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The Random Thought Thread

rmcjacket23 said:
Well, couple things here:
a) raising ticket prices isn't the end of the world. If you consistently put a product on the field that's worth watching, like many of the big market teams do, fans will pay a higher price for tickets. Willfully. That's pretty universally true.

b) Tampa (and Florida in general, quite frankly), in your example, struggles in two aspects. One, they rarely have any actual "star" players. They have a roster full of very good players, but nobody that the fanbase can get behind, because they won't be there long enough to get invested in. Star players is what drive people to come to the stadium.
Second, and most importantly, Tampa is basically a really shitty shorts town across the board. They've never really supported baseball at all, the stadium is in St. Pete, which is effectively an old person's village, and frankly they never support the Bucs that much either before Brady got there.
In most situations, teams attendance will rise and fall with the product on the field. See places like Kansas City, Cleveland, Houston, etc. Houston's attendance was putrid in their "rebuilding" years. That's a pretty big market with lots of $ to spend. KC stadium was full during the brief period they were WS contenders (and winners).

c) It's a major fallacy to suggest the team can't operate in the short term at a loss. They certainly can. 10 teams had negative operating income in 2022 alone. Some of them with very large amounts of negative operating income. It's not a requirement of the business that they be profitable every year. That's an Angelos choice.

d) Raising ticket prices isn't the only way to generate higher revenue. In fact, it's not even the best way. The best way would be either to put a product out on the field that MASN will actually pay you more $ to broadcast for, or create/spin-off into your own RSN.
The Yankees did almost $400M in revenue more than the Orioles last year. Gate receipts were about $250M of that, which is substantial. Orioles will never get to the gate receipt level of the Yankees due to pricing and just lack of brand name, but they can bridge the gap.
The other $150M is the difference between what the YES network pays to broadcast Yankee games, and what MASN pays to broadcast Orioles games.

Because of the Orioles declining controlling interest in MASN, and the fact they're required to re-negotiate every five years with the Nationals for broadcast rights, they really don't have a good "deal" compared to how other markets have structured their RSN agreements.
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10+ years (which again we have already seen that 10 years is not enough sustained success to turn a small market into a medium market) is not short term. If you told those businesses there is no example that suggests you will not be losing 50m per year for the next decade+ and there is no historical precedent that suggests it would stop, then you are not going to get many to take that bet. There is a difference between "we are going to lose money for a year or two" and "we are going to lose money for the next decade with no way of fixing it but at least the team will be good".

I get the problems with Tampa but the problem is you typically do not have many good examples of small market teams having stars because they are frankly expensive. Ohtani may very well get a larger salary than the entire As roster. If they signed him they would have a star but there is no way they generate enough revenue to justify it.

It is again a fallacy that a successful product will just automatically be worth more to broadcast. The Mets are terrible were terrible and will continue to be terrible but will be worth more for broadcasting than the Os because the market is bigger. That is the advantage of a big market. You are more valuable if you win more but not enough to actually overcome market size. Case in point in the NFL the Cowboys vs Giants always draws big even when both teams are awful.

Now I will not pretend to know the intricacies of the MASN deal compared to other deals but there is no way you are going to get the national brand recognition that the Yankees have as well as simply the local fanbase that is again significantly larger due to being a larger market.
 
Adreme said:
10+ years (which again we have already seen that 10 years is not enough sustained success to turn a small market into a medium market) is not short term. If you told those businesses there is no example that suggests you will not be losing 50m per year for the next decade+ and there is no historical precedent that suggests it would stop, then you are not going to get many to take that bet. There is a difference between "we are going to lose money for a year or two" and "we are going to lose money for the next decade with no way of fixing it but at least the team will be good".

I get the problems with Tampa but the problem is you typically do not have many good examples of small market teams having stars because they are frankly expensive. Ohtani may very well get a larger salary than the entire As roster. If they signed him they would have a star but there is no way they generate enough revenue to justify it.

It is again a fallacy that a successful product will just automatically be worth more to broadcast. The Mets are terrible were terrible and will continue to be terrible but will be worth more for broadcasting than the Os because the market is bigger. That is the advantage of a big market. You are more valuable if you win more but not enough to actually overcome market size. Case in point in the NFL the Cowboys vs Giants always draws big even when both teams are awful.

