest markets – teams like the Rays, the Royals and the Pirates.? Revenue sharing has provided these teams with major amounts of cash – over $40 million annually per team in some cases – making a few of these teams among the most profitable in baseball.? Who pays for this revenue sharing?? Cash-generating teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox – and of course, the cash-paying fans of these cash-generating teams.
We’ve written a lot here about revenue sharing, so my regular readers already know how the Pirates and Marlins have profited from revenue sharing.? But here’s something you might not have known.? Guess what other baseball team has received financial support from revenue sharing?? I bet you’ve guessed already.? In 2008, the Texas Rangers received a bit more than $23 million in revenue sharing payments.? In 2009, the Rangers received “only” $5.5 million in revenue sharing, and perhaps this drop in revenue sharing was a small reason why the Rangers’ prior ownership ended up in bankruptcy.? (The incompetency of the Rangers’ prior ownership was probably a bigger reason for the bankruptcy.)
Of course, you may question why the Texas Rangers received any amount of revenue sharing.? The Rangers are not exactly a small market team.? The Rangers are located in the fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States.? Moreover, the Rangers are the only team in its metropolitan area – there are three larger metropolitan areas in the United States (New York, Los Angeles and Chicago), but each of these metropolitan areas supports two baseball teams.? Chuck’s Rangers have the Dallas metropolitan area all to themselves.
Yet for the last couple of years, the Rangers received revenue sharing payments – baseball’s equivalent of welfare.? As we’ve pointed out, revenue sharing is not exclusively aimed at the little guys.? No, revenue sharing is also there to support incompetently managed teams in large markets … like the pre-2010 version of the Texas Rangers.? The Rangers aren’t the only team that’s fallen into this category.? A few years ago, the Philadelphia Phillies were also receiving revenue sharing.
Perhaps now you can see what Chuck meant when he called Yankee fans both “supportive” and “apathetic”.? We’re “supportive”, because we’ve funded major infusions of cash over the years to the Texas Rangers.? We’re “apathetic”, because we’ve never objected about having to do so.
We’ll do some fast math here.? It’s been estimated that the total distributed in revenue sharing in 2008 was around $400 million.? We don’t know how of that was paid by the Yankees, but Maury Brown at BizOfBaseball estimates that it might have been as high as 30%.? By that estimate, the Yankees would have paid out $120 million in revenue sharing in 2008.? We know that the Rangers received about 5.8% of the revenue sharing pool in 2008, so roughly $7 million of revenue sharing was paid in 2008 by the Yankees to the Rangers.? That was enough to cover Michael Young’s salary in 2008, with a little left over to pay C.J. Wilson and Josh Hamilton.? No wonder Chuck Greenberg thinks the Yankees are “supportive”!
Let’s do some more math.? By our estimates (and these are rough estimates), 54% of the Yankees revenues come from ticket sales at the Stadium, so about $65 million of the Yankees’ 2008 revenue sharing payment was funded by Yankees’ paying customers.? ??The Rangers received about 5.8% of the revenue sharing pool in 2008, so about $3.8 million of this $65 million went to the Rangers.? The Yankees attendance in 2008 was about 4.3 million.? Plug all those numbers into your calculator, and you come up with the following rough number:
About 88 cents from every Yankee ticket sold in 2008 went to support the Texas Rangers.? Nice support!
Again, you might not have thought that the Rangers needed to receive welfare payments from the Yankees.? Not when the Rangers are the only team in the fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States.? Sure, I suppose that other fans of other teams might have objected to having to fund these kinds of payments, particularly to a team in the big city in Texas, particularly when gas prices are so high.
But we Yankee fans are pretty much “go along to get along” types, easygoing, generous to a fault.? We paid that 88 cents a ticket for games when the Yanks beat the Rangers, and when the Rangers beat the Yankees, and even when the Rangers were not playing the Yankees!? Was it “apathetic” of us to put up with this system?? Maybe so.? I think when Chuck calls us “apathetic”, what he’s really saying is that fans of the Texas Rangers would not have paid an extra 88 cents a ticket to help support the Yankees — that is, if the Rangers were flush with cash and the Yankees were hurting for money.
(When Chuck called us “supportive”, he might have also been thinking about the Yankee’s league-leading 3,765,807 in attendance in 2010.? With an average Yankee ticket priced at $51.83, that’s about $195 million of fan support right there.? We’re probably understating this support – Forbes says that Yankees gate receipts are over $300 million, but we’ll let that go for the moment.? Texas had the 14th best attendance in baseball in 2010, at 2,505,171, and an average ticket price of $20.65, below league average.? That’s total fan support of about $52 million, or about 27% of the fan support received by the Yankees.? You think Chuck might be a bit envious of the way Yankee fans support their team?).
So, I hope this explains things.? When Chuck calls us “supportive”, we should say “thank you!”? And when he calls us “apathetic”, we can respond “don’t mention it, we were glad to help!”
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.
No comments:
Post a Comment