Posted by verywellthen on December 10, 2008
There were the exorcized Rays and Philly getting a belated championship. There were the Cubs looking like champions but (again) disappointing their increasingly demanding fans. There was Roger Clemens trying to extricate himself from the allegations of his personal trainer and Barry Bonds sitting the whole year. There was Pujols excellence and MannyBeingMannyInLA.
But the biggest story in baseball in 2008 is the biggest story in the nation in 2008 and one that is just beginning to unfold — the It-Might-Be-Great-Yet Depression.
I’m no economist, but I’ll play one on the internet and conjecture that baseball revenues are primarily tied to four things:
1)taxpayer subsidies, mostly in the form of all those new stadia, mostly financed through public bonds;
2) fans, either showing up at the gate or buying the cable and internet packages and licensed baseball;
3) uber-rich owners throwing money at their little trophy hobby (not technically revenue, but it can keep those salaries inflated),
4) corporations paying for the luxury suites and premium seating and advertising and naming rights.
Oddly, I think the revenue source that will dip the least will be the from the fans. Maybe I’m too big of a fan to objectively project my behavioral theory to apply to the casual fans or the family-of-five-on-a-sketchy salary fans, but I love the sport too much to look away.
Regardless, baseball is about to get a financial fastball — high and tight.
Posted in ➢ Minnesota Twins and Baseball | 1 Comment »
Posted by verywellthen on December 10, 2008
Kansas City never hit my radar screen as a place to live. But when I discovered Joe Posnanski’s baseball-ish blog, I wished I had been reading his Kansas City sports columns for years. His tales of childhood in Cleveland make me nostalgic for it, though I’ve never even been in Ohio. He isn’t old school, he respects the modern stats, yet he’s been around enough to anchor them with necessary caveats and a human basis. His touch is light enough to stay well above the frequent baseball-blog tone of ridicule.
And damn he’s funny. I get most of his references and his jokes seem just a more advance and adroit form of humor that I feel I’m almost capable of. If I was just 10% funnier, I’d be on Joe’s inner-circle email list, he’d let me stay at his house when I passed through Kansas City and would have an open invitation whenever he came here to Blue Heron Land. We’d travel to the same conventions and catchup on each other’s kids — if I had kids.
I don’t know if he pioneered his use of footnotes, but he’s self-promoted his style with the name Posterisk. when he’s lost on a subject that I don’t have much emotional involvement (such as writing about the KC Chiefs), I’ll scan what he’s dubbed the Posterisks. It’s sort of like David Foster Wallace footnoting, except that you’re led to the footnote by an asterisk, the footnoted section is typed in italics and resides just below the paragraph that originates the asterisk*. It’s easy to read in computer scroll text. And nothing makes me smile like a good tangent.
* And he will even embed Posterisks**
** I need to think of something Posnanski-style funny to put here. If I was only 10% funnier.***
*** Okay, here is the Posterisk that first pulled me into the almost daily musings of Joe — much to the loss of my professional productivity. Scroll down to the third italic segment for his imagined pitch to the TV producer for Gilligan’s Island.
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