Now I will not pretend to know the intricacies of the MASN deal compared to other deals but there is no way you are going to get the national brand recognition that the Yankees have as well as simply the local fanbase that is again significantly larger due to being a larger market.
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It doesn't have to be ten years though. The Orioles have been making huge profits for several years now. If you have a window of, say, 4-5 years of high success, you can sustain losses during that period. And by the way... signing your core players to lucrative deals is kind of meaningless in MLB, because if you have highly paid players on teams that aren't winning, guess what you do... YOU TRADE THEM. And somebody else pays them. It's literally the baseline for MLB.
The other obvious avenue is deferred salaries, which pretty much every team does now. So not only can you sign players to huge contracts and largely dump them at leisure, you can also defer large amounts of compensation long into the future, when revenue is higher.

I'm not in any way suggesting the Orioles will get Yankee revenue. They won't. Nor do they need to, because they don't have to spend like the Yankees do either. I'm merely suggesting that if you wanted to bridge the revenue gap between the two, ticket price increases ain't the only way to do it.

As for media rights deals, sure, the "bigger markets" do better. As they always will. But Texas, Seattle, San Francisco, and the Houston's of the world ain't exactly huge markets either. And they do substantially more revenue in terms of media rights fees than the Orioles do. Like you gotta realize that some of the shittiest possible markets for MLB (Tampa, Oakland) are not far behind the Orioles in terms of RSN revenue for media rights deals. That's where they fall into. And there's other teams with no sustained success either that doing substantially more.

That's the argument against John Angelos. Other teams, with smarter leaders, have figured out ways to maximize revenue and balance profits better than he has. They do it through strategies for ticket prices and attendance. They do it through positioning themselves to maximize revenue in media markets. They do it through strategic deferred compensation structures.
The only thing he's done well is learned to get out of the "baseball side" of the business, i.e. not meddling in talent development and roster construction.
 
Adreme said:
I mean there are not exactly a lot of examples of small market teams having sustained success. Tampa Bay is about the only one. Other teams have a year or two and then fall off hard. The reason being no one is willing to say "I will lose 50-100m per year under the hopes that maybe in 15 years I can get back to exactly where I am right now". Nobody is going to make that bet.
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Are Houston, St Louis, or Atlanta considered small or big markets?
There's a lot of "grey" area in what the public arbitrarily views as big vs small markets.

I don't think anybody would argue that St Louis or Atlanta are "big markets". So, at best, their "medium" markets. Those two franchises have very, very, very long track records of sustained success in MLB.
 
Bijan Robinson's personality is a cringe fest. Great player, weird dude. The mustard company and commercial he started really put it over the edge.
 
rmcjacket23 said:
Are Houston, St Louis, or Atlanta considered small or big markets?
There's a lot of "grey" area in what the public arbitrarily views as big vs small markets.

I don't think anybody would argue that St Louis or Atlanta are "big markets". So, at best, their "medium" markets. Those two franchises have very, very, very long track records of sustained success in MLB.
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Fulton County (where ATL is) is kind of a huge market. It has been a massively exploding market in recent years and has become one of the bigger markets.

Here is a fun fact though as you mentioned the Rangers. The Rangers average more than double the television ratings of the Orioles. They are not a better team but the Texas market is kind of big. Yes their immediate area is not as big but the state of Texas is kind of big and highly populated and they have access to that entire market.

The reason the Rays matter here is because they have shown winning is not enough. The Rays have built a winner for the past 15 years and have nothing to show for it. They are quite literally the only example I could find, and if you can find one feel free to share it, of a team with low revenue able to put together a winner for a sustained period of time. If the argument is that the Orioles would only be losing money for 5 years then the two next questions become: what is the basis for that assumption as the Rays have been winning for 15 years and have not started making money and what is the end benefit of such a loss even if the timeline is accurate? The reason for the 2nd question is if you say "be willing to lose 100m per year for 5 years" usually the end benefit of that should be a greater profit then prior but I somehow doubt that will be the case.
 
