December 31, 2007
The Twins and Santana
David Zingler complains about the Twins and Santana in a post titled, "Santana Situation shows exactly what's Wrong with Baseball." His main complaint appears to be that big market clubs are allowed to low ball the Twins.
He complains that baseball doesn't have meaningful revenue sharing like the NFL. However, I believe teams collect well over $30 million each in revenue sharing, and with the growth in revenue of major league baseball, that number is only going up. Given Joe Christensen's payroll calculation, the growth of revenue, and the Twins moving into a new stadium, there's no reason Minnesota can't afford to keep Santana. Maybe, just maybe, it's the Twins who are being greedy here, wanting to pocket rather than spend their revenue sharing money. Or maybe the Twins are just being smart, trading a player too early than too late. No one is forcing the Twins management to do anything. They can afford to keep Johan, they can afford to trade him, and they can afford to lose him via free agency. They'll go with the best deal they get, and no amount of revenue sharing, in my opinion, would change that.
Posted by David Pinto at
09:26 AM
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Management
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Not to mention that Carl Pohlad is absolutely loaded. There's no reason that he couldn't do what Mark Cuban, Dan Snyder, and Paul Allen have done, and invest some of their own wealth in the product. Open up your wallet! Treat your franchise like the rich man's vanity project it really is!
Or if you don't want to be baseball's answer to Mark Cuban, then consider Mike Ilitch. He's rich, but not Pohlad-rich. And with the Red Wings and Tigers, he's found that if you invest in the product, you get back far more than you put in. Detroit isn't intrinsically a better market than the Twin Cities; given the sad state of the domestic auto industry, Detroit is almost certainly a worse place to own a team. Ilitch has revived two moribund franchises in a declining market, and become a hero in his hometown. Carl Pohlad could easily do the same.
I don't know how much Pohlad or Ilitch have but I figure that Ilitch could probably outspend the Steinbrenner's with what he's got. He did it with the Red Wings, becoming the Yankees of the NHL. At one time his payroll was almost double the next best team, and it paid off.
Mike I. owns Little Ceasars pizza, the largest pizza chain in the world. Man sells a LOT of pizza pizzas!
Little trivia. Three of the to five largest pizza chains in the world are based around Detroit. LC, Dominos (Tigers previous owner), and Papa Johns. Go figure that one. You can't go ten feet in metro Detroit without tripping over a pizza joint, whether it's the big guys or a mom-and-pop shop.
Oh yeah, almost forgot. I don't think Santana is going anywhere util late summer, when the Twins have a better idea where they stand in the central. If they're competitive all summer, he's not going anywhere.
The NFL has so much parity that no team could ever go undefea... oh, never mind.
I don't know the intimate details of Ilitch's finances, but he's not super-rich. Little Caesar's is one of the biggest pizza chains in the country, but it's in a costly battle to stay near the top. I think right now, Domino's is #1, Pizza Hut #2, and Papa John's has overtaken LC's for #3. And in the giant-sized American marketplace, #3 or #4 is not a safe place to be. Just ask Chrysler or Wendy's.
Anyway, back to baseball. Ilitch has put his own money into the Wings and Tigers, but he's also been extremely aggressive and proactive at marketing his teams and getting the most possible revenue out of them. He's really running his teams as businesses rather than vanity projects: he invests in the product, and revenues increase. There's no reaons Pohlad couldn't do the same; he just chooses to nickle-and-dime it instead.