YS9 Considers Loss of Revenue Suit
May 12, 2044: Yellow Springs – Several days after the YS9 front office announced robust attendance numbers, the worm has suddenly turned.
“The problem is Sacramento,” reads an early draft of a summary briefing that YS9 lawyers are said to be preparing as they seek injunction against the Mad Popes. “They keep trading away the only few guys anyone wants to watch, so what’s left is a pile of rubber arms and slow-footed hitters that not even the Mad Popes’ PR office can find a way to sell. Our fans are among the most sophisticated in the world—which you can tell because only highly advanced thinkers can understand why the Heartland Pennant is the real gem of the Brewster—they are not going to fall for the Full Monty Shell Game that Sacramento is trying to foist on the baseball world.”
Attendance at the previous three-game series in which Heartland rival Omaha was in town for registered in at something over 59,500 fans, essentially sell outs every night. The two games with the Mad Popes have rung in at a tepid 47,500, a difference of some dozen thousand. At $18.50 a pop even a Kindergartner can calculate the impact of this loss as some $222,000. (Note, schools in Yellow Springs are advanced enough that Kindergartners can all add, subtract, multiply and divide. Most can handle trigonometry, algebra, and basic probability and statistics, and a few are working on a group project that uses graph theory to predict the outcome of what would happen if you put Vinnie Vitale’s hairpiece into a blender and hit “dice.”)
The brief is to be submitted in municipal court with the request that the judge require the Sacramento team replace that lost revenue, but is apparently being held back so that numbers from tonight’s game, the last in the Mad Pope series, can be included.
With the league’s gate sharing of 40%, it’s expected that the Mad Popes will probably have to cut the Nine a check for upwards of $350,000-$400,000 dollars to cover lost revenue.