When it comes to running a sports team, there are ultimately several factors that come into play that determine your ability win. Clearly, you have to be able to scout and evaluate talent. After that, getting those players under contract can be tricky. In doing so, it’s critical to make the best use of whatever revenue resources you have at your disposal. Money doesn’t buy championships, but let’s face it, it doesn’t hurt.

The countdown had been coming for months. It was just a matter of what would happen when it ended. We’re of course talking about the Washington Nationals’ declaration that they would shut down starting pitcher Stephen Strasburg at 160 innings pitched, something that the club had said they would be doing after the no. 1 draft pick and Scott Boras client had Tommy John surgery in 2010 to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow.

We counted. We watched. We never made it that far.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

On Saturday, the baseball world saw what it often likes to see in a true blockbuster trade. There may be regrets when all is said and done, but for now, the sides each got what they were looking for. The Red Sox, who had the league’s third-highest Opening Day payroll ($175,249,119), got little aside from salary relief in the deal ; the owners of the Dodgers, who on May 1 closed a $2.15 billion sale, were looking to not only make the playoffs but run clean through to a World Series championship.

As we covered on Saturday here at BP, the nine player deal had the Red Sox trading right-hander Josh Beckett, left fielder Carl Crawford, first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, infielder Nick Punto, and reportedly $12 million cash considerations to the Los Angeles Dodgers for first baseman James Loney, infielder Ivan DeJesus, Jr., right hander Allen Webster, and two players to be named later. Those two players are rumored to be Rubby de la Rosa and Jerry Sands.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

There was a time not too long ago when folks were leveraging themselves to the eye sockets in order to purchase goodies—big, expensive goodies such as homes and cars. In fact, many got in over their head and had these expensive, leveraged purchases repossessed, while others simply are straddled with mountains of debt.

Coming up on the end of the first season of owning the Houston Astros, Jim Crane seems to fit in with the latter group. He hasn’t done anything horribly wrong other than to strip the team down to the axels.

Read the full article...

The conversation often starts innocently. I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked, but to date, I haven’t been able to answer completely or in under a half-hour. The question is: What does sports business involve?

On the face of it, it looks pretty easy. I always grab the path of least resistance on the query and reply, “It’s sports outside the lines.” If you’re pressed to provide added detail, the conversation explodes into everything from labor to PEDs to stadium construction to sportswear to… to… well, you get the picture. When I write for Baseball Prospectus, it makes sense to pick a topic each week and dig into it. But, for every topic covered, there’s a cornucopia of them that don’t get covered.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

For those that haven’t followed baseball’s history outside the diamond, White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf could well be defined as one of baseball’s hardliners. While neither he nor Bud Selig would admit it, the two were greatly responsible for driving former commissioner Fay Vincent, Selig’s predecessor, out of office.

Reinsdorf has been a hardliner on other issues as well. He’s a key sounding board on labor issues and has often chimed in on paring the league down via contraction. Whether this was in 2002 when the league owned the Montreal Expos or now, when the difficulty of new stadium construction comes along, Reinsdorf has hit on the “C” word.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

Money has a way of making people do funny things. A lot of it can alter your perception of what is (and is not) extravagant.  It certainly changes how you approach purchases, and in MLB, it’s no different.

The times were different and the circumstances far removed, but I can’t help but recall former commissioner Peter Ueberroth speaking to the owners on October 22, 1985. As I said, the topic was far, far different (collusion), but nothing (maybe ever) has changed about owners being hyper-competitive. As outlined in John Helyar’s seminal book, Lords of the Realm, Ueberroth was quoted as saying:

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

Love him or hate him, one thing that’s certain is that under Bud Selig’s tenure, MLB’s popularity has grown. Whether one points to what I call “Selig’s Reclamation Project”—the 22 new or renovated stadiums under Selig’s tenure, labor peace, revenue-sharing, et al—baseball’s attendance has skyrocketed.

