Plus, I think it was Rob Neyer's latest column, the Yankees' salary as a ratio to the average league salary hasn't really changed from the 1977 (78?) team to the current team. I don't have time to check for the article, but I think it's in there. Sorry about the vagueness, but I just got back from London. ;)

I notice that a lot of people seem to misunderstand that ticket prices are a product of supply and demand for tickets and have little to do with player salaries.

Obviously, player salaries are capped by team revenues, but don't affect ticket prices (at least, not much) in the other direction.

Personally, I'd rather see the players get rich than the owners get richer.

Hey Juan, I'm a NY Giants season ticketholder. There's a salary cap in the NFL, yet my tickets get more and more expensive each year too. I haven't gotten my bill for 2004 yet, but I bet there's a raise even though they were 4-12 last year!

The issue about a salary cap (or other similar working structure) is not about affecting ticket prices, but about affecting competitive balance.

I agree that in general, it's better to see players get rich than owners get rich, but this can be part of a salary cap-type structure. Take the NBA. The cap is relative to total revenue. Players will always get something like 62% of the revenue, and the owners get the rest. So if the pie grows, everyone wins equally. The difference is baseball is that the local revenue dominates the national revenue, so having balanced sharing is harder to sell. In the NFL, it's easy to say "Everyone gets the same amount of the national TV deal." It's harder to say "Hey, Yankees, we know that you are 'earning' that $60 mil from YES, and $100 mil from tickets, but you wouldn't be earning it if the Devil Rays didn't show up to play, so you have to share the money more evenly." But that's the reality of the situation.

Thrill, the NFL's salary cap goes up every year several percent. Maybe that's one reason why your ticket prices increase every year.

Yes, the cap goes up every year, but I'm sure that is offset by the revenue sharing that goes on in the league. Plus, Juan's point (I think) was that a salary cap in MLB would lead to lower prices, giving more lower and middle class fans access to the sport. My point was that in New York (remember, Juan was complaining about the Yankees), demand will usually always exceed supply, and prices will continue to escalate, cap or no cap.

Anyone who thinks that salary caps make for better more competitive sports might want to ruminate on the following numbers:

NBA % of teams with .500+ Record: 45% (13/29,) current 2004 standings

NFL % of teams with .500+ Record: 50% (16/32,) final 2003/2004 standings

MLB % of teams with .500+ Record: 60% (18/30,) final 2003 standings

the bad teams in baseball are REALLY bad but there are more winning teams in the ne sport with NO salary cap, who'd a think it??

Yeah, when you have teams like the Devil Rays and the Tigers, it's easy to have more than 50% of the teams above .500. I wonder what the 3 year average is for teams above .500...

As Ali Nagib said, its easier to split the revenues in the NFL. MLB teams have been cooking up more and more schemes to move more revenue from the team to other common-owned businesses. This is the case with the Cubs reselling of tickets through another company owned by Tribune, the Yankees and YES, Braves and TBS, etc. There is no easy way to work through all that and split up the cash. I have friends that argue baseball could create an independent entity that would value local television rights, etc, but I could never see the owners agreeing to that.

Steve,
The fact that MLB has more teams that are above .500 does not mean there is more balance. In fact it is the opposite. There is more imbalance. Competitive balance means the bulk of the teams hover around .500. Of course I think that implementing a reveue sharing/salary cap in Baseball is more difficult than NFL because the bulk of team revenues are local broadcast rights. Moreover the low payroll of teams like the Brewers makes it clear to me that even if there is revenue sharing, without a mechanism to force teams to spend on player payroll it is essentially worthless from a fans perspective.

The "winning percentage" argument is flawed because it ignores sample size, both in number of games and years.

Baseball has a 162 game season. Basketball has 82 (and is currently at around 60). The NFL has 16. These are not easily directly comparable, because the fewer games there are, the more likely it is to have big, random fluctuations.

Additionally, there are SUPPOSED to be about half the teams above and below in any given season. If there are more teams above, it means that the bottom teams are extra bad. The reverse is also true. If you look at the last 10 year, baseball is WAY behind the NFL and NBA when it comes to balance. I believe it may be getting slightly better under the new CBA, but it's still not on the same level.

First of all I know what the word balance means, thank you.

Second, I didn't say that salary caps don't provide balance I said they don't provide BETTER or MORE COMPETITIVE sports.

Third, If more teams are above .500, that means that theoretically more fans are following teams that WIN. And Teams that win are prefered to teams that lose.

The fact that there are fewer teams getting beaten more often than more teams getting beaten about equally just says to me that those MLB teams that are getting absolutley demolished are making profound managerial mistakes.

David, if your opinion is correct, then how do you explain the Indians?

Over 400 straight sellouts until a few years back. New owner who overpaid for the team, can't afford the wages he was paying so he slashes everything. Payroll expected to be around $45M, down from $90M+ in 2001.

Mixed bag? Certainly. So let's mix it up even more... attendance dropped to 1.7M last year, and may go a hair lower this year. A handful of sellouts tops. Yet, have ticket prices decreased due to the law od supply/demand? Nope. Some restructuring of pricing, but various prices have nonetheless increased.

Some of these things have nothing to do with one another. Some directly contradict supply/demand. And some fly in the face of team salaries affecting prices. Yet... somehow I can't help but feel deep down that in fact there IS a connection between salaries (or at least profits which are impacted mightily by salaries) and ticket prices.

I guess it just goes to show that no ONE thing is the reason... rather it's a factor of several things - including salaries.

Dave,

Maybe if Cleveland had lowered its ticket prices in response to less demand, they would not have gone down to 1.7 million fans. After all, the ticket price is only one part of the revenue stream. A minor league owner once told me that a person in the stadium is worth $20 in revenue beyond the ticket price. I'm sure it's much higher at a major league stadium. So when the Indians saw attendance going down, a smart move would have been to lower ticket prices by a small amount. They would have made up most of the revenue in concessions.

I think it's interesting that there's a Yankee fan who's complaining. I think it's disgusting too, but I'm not a Yankee fan. Ken Rosenthal, though, takes a more analyitical approach. He writes that the Yankees aren't evil. His arguments might be right, but I still think that they're evil. :-)

I'm with Juan, there's more than market force going on here. I'm not sure but I'd bet that a family of four could have watched the great Mantle teams for a hell of a lot less as a percentage of take home pay of a working person than they can now. It's like the movies, when I was a kid you could buy an adult admission to a huge fancy first run theater for about half of one hours national minimum wage. Now it's close to two hours of minimum wage work to buy an adult admission for a small screen multi-plex thrown together with cinder blocks.

AFAIK the way "competitive balance" is traditionally measured is by computing the expected standard deviation of wins, given season length and league size, and comparing that number with actual observed standard deviation of wins. IIRC, football was lowest (at a ratio very near to 1 observed SD/expected SD), baseball was next (around 1.8), and the NBA and NHL were way behind. I'm pretty sure this stuff can be found online somewhere but I'm too lazy to look.