Best Interest of Baseball?
October 5, 2007 by Geoff Young
Filed under News
Wait, what are we talking about?! We decided?! My best interest?! How can you know, how can you say what my best interest is? What are you trying to say? I’m crazy?
I’m pretty certain that Suicidal Tendencies didn’t have Major League Baseball in mind, but if the shoe fits…
A reader passed along an article (thanks!) at Smart Money called 10 Things Major League Baseball Won’t Tell You. It’s a fascinating, if disturbing, read.
On institutionalized ticket scalping:
Since 2001 teams have partnered with online brokers, allowing ticket holders to sell their seats for whatever the market bears; the team gets the initial sale as well as a 25% cut of the profit from the resale. Not only are fans held hostage by this institutionalized price gouging (resale price, and not face value, is printed on the ticket), but any competition is eliminated.
On cooking the books:
Owners pay themselves and family members for executive positions (the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner has variously employed two sons, two daughters and three sons-in-law), and, of course, the salaries are listed as expenses. Most significant is the revenue from concessions, parking and television, which aren’t counted as profit even though the money goes straight into the team’s coffers. As former MLB President Paul Beeston famously boasted when he was a Toronto Blue Jays executive, “I can turn a $4 million profit into a $2 million loss and get every national accounting firm to agree with me.”
On the antitrust exemption that basically lets MLB do whatever it wants:
Minor league players are bound to their teams, team owners have major hurdles to jump to sue the league, and the league can decide where a team plays. Montreal Expos fans found this out the hard way, when MLB up and moved their team to Washington, D.C., after the 2004 season.
Sigh. These aren’t exactly revelations, but it’s always irritating to be reminded that the folks who run the sport we love don’t necessarily have its best interests at heart.
You’re not crazy. They’re the ones that are crazy…