Still, like everything, baseball could use some improvements. After all, nothing is perfect, and baseball is no exception. Some things are a byproduct of a landscape different than the NFL and NBA. Some are of its own doing. Everyone probably has their own list of what they could do to market MLB better, and we’d like to hear it in the comments. Here are five things that MLB could do to grow its popularity further.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

Television ratings are a funny thing. The spin that can come out of the numbers can drive reports in wildly divergent directions. In sports, ratings can be spun to say that the popularity of a given league or club is high or low, depending on those feeding the information. Of course, leagues and clubs love to tout growth, while detractors can spin numbers negatively. For Major League Baseball, ratings have been used to show that the game’s popularity is on the rise, while others have pounded keys to say that it’s a “dying sport.”

So, which one is it? As is often the case in data analysis, the truth can lie in the middle. Before we get started, let’s give a quick primer on what the ratings numbers mean.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

There was a point not too long ago when the key revenue stream for Major League Baseball was the gate—ticket sales—with media rights through television coming in second. Recently, however, there has been an explosion in the amount of money coming into sports properties in the U.S. via media rights that is altering the landscape. Whether it’s collegiate sports conferences or the “big four” sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL), the dollar amounts for national and local broadcast rights have increased. The reason? With the advent of the DVR and movies on-demand, regular programming can be watched whenever viewers like. With content being recorded, fast-forwarding past commercials has become commonplace. Live sports programming is the exception. Since fans want to see action when it happens, advertisers are placing more focus around sports than ever before.

The increases in media rights fees have happened already at the local and regional level in baseball, as exhibited by the Rangers, Angels, and Astros (and soon to be Dodgers and Padres). In the coming months, MLB itself will be cashing in, too, when the national television broadcast rights come up for renewal. Currently, the deals with FOX, TBS, and ESPN all expire at the end of 2013. According to sources, informal conversations have already begun on renewing the national television deals.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

The general manager and owner’s dilemma been around since Ban Johnson decided that it was better to pay players rather than having them play as amateurs, the dilemma of trying to balance a budget with creating the most competitive team possible. We armchair GMs like to talk about whether this deal or that deal is good or bad, often within the framework of how much a player is being paid and whether they are “worth it.” Indeed, Baseball Prospectus strives daily to provide data that works to define that conversation.

The general manager’s dilemma, however, is tougher than, say, the budget that you or I set for our household. With some exceptions, most of us have a general sense of what our income and expenses will be. We may get a modest raise and the cost of living may increase at a rate that we can see coming, so for the most part, our monthly budgets can be set and we can adjust accordingly.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

To get to the heart of this messy matter, one needs to start at the beginning. The creation of Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN) was the direct effect of negotiations between MLB and Orioles owner Peter Angelos to allow the relocation of the Montreal Expos to the Washington, D.C. market. Angelos was vehemently opposed to the move, saying that while the location proposed in the Nation’s capital would not infringe on baseball’s physical territory outlined in the MLB Constitution (see page 15), it would carve a hole in the Orioles’ television territory and take a massive dent out of TV revenues. The compromise was the creation of MASN. The Orioles initially controlled 90 percent equity in the regional sports network, while over a 23-year period the Nationals’ equity would grow to just 33 percent. Currently, the Nationals have a 13 percent equity stake. In terms of that being an equitable arrangement, the question becomes, “Do you give that much control of MASN to the Orioles or not allow the Expos to relocate to Washington, D.C.?” The answer was more or less, “We’ll choke on the equity stake, just let us (the Expos) into Washington, D.C. and let us become the Nationals.”

Into this mix has been the skyrocketing increase in television rights fees that began with the Texas Rangers’ $3 billion, 20-year deal that was mirrored by the Angels and has since set the market. The Padres—who, based on Nielsen, are the 28th largest Designated Market Area  (1,077,600 television homes)—are on the verge of completing a deal with FOX Sports San Diego in which the club will receive a 20-year  television deal that could top out at as much as $1.2 billion and has $200 million in up-front  equity. Such a rights deal would pull in $50 million annually.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.