Neil deMause

In which I tackle the question of whether more competition for baseball playoff spots will encourage teams to spend more on players, plus revisit the Great Attendance Drop (subscription required):

Economic cause-and-effect is a funny thing. Last week, Matt Swartz laid out the reasons why the proposed addition of an extra wild-card team in each league could end up enriching the players at the expense of the owners. It’s a long argument and worth reading, but the nut of it comes down to: More wild cards equal more teams in the playoff hunt, teams in the playoff hunt are more likely to bid up player salaries, and so shoehorning two more teams into October, even for a single game, is likely to drive salaries skyward… [read more]

My Extra! magazine article on how U.S. media coverage of last fall’s elections ignored climate policy, previously print-only, is now online for free: You can read it here in its entirety, no tree-killing or money-spending necessary. (Though FAIR could certainly use your money if you want to subscribe, and their digital subscriptions save both trees and your cash!)

The baseball season isn’t even three weeks old, and six teams have already set new single-game records for lowest attendance at their current stadiums. Is this a small-sample-size aberration, or a sign that the ticket bubble is about to burst? (Subscribers only.)

The young baseball season is already shaping up to be lots of things—the Year of the Great Red Sox Collapse, maybe, or the Year of the Exploding Appendices—but one theme that might actually survive small-sample goofiness to have some legs is the Year the Fans Went Away. MLB attendance has been gradually sliding ever since its peak in 2007, but the early signs this year have been pretty alarming… [read more]

The Yankees are having trouble drawing fans again this season, and I set out to assess the theories why:

Following last night’s ten-inning loss to the Twins, the Yankees’ record stands at 3-2 (good!) and the team trails Buck Showalter’s undefeated Orioles by a game and a half in the AL East (bad!). But since everybody knows that early April stats don’t matter (remember how the Yanks started off 1-4 in 1998 and went on to set a new AL wins record?), instead everyone is focused on the acres of empty seats that have suddenly sprouted up in the Bronx: Last night’s paid attendance of 40,267, notes River Avenue Blues, made it four straight nights of new record low ticket sales at Yankee Stadium: The Reboot… [read more]

The Forbes baseball team value estimates have been released, and in my latest spin at Baseball Prospectus, I take a look at what this means for stadium deals, the Mets’ and Dodgers’ debt woes, the Rays contraction rumors, and the future home of Albert Pujols (subscription required for this one, though on the Rays issue you can also check out my related post at fieldofschemes.com):

For sports economics geeks, it’s a rite of spring right up there with unpopular politicians throwing out first pitches: the annual release of Forbes magazine’s baseball team value numbers. The tradition goes back to 1990, when Michael Ozanian first published estimates of MLB teams’ finances for Financial World magazine; when Financial World disappeared in a puff of mismanagement in 1998, Ozanian took his spreadsheets to Forbes, where they’ve appeared ever since.

For years, sports economists treated the Forbes numbers as kind of a business-side equivalent to fielding stats: probably not all that accurate, but worth looking at because, hey, they’re all we’ve got. All of that changed, though, after last summer’s Leakgate, in which internal MLB documents leaked to Deadspin revealed the financial details for several MLB teams—and the income numbers matched the Forbes figures almost exactly… [read more]

Every year as baseball season approaches, I get (and have) the same question: How come I can’t watch my home team’s games on my computer? The answer, it turns out, is more complicated than I’d expected:

Living in the future has its advantages. Back when I was a kid, in the late Pleistocene, catching a ballgame remotely meant either watching your local teams on TV or, if you were away from your living room, listening on the radio; maybe if you were very lucky and it was late at night and the ionosphere was aligned just right, you might be able to just barely tune in something that might possibly be Ernie Harwell on an out-of-town broadcast. Today, anyone with $99.99 burning a hole in their credit card ($119.99 if you want DVR-style gewgaws like fast-forward and rewind) can sign up for MLB.tv and watch any game, whether spring training, regular season, or postseason, on their computer, iPad, smartphone, or PlayStation 3—I’m sure that right this moment someone somewhere at MLB Advanced Media is working on an app that will stream hi-def baseball video live to the dashboard display of your flying car, just as soon as those are invented.

