Category: Economics

What About the Fans? Won't Somebody Please Think About the Fans?

Every so often, Buster Olney – who is otherwise one of my favorite non-statistically focused baseball writers – careens off the rails into the type of mawkish story typical of the more traditional beat writers. So it was Thursday, I’d argue, when the headline to Olney’s blog read “Red Sox protest hurtful to fans.”

Huh.

At this point, you might expect I’m going to furiously defend the players in their recent dispute over the stipends for the coaching and training staff. Which I’m not. At least not furiously. Like many, including – presumably – those who will be receiving said stipends, I appreciate the sentiment. But I agree with the many observers who felt that the situation was clumsily handled at best.

But “hurtful to fans?” Please.

Was it inconvenient? Probably. Was it ideal that fans weren’t kept up-to-date on the situation? Nope. But ultimately, this was the effective equivalent of a rain delay. No more, no less.

Olney, apparently, saw things differently, saying “Instead, the Red Sox walked out on a crowd that had paid in good faith to see a baseball game.” Which would be true, if they had actually “walked out.” But of course they did not. He went on to quote “a major league executive with another team” as saying, “At the end of the day, it is the fans that took the hit.”

What hit? An hour and six minute delay of the game?

Maybe I’ve been hitting the Kool-Aid jug too early and often of late, but I can’t get in a twist about a dispute that lasted less than two hours.

The really offensive bit, as far as I’m concerned, was this:

Given that it was the responsibility of the Red Sox players to understand the situation before it became a crisis, a more magnanimous gesture would have been for some of the Boston players to offer up their stipends to the coaches, given that some of them are paid somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000 a day, rather than victimizing the fans.

Would that have been magnanimous? Absolutely. But given that MLB – a six billion industry – is disgracefully trying to extort the tiny Cape League, you’ll forgive me if I’m not inclined to take the league’s side here. Why, precisely, should the players foot the bill for a trip that benefits the league rather than themselves?

The suggestion, frankly, was ludicrous, and I expected better from Olney.

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Can We Drop the Whole "The Red Sox Are the New Yankees" Thing Now?

Following the $100M+ the Red Sox shelled out for Daisuke Matsuzaka last offseason, I – like many Red Sox fans – was besieged with claims from (jilted) Yankees fans that “we were just like them.” That by virtue of that single capital expenditure, we were at once on equal financial footing with the Evil Empire. The media, true to form, picked up on this theme, debating such brain teasers as “would it be as fun to win now,” or “have we sold our souls?” Which obviously, I’ll ignore.

Herculean as my efforts were, however, I was entirely unsuccessful in persuading Yankees fans and good people alike that the two clubs remained quite distinct, in fact, in financial terms.

For while it’s convenient for fans of small market clubs like the A’s and Twins to lump all of the big market teams into a single bucket, the fact remains that we weren’t within hailing distance of the Yankees in terms of payroll numbers (the Matsuzaka posting fee aside, which I’ll get to in a moment). This inclination is understandable, given the respective payroll deltas. According to an AP report today, the gap between our roster and Tampa’s last year, for example, was $123.6, against the $62.9 million the Yankees spent above and beyond our costs.

So how are we different, in light of those numbers? Well, fortunately Allan Wood over at the Joy of Sox answered that question for you this past August:

Meaning you could take the Red Sox’s current payroll, add the salaries of

Ichiro Suzuki
Miguel Tejada
Kevin Millwood
Barry Zito
Albert Pujols
Dontrelle Willis

and still be about $1 million shy of the Yankees’ current payroll.

And that was with a payroll differential of $66M, not $62M.

We spend more than most every other club, it’s true. But please, can we drop the fiction that we’re the same as the Yankees?

Oh, and that monster posting fee which doesn’t get counted against officially reported payroll? Well, amortizing the fee over the 6 year life of the deal, I come out with a figure of $8.5 million per season. A hefty chunk of change for you and me, but not one that alters the above argument meaningfully.