With the season freshly over and the Edmonton Jackrabbits its newly crowned champion (sounds, good, eh, Chris?), the BBA executive offices have retreated into their hutches and started figuring how and where the dough went. This is a business, after all. The goal is to make the commissioner and all the high-rolling investors filthy rich.
The good news on this front is that a newly released report indicates that the BBA created a new record for revenue, collecting over $3.56B in revenue. Averaged over the teams, that’s $118.76M, though California topped the charts at $153M, and Hawaii’s $77.8M was at the bottom.
The worrisome news is that attendance, which once ranged as high as 89.5M across the league, rose only gently from last year’s low of 81M, up to 83.4 in 2038. League officials had informally hoped that the rise would be a little more impressive, but still the 2.4M increase is still at least going in the right direction.
Combined, the news seems to say that the league is drawing its slight record high from a fewer number of people, something that suggests that fan complaints of price gouging may be at the heart of the situation. The BBA’s executive office has been oddly silent about the drop in attendance, though Peabody and Cleaver, the league’s financial advisors, have earlier posted a reference paper that included the comment that there’s a clear relationship in the league’s price/attendance elasticity equations, and that there should exist some form of equilibrium state where these values circulate around a peak revenue point. Whatever that hell that means.
The report includes several viable charts, because, of course it does.
PLAYERS WANT THEIR CUT:
These kinds of performances and the league’s overall revenue structure is certain to draw the attention of player’s union reps, who have been vocal in their distaste for recent discussions among BBA GMs that have been geared toward reducing extravagant spending. “We need more 6-season deals,” said Miller Marvin, spokesperson for the organization. “To hear the GMs talking among themselves is chilling. In this time of expansion and revenue growth, for one set of GMs to shame another for spending their money is un-American and anti-competitive. The league should look into it."
TEAMS CLOSER THAN EVER?
Other observers will note that the gap between richer and poorer teams, a value that had been as high as $93M a decade ago, has fallen to just $78M today. This suggest that, counter to the player's union protest, as far as raw revenue is concerned the league is financially closer today than any time of its past decade.
Regardless, the revenue stream alone suggests that baseball is still lucrative, and the existence of $30M and $40M contracts for the top end of league players is likely to mean fan interest in such conversations will not budge too far. On the whole the reports suggests that BBA baseball is still healthy and vibrant.