Any game, that is, unless it’s one involving your local team. In that case, you’re still stuck with 20th-century technology, and either tethered to your TV or forced to stick with audio. Any attempt to do otherwise will result in that dreaded message familiar to MLB.tv users: “We’re sorry. Due to your current location you are blacked out of watching the game you have selected….” [read more]

I have an article in the February issue of Extra! on how the U.S. news media largely ignored Republicans’ climate-change-denial rhetoric in the runup to last November’s elections, despite the fact that it could have huge consequences for the fate of the earth. It’s not online, sadly, but you can buy a copy for $4.95 at what we used to call “your local news-stand,” get an annual subscription for not much more, or wait a month or two and it should show up for free here. Here’s the intro:

Of all the issues at stake in the midterm congressional elections of 2010, the one that hung most in the balance may have been the fate of the world’s climate. It was clear from early in the election cycle that incoming Republicans were uniformly in agreement that no government action to control carbon emissions was desirable, or indeed necessary: Of Republican Senate candidates, “19 of the 20 who have taken a position say that global climate change is unproven or actually a hoax,” the National Journal’s Ron Brownstein told Christiane Amanpour (This Week, 9/26/10).

Several prominent GOP leaders had gone even further: Soon-to-be House speaker John Boehner declared that “the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it is harmful to our environment, is almost comical,” while Rep. John Shimkus, a contender for chair of the House Energy Committee, brushed off fears of climate disaster by citing the Bible’s promise that “as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease” (New Yorker, 11/22/10)…

Ten years after the idea of “contracting” baseball teams died a merciful death, it’s back in the news. Who’s trying to get what out of whom this time?

This time, it seems, it started with Ken Rosenthal. Two days after Hank Steinbrenner let fly with an attack on baseball’s revenue-sharing plan that concluded, “if you don’t want to worry about teams in minor markets, don’t put teams in minor markets, or don’t leave teams in minor markets if they’re truly minor,” Rosenthal penned a Fox Sports Exclusive that significantly upped the ante: “Don’t be surprised if the “C” word—contraction—returns to the baseball lexicon soon,” he wrote, noting that he’d been “hearing rumblings” that “certain big-market teams” wanted to whack the Rays and A’s. In one scenario, wrote Rosenthal, Rays owner Stuart Sternberg would end up buying the Mets from the troubled Wilpons, while A’s owner Lew Wolff did the same with the McCourt-wracked Dodgers, before watching their old teams go poof… [read more]

The New York Post has revealed what it claims are the front-runners to buy a share of the New York Mets, but doesn’t tell us anything interesting about them. Armed with Google, I set out to rectify this:

This morning’s New York Post made it a lot easier to set up your office “Who’s going to end up owning the Mets once the Wilpons have to repay their Madoff money?” pool, by running a helpful list of rich guys who, it claims, are in the running to buy at least a share of the Amazin’s. Less helpfully, they’re all a bunch of upper-mid-level Wall Street guys you’ve probably never heard of unless you go in for Goldman/Citi slash fic.

So, in the interest of informed gossip, Runnin’ Scared herewith provides your crib sheet to the guys who may or may not be sharing the Citi Field owners’ box in coming seasons… [read more]

Next up fo New York City after the defeat of a paid sick leave bill: a proposal to require decent wages for employees at development projects that get city subsidies.

The battle lines are all too familiar: A worker-rights bill backed by a broad coalition of unions and progressive politicians, but opposed by major business interests. A majority of the City Council on board as sponsors, but no commitment from the Council speaker. Dueling economic impact studies conducted by the two opposing sides, with each insisting that the other’s is inadequate.

After the Council’s long-awaited bill to extend sick leave to all private employees in New York City crashed and burned last fall once Council Speaker Christine Quinn declared that it would be too harmful to businesses during tough economic times, many of the same players turned their sights on a proposed “living wage” bill for recipients of city development subsidies… [read more]