Sacramento Scam

Skip Sauer notes a trick that Sacramento politicians are using to get public approval to raise taxes for building  a new arena for the Kings.

Reader Mike Marshall notes that the new deal is now buried inside a general tax referendum, which requires only 50% + 1 vote to pass, rather than the 2/3 super-majority required for a specific tax hike. …

If I understand the sequence and strategy right, city leaders came to believe that the original plan to finance and spend about $600 million on an arena was unlikely to pass muster with voters, so in response, they are going to spend another $600 million on “unspecified projects” and make everyone pay. This in order to cross the threshold at the voting booth. This one might be worth watching.

Laws and sausages.

Minor league gimmicks

Minor league games are a lot of fun to attend. In fact, if you ever want to introduce someone to baseball, the minor leagues are the place to go. However, because the major league games are so easy to find on TV, the minors normally have to do some other things to get fans out to the park.
Brian Borawski links to a list of minor league gimmicks in his Business of Baseball Report. Here is my favorite.

Brevard County Manatees (Florida State League)
Plunger Giveaway
Saturday, August 26 vs. Palm Beach Cardinals
Sometimes it’s best to do away with witty remarks and historical anecdotes and simply report the facts: on Saturday, the Brevard County Manatees will be giving away plungers. Unfortunately, that is currently all that is known about this unprecedented promo. Will it be a sink plunger? A toilet plunger? Will it be embossed with the Manatees logo? The world wants to know, but details are maddeningly vague at this point. You’ll simply have to attend Saturday’s game to find out.

Reminder: Blogs due on Monday

You must have your blog up and running by Monday morning. I’ll be looking at them at about 8 am. Remember when you set your blog up to make sure that the subject matter of the blog is clear. You might want to add an introductory post stating what you plan to blog about over the semester.

The Maryland Stadium Authority

Economist Dennis Coates, a leading expert on stadium finance, points to an interesting critique of the Maryland Stadium Authority.

It loses money, violates the law, and works to protect the monopoly status of a private business.

Maryland has received all those good works from an agency created in 1986 with the “mission of returning a professional National Football League (NFL) team to Baltimore and ensuring that our Major League Baseball team, the Orioles, remained in Maryland.” Now that’s good government!

It’s comical how far the MSA has overstepped the bounds of it’s original mission. And from the sound of things, it doesn’t appear that the organization is any could at what it does, except maintaining its own existence.

Test Post

This is a test post. Blogging is fun. Dr. Bradbury’s blog is Sabernomics.

Why is baseball tourism down in St. Louis?

Phill Miller at The Sports Economist reports that tourists are making fewer trips to see Cardinals games this year.

The Cardinals are taking the heat for a slumping baseball season. But could the Redbirds be to blame for another slump as well?

Some local attractions and hotels wonder whether a ticket squeeze at the new, smaller Busch Stadium has discouraged tourists from visiting Cardinal Nation this summer.

I think this is unlikely. New stadiums normally generate increased attendence. Some have suggested that the new smaller park is limiting the people who can visit. I doubt this since there are still tickets available for games.

Combined with high gas prices, weather, and a worse team it seems that the drop is baseball tourism is a product of scheduling.

Cardinals ticket chief Joe Strohm has not crunched visitor data yet for this season, but he says this season is different from last year in a few significant ways. The team has hosted only seven weekend series May through August, compared with nine last year. Also, the Cardinals played four fewer home games this July.

I wonder how much teams lobby the league for weekend home series in mid-summer.

A New Way to Find Talent

How do the Florida Marlins win so much without spending much money? They are creative. Here is an example.

When the Florida Marlins organization needed players to fill gaps within its minor-league system, it turned to the independent professional baseball leagues.
Since the start of the minor-league season, only Oakland has acquired more players than the five players Florida has pulled from independent baseball – professional baseball leagues whose teams don’t have a major-league affiliation. The skill level of players in the leagues ranges from former American League MVPs (Juan Gonzalez, Rickey Henderson and Jose Canseco) to minor-leaguers released from their organization to undrafted free agents.

