davearm2

The amount of animosity Braves fans had for that man was palpable. Combine that with the fact that the Braves have superior options coming up through their system to replace him (Teheran, Delgado, Minor, etc), and the fact that they would've ended up moving him to the bullpen, he was an obvious bet to get dealt. No point in having a $15 million long reliever on your staff I'm quite certain someone would have paid more than 5 million to have Derek Lowe for one year. We'll never know though, because Atlanta traded him and 10 million for nothing on the first day of the offseason. The first day of the Braves' offseason was like a month ago. I have no idea how many teams they discussed Lowe with, but I'd be pretty confident it was more than just the Indians.

Tons of room in straightaway LF though. Surely why that location was chosen for the Toyota sign. Put a video board there with a Toyota logo on the top.

Trading for Wright and signing Fielder gets the Cubs a little ahead of where they were in 2011, with Ramirez and Pena. Obviously they need to get more than a little ahead of 2011 to be contenders.

That was my conclusion... Cubs can get out from under ~$5M.

The only one I recall being confused is you. Everyone else seems to be pretty clear on why I thought $24M is the floor. You could go ahead and clear all this up by giving us your revised estimate of the Cardinals' profit from the 2011 postseason.

That would be very ugly, and not very jumbo. I think you need to keep the scoreboard and do the jumbotrons off to the side. Yes I was suggesting a freestanding video board, immediately adjacent to the current (unaltered) scoreboard.

Dear God they actually went through with this.

You may not have intended to argue that, but you absolutely were. Holy God, what? This is nuts, even for you. Hey if you don't understand what it is you're saying on here, that's a you problem, not a me problem. You can't reduce profits from $24M to $14M unless game-day expenses exceed game-day revenues. You asserted this very thing.

Hernandez is an elite pitcher, no question, but he's also being paid like one, so the value of his production doesn't exceed his cost by a whole lot. One would think that limits his trade value pretty significantly.

You may not have intended to argue that, but you absolutely were. That is why I asked like two pages ago if you even bothered to read.

Well, yeah; even I wasn't arguing that the expenses matched or exceeded the revenues. That's just common sense. You argued that very thing earlier when reducing $24M to $14M.

There's a site I found with a lot of this data. Unfortunately, there's really no way to get the pertinent revenues and expenses broken into fixed and variable components. About the best we can do is see that our assumption that gameday revenues > expenses seems to be supported. http://www.rodneyfort.com/SportsData/MLB/MLBIncomeExpense/MLBIncomeExpense.html

I just went at 70% of a 40,000 person crowd drinking 1.5 beers each. Very likely an overestimate. I don't think you're off that much. Attendance would be in the 47K range @ Busch. If 1 of every 3 is drinking, and they're having 2 beers each, that's 31,000.

Spitball me how much of that SportsService takes because they're the company that actually buys and supplies the beer. So how much does the team actually make on that? I built that into my margin estimate. The team is going to make the lion's share of the concessions profits, not the vendor. So if the price of a beer is $7.00 say, and the cost is 50 cents, the vendor makes $1.50 and the team makes $5. Total guess, but I bet the pie splits about like that.

Why would a playoff game cost significantly more? Because it would be. Extreme example: do you think it costs significantly more to host the Super Bowl than a regular season NFL game? Yes. But a conference championship game probably carries with it similar operating costs to a regular-season game, and I missed the World Series halftime show featuring a popular musical act. Good point about the halftime show; I forgot about that. Like I said, I'm just assuming that the cost for things like maintenance and groundskeeping and security and supplies (hell maybe city costs like fees and [expletive]; I have no idea) goes way up when you're hosting something that "big." Like in that "we need to go out of our way to cover our asses" sort of way. I could easily be wrong; that's just hoe I've always assumed it went down. Maintenance and groundskeeping? Wha? You think they bring in some ultra-rare exotic dirt for the postseason? Buy a new fleet of Ferrari riding mowers?

If you have no idea, then how are you coming up with your figures? Like I said several times, spitballing. I'm just guessing. Spitball for me how many beers you think they sell at a Cardinals game. 42,000 42,000 beers x $5 margin x 9 postseason games ================ $1.9 million

If you have no idea, then how are you coming up with your figures? Like I said several times, spitballing. I'm just guessing. Spitball for me how many beers you think they sell at a Cardinals game.

Why would a playoff game cost significantly more? Because it would be. Extreme example: do you think it costs significantly more to host the Super Bowl than a regular season NFL game? Putting on a postseason game won't cost THE CARDINALS any more than a regular season game. All the extra fanfare and hoo-ha, folks like Fox Sports and MLB foot the bill for.

If you have no idea, then how are you coming up with your figures?

What is the primary cost of hosting a baseball game? Better yet, give us the top three, and an estimate of the dollars for each.

Just for kicks: 200 hourly employees for a baseball game x $10/hr wage x 8 hour shift x 9 home games ============ $144,000

That doesn't make $24 million the floor. Those revenues ultimately being anything above $1 after all is said and done would technically count as the revenues exceeding the expenses. The costs being, say, $10 million dollars would still mean that they receive around $14 million in revenue, so your floor declaration is meaningless. Do you even bother reading? START with $24M ADJUST from 2008 to 2011 dollars ADD for concessions etc. SUBTRACT for ushers etc. ASSUME concessions > ushers Do the math: how can $24M *not* be the floor??? Please, give us something more than "well I would say it's no more than $14M". Show us your work.

Then Dave shouldn't have termed them gross revenues! The revenues I reported from the article are already net of the player's pool dollars, but are not net of gameday expenses (whatever those amount to). As I said, start with $24M (in 2008 dollars; now it's higher), subtract gameday expenses (ushers, electricity, etc) add ancillary gameday revenues (concessions, parking, etc) add indirect revenues (increased season ticket sales, sponsorships, etc) The $24M number is the floor, IMO. Like Kyle said, the gameday revs should exceed the gameday expenses, leaving another net gain. Plus the follow-on revenues in 2012.

I mentioned this in another thread, but Theo was faced with a very similar situation a few years ago with Mike Lowell. That time he re-upped the guy. The end result was not pretty.

I am all for building from within, but as a large market team, we can afford to spend when it is prudent. I have no doubt that Pujols and Fielder both will probably not be worth the money at the end of their contracts. On the other hand, both will likely be worth it early on. This, in my opinion, is the time to go big with an impact FA...and then by the time the contracts are burdensome, the building from within will hopefully produce players that help the Cubs weather the large contracts when the players aren't living up to that value. Pujols and Fielder are the type of FA that likely are going to produce worthy of the expediture early on. Seems to me the way to do it is to sign the big FA's *after* (or at the same time as) the "building from within" plan is bearing fruit. Don't you want the expensive guys' prime years to overlap with the years the young guys are actually producing in the bigleagues, not the ones they're playing in high-A? Your plan has the expensive guy producing while the kids are developing, and the kids producing while the expensive guy is declining. Better would be for both to be producing at the same time. Your plan is to be awful for a few years? If the choice is between awful now and awesome in 3 years, or average now and average in 3 years, I'll take the former. Of course I'm squarely in the camp that thinks no amount of Theo magic is going to make this team a contender right away. Just too many holes to fill, too many average guys, and too many overpaid guys to overcome quickly. I think any honest evaluation of the roster will conclude it's simply not very good. They weren't 20 games under .500 by accident and rotten luck.