Neil deMause

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]

This week at Baseball Prospectus, I take a look at Bud Selig’s plans to add extra wild-card teams, and whether this will make baseball’s postseason any fairer, and its regular season any more meaningful:

Somewhere among the piles of spiral-bound notebooks stacked in my closet lies a short-lived diary titled “The Last Pennant Race.” It recounts the day-by-day events of the last two months of the 1993 Yankees season, of which pretty much all I can remember is, first, that the Yankees managed to tie the eventual champion Blue Jays for first place roughly three dozen times, but never managed to take the lead on their own, and second, that in one late-season game, Don Mattingly, presaging the Jeffrey Maier incident by three years, got credit for a key home run despite it being caught by a fan leaning so far into the field of play that he could have shaken hands with the second baseman… [read more]

The 1099 tax form mess continues, with both the House and Senate moving to pass repeal bills. Unfortunately, the Senate’s solution for filling the resulting revenue gap is to promise vaguely to find unneeded spending it can cut; the House’s is to raise low- and middle-income earners’ health insurance premium costs; and the whole thing might still fail if the two sides can’t agree on a compromise:

There’s one legislative issue lawmakers on both sides of the aisle overwhelmingly agree on: The onerous 1099 tax-reporting mandate that snuck into the health-care reform bill has to be repealed.

The Republicans promised to eliminate it in their Pledge to America, and President Obama did the same in his State of the Union address. So nearly one year after its passage, why isn’t the law dead yet?… [read more]

Trying to make sense of what the Mets owners’ money woes could mean for the finances behind their new stadium:

If the last ten days in the life of Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon were a baseball game, they would have been shut out, made 17 errors, and hit into a game-ending unassisted triple play. (That last feeling, admittedly, is one that they’re already familiar with.)

First, Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee for Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme victims, announced he was suing the Wilpons for as much as $1 billion in ill-gotten gains. Since then, it seemed like not a day has passed without a Wilpon-related bombshell… [read more]

From today’s Washington Post political blog:

Republican leaders will soon be walking a tightrope when it comes to the looming spending debate.

But at least it looks like the public is on their side.

In addition to being a very difficult metaphor to picture (which side of the tightrope would that be, the top side?), it doesn’t even help make the authors’ point: If the Republicans are walking a tightrope between forcing Obama to make spending cuts and risking a government shutdown if a budget isn’t passed — which actually seems more like “playing chicken” than walking a rope, but never mind — then what is it that the public is supporting? Opposing raising the debt ceiling, according to poll numbers given in the article; but the GOP isn’t stopping the government from raising the debt ceiling, just demanding new spending cuts before it agrees to more debt.

So really, the public is on a different side of the rope. Good thing it has an infinite number of sides.