“I think if you look at the growth of independent baseball teams and the growths that the leagues have experienced, they are filling a niche for major-league baseball organizations,” Marlins director of player development Brian Chattin said.
The Marlins don’t scout the independent leagues. When a need appears within the organization, they scan independent leagues for a player putting up good statistics. If a player looks like a match, they then talk to their scouts, who might have seen the player in previous years.

The Marlins are under-appreciated as an organization. Since 2000, the Marlins have averaged 82 wins a season while spending nearly 40% less than the league average team salary. Only the Royals (43%), Brewers (40%), Twins (40%), and Devil Rays (40%) have spent less. Though they get a lot of flack for “gutting” their team–actually they do a good job of dumping over-priced veterans for good prospects–and threatening to move, they are a model organization.

Sprint To Broadcast MLB Games

MLB has reached an agreement with Sprint to carry radio feeds to its cell phone customers for $5.99/month. The deal is not exclusive, so look for other wireless carriers to reach similar deals.

Who Owns Player Stats?

According to a recent court decision, player statistics are in the public domain. This is a big victory for the fantasy sports business, which does not have to pay the league for the data needed to run its games.

Judge Medler’s finding stated, in part, the following: “the court finds that the undisputed facts establish that the players do not have a right of publicity in their names and playing records as used in CBC’s fantasy games and that CBC has not violated the players’ claimed right of publicity. The court finds further that the undisputed facts establish the names and playing records of Major League baseball players as used in CBC’s fantasy games are not copyrightable and, therefore, federal copyright law does not preempt the players’ claimed right of publicity.”

The judge ruled that MLBAM and the MLBPA “not interfere with CBC’s using players’ names and playing records on its website and in its fantasy baseball games in the manner presented in this case;”

David Pinto offers some excellent commentary on how the MLBPA may have “dropped the ball” on this one.

It’s my opinion that MLBAM should have kept the fees low and encouraged more fantasy games. Fantasy games are a growth industry; they create fans for major league baseball, and those fans spend money in the MLB.com store, attend MLB games and watch the advertising during broadcasts that keeps the teams running. They should be encouraging the growth of the industry with low license fees. If a court finds that the MLBAM has no right to license the stats, they’ll end up with nothing.

The Players Association had a nice little business going here. They sold that to MLBAM, and now neither is getting a penny. They should take some blame, also:

I’m even more disappointed in the MLBPA. I still believe they are the best union in the world, but they need to understand that the value of their players comes from fans wanting to watch them perform. More people playing fantasy games means more eyeballs to watch them pitch and hit. It would be nice if the MLBPA stepped in and said, “This wasn’t what we had in mind when we gave you the exclusive.”

If you want to start a fantasy baseball game, now’s the time. Congratulations to CDM for increasing competition in the fantasy game market!

This seems to be a lesson that sports teams should have learned a long time ago. Teams resisted radio and television for fear that fans would stop going to games. What they soon learned is that they generated a taste for fans among a wider audience, because it was easier to become fan. Teams earned more revenue from the expanding fanbase than they lost in fans enjoying the game differently. Think about what the Cubs and Braves would be like without WGN or TBS.

Money for Nothing

The Sports Economist points out how going out of business was a good deal for the ABA’s St. Louis Spirits.

Thirty years ago when the ABA merged with the NBA, two of the six teams were not invited to join, but the merger required unanimous approval. The owner of the Kentucky Colonels gave his assent for $3.3 million. But the owners of the St. Louis Spirit – the Silnas brothers – wanted a little something more. They got $3m, plus a share of future TV revenues of the four merging teams. In perpetuity.

In the early years, the Silnas’ share amounted to $300,000 per year. And then came the flood of media money, the Magic and Michael eras, and lo, the Silnas are sitting pretty. They’ve turned down every buyout offer and withstood every attempt by the NBA to break the contract, collecting $168m in the process. The current haul is $15m per year. 

Must be nice. Someone in St. Louis was thinking; a whole mess of people in the NBA were not.