How would you setup a fair and balanced financial plan for MLB?

[gehringer_2]

2 hours ago, chasfh said:

As long as there is no requirement to spend the money on payroll—how could that effectively be proven, anyway?—at least half of the luxury tax will always be a transfer from the biggest spending teams directly into the pockets of the teams that are purposefully not spending. Who wouldn’t want to buy a business where the competition is compelled to give you money as a reward for not spending to improve your product?

IDK what the 'right' answer is. We point to the NFL as the model for parity, and the one virtue in the NFL is that good ownership wins by being good ownership, without having to worry about the other guys having more resources. The Lions have been the poster child for this - years of failure under WCF because he didn't know or maybe just wouldn't run his football team the way it needed to be run to win. Shiela comes in, cleans house, and puts a winning team on the field with exactly the same resource base. Now the question is, if you are a fan, is it any worse to live in a major market NFL city and be doomed by a bad ownership (say the NYG) or be a baseball fan in a small market city doomed because despite good management your team doesn't have the resources to compete? It's futility for the fan either way. And in at least one sense you can argue that the MLB system is better because by making fans in big markets happy more often you are making more fans happy. That is an argument, but of course that the NFL's cash flow now dwarfs MLB's that argument hasn't really proven out overall.

Edited Friday at 03:35 PM by gehringer_2

[Edman85]

15 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

just for context, ESPN is reporting that 9 teams are paying at total of ~$400M in luxury tax this season, led by the Dodgers with a $169M levy. 

What I didn't know about the LuxTax  is that the first 50% goes to the MLBPA pension funds, not the low revenue teams. So that only leaves about $9M per team in LuxTax revenue payments, and even that money is distributed not equally, but based on some formula by the commissioners office that rewards teams that are building their fan base. (See Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_luxury_tax ). Basically LuxTax transfers amount to about 1 WAR of payroll per receiving team. IOW -  hardly moves the needle. 

According to the same Wiki, MLB's main revenue share system requires teams to pool 48% of their non-media income (basically gate revenues) after deducting "stadium expenses" and that is then split equally 30 ways. Very roughly, a team that sells 3M ~$50 tickets would have $75M more gross gate revenue, maybe call it $100M since rich teams probably make a bundle more on luxury boxes as well,  than a team that sell 1.5M tickets, but who knows what is left net after what the teams are allowed to deduct as 'stadium expenses'.

Be careful using Wikipedia. Best to just go straight to the CBA itself.

[Tiger337]

2 hours ago, Edman85 said:

Be careful using Wikipedia. Best to just go straight to the CBA itself.

tldr

[Tiger337]

Just looked it up now.  426 pages.  

The constitution is less than one tenth of that.  

Edited Saturday at 04:50 AM by Tiger337