THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

AWESOME article

public funding for baseball stadiums, or any pro stadiums, is, for the most part, a political disgrace, and I agree with pretty much everything Passan says.  it also shouldn’t be news to anyone that teams are looking to rip off taxpayers, but thats mostly beside the point. 

as a fan of MLB tho, I’m not going to complain too much.  my rationalization comes from 2 sources. 1) cities derive a measurable amount civic pride from having major north american pro teams in their market, so stadium subsidies have some component of “public good” to them. 2) i don’t see this any any worse than the subsidies other businesses, particularly hollywood film crews, get for relocating or staying in areas.

granted, these are pretty weak reasons to give profit seeking firms hundreds of millions of taxpayer’s dollars, and if i could wave a magic and undue these kinds of deals and all other injustices of the world, i would.  i’m just saying, it’s not the worst thing in the world, for baseball fans anyway.

Ditto! I love Passan; he is the only non-SABR person I read regularly. He’s got the old-school reporting style that I love without all the old-school baggage of ignorance. If he didn’t look 13 he’d probably be on the teevee more often.

I wouldn’t call Passan non-sabr.  He’s mentioned some metrics in his columns now and then and it’s quite apparent he understands them.  It just isn’t his job to write about them the way you’ll see in a Fangraphs article.

In an ideal world, which we don’t have, not only would the city governments fund the stadiums, they would own the teams.  All the team employees would be employees of their municipal government, and the Players’ Union would be just another municipal employees’ union. 

Then fans could have really rooted for the Montreal Expos or the Quebec Expos, since they would have been owned by one of the two governments, and not the Loria Expos.

This is not an ideal world, but if teams are going to be privately owned, the next best step would be for the cities to build the stadiums anyway, but to rent it out to the teams.  The rent would be negotiated between the teams and the cities for no more than multi-year leases, and the cities could always raise or lower the rent depending on the current value of having the team play into the city, and the strain on municipal coffers.

#5 - not in my ideal world, no offense. 

if you want government owned or controlled teams, just about every public high school and college in america has teams that you can follow.  also plenty of stadiums were/are municipally owned.  it usually works out for a crummy deal for the municipality, since stadiums take up huge amounts of real estate, are not efficient users of that space, and are beholden to a limited number of events for which they can charge rent.

i’m perfectly content with privately held, for profit businesses running pro sports franchises.  it’s when politicians try and stick their beaks into the operations when things get screwed up (or when the owners go searching for politicians for hand outs, blame is on both sides, for sure).  i shudder to think how local and state governments would run pro sports teams had they total control over them.

You must not be a Packer fan.

I’m pretty sure the Packers aren’t owned by the city of Green Bay.

actually, that’s a good point.  publicly owned teams are an interesting idea.  i know it’s more common with EPL teams, at least before a lot of the big ones got bought out (recent and famous example being Glazer and Man U) but you don’t see it very often.  when i have some more free time i should look into what the Packer’s shares actually entitle the shareholders to, what the restrictions for ownership are, etc, since it is a very interesting concept.

i certainly wouldnt mind owning a piece of the mets.  i’d feel much better about my impotent whining about management were that the case, anyway.

I do not like Loria/Samson/Selig and I despise public subsidies of professional sports teams, but Passan may be out of his league in this article.  He continually cites the $2.4 billion dollars to be paid over 40+ years instead of whatever the present value of those loans are (and I don’t see how it’s the Marlins’ fault if the city chose a silly way to finance the cost of the stadium).  Passan also apparently doesn’t know the difference between operating income and cash flow.  He also cites operating income as if a team earning tens millions of dollars is obviously very successful--but if the owners have invested hundreds of millions, then that return on investment may actually be pretty modest, not to mention that what investors are really interested is net, after-tax income, not operating income.