From: prb@chinet.chi.il.us (Paul Botts)
Subject: Re: Lies about attendance (Was Speculation Of A Coming Orioles Sale)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 20:21:35 GMT

In article <1993Jan7.062942.4271@Princeton.EDU> niepornt@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (David Marc Nieporent) writes:
>Of course attendance was down in some cities.  This is to be expected.
>That certainly doesn't imply baseball is in trouble.
>
>Mediots have been claiming that baseball attendance is down.  And it
>just isn't true.
>We're talking about a time when ticket prices are rising rapidly,
>according to the papers, and there is a recession going on.  And yet,
>more and more people go see baseball games every year, and baseball is
>in trouble?

Total attendance was down very slightly (about 2%) in 1992 from 1991.
However it is important to note that 1991 represented the all-time
record total attendance for the major leagues, the fourth time in five
years that the record had been broken. So the overall curve is clearly
pretty healthy.
The TV ratings, of course, are not so healthy, but they're not sharply
declining, either - they're just sort of flat, and the networks and the
baseball owners had counted on further growth. MEanwhile, *local* TV
ratings in many cities are strong - that's why the Yankees got that $50
million/year local TV deal, and why the Tribune Co. balked at switching
divisions in order to protect the WGN ratings (the WGN ratings are
steady moneymakers, and worth protecting).
Take all owners' pronouncements on their profitability with a alrge
grain of salt, since they are under no obligation to prove it, and since
they have demonstrably lied through their teeth in the past. Recall that
in 1985, when Ueberroth was commissioner, he ordered the owners (who had
been crying poverty same as now) to open up the books. When they did it
was discovered that contrary to the claims that at least 1/3 of the
teams were losing money, in fact only 2 teams had lost money the
previous year. This fiasco was a big part of Ueberroth's being
"uninvited" to another term as commissioner. Note that the hard-line
owners like Bud Selig are currently claiming the exact same percentage
of losing teams now as they did then (1/3). Given that the resale value
of franchises just keep climbing, and that there is evidently no
shortage of individuals just dying for a chance to invest in a
major-league franchise, I see no reason to take this claim any more
seriously now than in the past.
In general, the owners like to throw around broad generalizations which,
on closer inspection, seem to have no basis in any real-world results.
Take the oft-repeated wisdom that, in the free agent era with the
ever-climbing player salaries, "small-market teams just can't compete
with the big guys." Well, if they mean compete on the field, this is
clearly false: since the free agent era began about 17 years ago, teams
from markets like Milwaukee, Cincinnatti, Pittsburg, Oakland, St. Louis,
and Minnesota have made more than their share of postseason appearances
and collected plenty of Series rings. If they mean compete on the
balance sheet, well, who knows - unless they care to back up the claim
with some financial statements, we have no way to accurately assess the
claim. All we can say for sure is that none of these small-market teams
have gone bankrupt, some (like Cincinnatti and St. Louis and Minnesota)
have regularly been among the attendance leaders, and until there is
some actual evidence that some of them are in financial difficulty, we
can't presume that they are.
There is one very big difference between the owners and players in the
ongoing tussle over shares of baseball's revenue pie: whereas the
players' share (salaries) is publicly reported, the owners' share
(profits) is not. So the one side is much freer to play fast and loose
with the facts.

Newsgroups: rec.sport.baseball