Adreme said:
Fulton County (where ATL is) is kind of a huge market. It has been a massively exploding market in recent years and has become one of the bigger markets.

Here is a fun fact though as you mentioned the Rangers. The Rangers average more than double the television ratings of the Orioles. They are not a better team but the Texas market is kind of big. Yes their immediate area is not as big but the state of Texas is kind of big and highly populated and they have access to that entire market.

The reason the Rays matter here is because they have shown winning is not enough. The Rays have built a winner for the past 15 years and have nothing to show for it. They are quite literally the only example I could find, and if you can find one feel free to share it, of a team with low revenue able to put together a winner for a sustained period of time. If the argument is that the Orioles would only be losing money for 5 years then the two next questions become: what is the basis for that assumption as the Rays have been winning for 15 years and have not started making money and what is the end benefit of such a loss even if the timeline is accurate? The reason for the 2nd question is if you say "be willing to lose 100m per year for 5 years" usually the end benefit of that should be a greater profit then prior but I somehow doubt that will be the case.
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a) TV ratings are a product of RSN deals, of which the Orioles have made a shitty one. This would be the textbook case of an Owner trying to sell to the public that his hands are tied, when some of the poor decisions he and his father made are direct contributors to why they can't make comparable revenue to similar markets. John has nobody to blame but himself on that one.
b) define "low revenue"? What you'll find if you look at the plots of team revenue historically is that, to no surprise, revenue tends to rise as the quality of product goes up, and fall as it goes down. That's true of teams like KC, Cleveland, Houston, etc. who all had long periods of time of being irrelevant, then magically saw a revenue spike right around the time they started being relevant again.
Tampa and Florida teams in general aren't the rule, because people in Florida just don't watch pro baseball. Never have. But that's just one geographical location. Could make a case that applied to a place like Montreal also, which is why they no longer have a team.
c) I never suggested they have to lose $ for five years. I never even suggested they have to lose $ at all. They can just be less profitable in the short run in order to increase revenue in the long run. That's a model pretty much every time has executed that has grown its revenue base.
Orioles had a 25% gross profit essentially last year. If gross profit drops to, say, 10%, is that going to kill John Angelos? That drop alone would allow him to pay for two high-priced players to stay with the Orioles long term. And that's before any increased revenue kicks in, which there would be.
d) I don't know who told you the Rays haven't made $, but they have. 2022 they had $45M in profits, 2020 they had $68M, and I see a total of two "loss" years from 2014 through 2022. Which also correlates with the timing of when they actually start to increase payroll to be even more competitive.
 
Kinda wild to see people bootlicking for an owner. Especially one of the worst owners in all of sports. I don’t get it
 
Clear and succinct article about JA poor mouthing it. Just sell the team please.

theathletic.com

Rosenthal: Orioles' John Angelos hits the wrong note singing small-market blues

Don’t you just love it when major-league owners cry poor? John Angelos, the Baltimore Orioles’ managing partner, must think people are not paying attention, or are just plain dumb. Angelos told The New York Times that Orioles fans can pretty much forget about young stars such as catcher Adley...
theathletic.com theathletic.com
 
Tank said:
Clear and succinct article about JA poor mouthing it. Just sell the team please.

theathletic.com

Rosenthal: Orioles' John Angelos hits the wrong note singing small-market blues

Don’t you just love it when major-league owners cry poor? John Angelos, the Baltimore Orioles’ managing partner, must think people are not paying attention, or are just plain dumb. Angelos told The New York Times that Orioles fans can pretty much forget about young stars such as catcher Adley...
theathletic.com theathletic.com
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No tank , shut up and eat this $25 hotdog or I’ll sell the best players
 
Accurate every Friday
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NFL, I have one question for you brother. What you going to do when Kirk Cousins, The Minnesota Vikings, and the thousands of Viking maniacs run wild on you!

FB1C756840A2D1AFECC0320995277A58_6.jpg
 
The Buccaneers having 2 Super Bowl rings annoys me because we should have more than them as we’ve been a superior more consistently good franchise. God damn 2006,2008,2011,2014,2019 and injury ravaged 2020,2021,2022
 
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