Neil deMause

Wow, it’s been ages since I last posted here. Most of that remains (as I hinted before) due to the vagaries of the dead-tree publication production cycle: Right now I have at least four articles in the can that should be popping up into public view over the next month. Add in that my Baseball Prospectus column is on hiatus thanks to a lack of funding, and it’s made for a bit of a dry spell around these parts.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to tide yourself over with my short review of Nationals Park in Washington (at Field of Schemes), only three years after it opened. Okay, dead trees aren’t the only thing causing lag around here…

Mets ownership wrapped up a tumultuous week by agreeing to sell off a minority stake in the ballclub for $200 million to hedge funde honcho David Einhorn. Who is this guy, and what does he want with the Amazins?

Talk about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat: This week, Mets owner/accused Bernie Madoff unindicted co-conspirator Fred Wilpon 1) was the subject of a New Yorker profile in which he dissed his three best players, then had to apologize via clubhouse speakerphone, 2) was the subject of a Sports Illustrated profile in which he suggested the team payroll would plummet from $142 million to less than $100 million next year, then had to watch as GM Sandy Alderson publicly contradicted him, and 3) cut a deal to sell a minority share in the team to hedge-fund superstar David Einhorn for $200 million, staving off financial ruin with an 11th-hour influx of cool, sweet greenbacks. Which one do you think he’s going to be posting about on Facebook?… [read more]

In the wake of Mets owner Fred Wilpon’s player-dissing New Yorker interview, I explore whether holding a fire sale makes baseball — or economic — sense (subscription required):

Was it really only six months ago that Mets fans were hailing the arrival of Sandy Alderson as putting an end to one of the grimmest eras in a team history full of grimmage? Finally, the Omar Minaya epoch was at an end, and with it the days of throwing money at Oliver Perezes and Luis Castillos; from now on, the Mets could spend their cash reserves wisely, and leverage their big media market and their core of young(ish) talent to bring October baseball back to Flushing… [read more]

If you’ve been wondering where my non-baseball writing has gone to recently, I have a bunch of stuff in the pipeline that’s going to start showing up in print (and in pixels) in coming weeks. And the first of these is now out, a profile of Brooklyn developer Bruce Ratner for the Jewish Daily Forward, on the occasion of his firm’s reported ties to a state senator accused of bribe-taking:

When federal prosecutors charged New York State Senator Carl Kruger with taking more than $1 million in bribes in March, few were surprised to see seven others indicted with him. The colorful Kruger, who represents the heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brighton Beach, Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay, has long attracted media attention for high-profile deal-making among a wide network of politicians and lobbyists… [read more]

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]

Just a note that I’m doing a live chat tomorrow at Baseball Prospectus from 1 pm to roughly 3 pm EDT. You can submit your questions ahead of time, tune in live tomorrow, or read the transcript later, all at the same location. Baseball questions preferred, but I can bend the rules and take one or two Anaheim Kings questions if the masses demand it.

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]