This is a story about the business of baseball. It’s a story about the women who make up 45% of all baseball fans. And it’s a story about MLB-licensed merchandise made for and marketed to those female fans.

Revenue generated from the sale of MLB-licensed gear goes directly to the league’s “central fund” and is shared equally by all 30 teams. This includes sales of all MLB-licensed products at ballparks, team-sponsored stores and online at MLB.com. Every T-shirt, every baseball cap, every sweatshirt, every key chain, every everything with an MLB team logo benefits the fund and, in turn, every franchise.

This is a story about the diversity of interests and tastes among women baseball fans. For myself, and my 9-year-old daughter, I prefer women’s and girls’ cut clothing in traditional team colors. We are Giants fans. That means lots of orange, black, grey and white T-shirts, sweatshirts and the like. I don’t like pink baseball gear. Or “PINK” baseball gear — the brand MLB cross-markets with Victoria’s Secret. Nor do I like rhinestones or sequins on my Giants shirts.

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The St. Louis Cardinals’ farm system is the envy of the league. ESPN’s Keith Law recently ranked the Cardinals’ minor-league teams Number 1 in his annual farm-system rankings, with Shelby Miller, Trevor Rosenthal and Oscar Tavares all in Law’s Top 100 prospects. Baseball America agreed.

But all is not well for the Cardinals’ Triple-A affiliate Memphis Redbirds of the Pacific Coast League. Their story is a warning that, even in a baseball-loving town, it isn’t always true that “if you build it, they will come.”

The Redbirds play in AutoZone Park in downtown Memphis. The ballpark, built in 2000, is nestled between high-rise office buildings not far from the Mississippi River. AutoZone Park is considered a jewel among minor-league ballparks. Baseball America named it the 2009 Minor League Ballpark of the Year. There are wide concourses, club seating, luxury suites and open-air party decks. It cost $80 million to build — a high price tag for a minor league ballpark.

And now, it’s awash in a sea of debt.

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Yahoo! Sports reporters Jeff Passan and Tim Brown reported late on Tuesday that they had obtained records of now defunct anti-aging clinic Biogenesis and that three of the documents contained the name of Brewers left fielder Ryan Braun. Last week, the New Times of Miami reported that Biogenesis and its founder Anthony Bosch had allegedly provided performance-enhancing drugs to other MLB players, including Alex Rodriguez, Nelson Cruz, and Gio Gonzalez. Rodriguez, Cruz, and Gonzalez have denied receiving PEDs from Biogenesis or Bosch.

According to Yahoo!, one of the documents includes Braun’s name among a list of other players, including Rodriguez, Gonzalez, Melky Cabrera, Francisco Cervelli, and Danny Valencia, but without any notation about drugs or other substances banned by MLB. Another document has multiple references to Chris Lyons, one of several attorneys who represented Braun in 2011 and 2012 in his appeal of a positive drug test. That appeal was ultimately successful when the MLB arbitrator, Shyam Das, found that the urine sample obtained from Braun had not been handled in accordance with the process set forth in MLB’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program and was, therefore, invalid.

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There was the Reggie Bar, named for and endorsed by Reggie Jackson. There was Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle in a prominent ad for Yoo-Hoo Chocolate Drink. Stan Musial was on the back of the Wheaties box and paired with Ted Williams in ads for Chesterfield cigarettes. Roger Clemens was in a Zest soap commercial and Rafael Palmeiro talked about erectile dysfunction for Viagra. Okay, maybe that last one isn’t the one to highlight.

But why aren’t there big major league stars on today’s Wheaties boxes?

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The Los Angeles Dodgers announced this morning the creation of a new cable television network that will broadcast all Dodgers games and other Dodgers-related programming beginning in the 2014 season. The network, to be called SportsNetLA, will be operated by American Media Productions or AMP, a newly-formed subsidiary of the Dodgers’ ownership group. Time Warner Cable (TWC) will carry the new network in Los Angeles and Hawaii and pay the Dodgers between $7 billion and $8 billion over 25 years for that privilege.

“We concluded last year that the best way to give our fans what they want — more content and more Dodger baseball — was to launch our own network,” Dodgers chairman Mark Walter said in a prepared statement. “The creation of AMP will provide substantial financial resources over the coming years for the Dodgers to build on their storied legacy and bring a world championship home to Los Angeles.”

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News broke Sunday night that the Maloofs — the majority owners of the National Basketball Association’s Sacramento Kings — agreed to sell their share of the team to Seattle investors, including Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and investor Chris Hansen. The Seattle group valued the franchise at $525 million, and agreed to pay $340 million for the Maloof family’s 65% stake. Sacramento mayor and former NBA star Kevin Johnson is working to assemble a counter-bid to keep the team in California while minority investors may sue and claim a breach of the limited-partnership agreement. In other words, the $525 million value is likely to go up before this is done.

Just days later, Forbes published its annual story on NBA franchise values, and ranked the Kings as the 11th-most-valuable franchise, using the $525 million figure from the proposed sale. But the Kings weren’t the only NBA team to see its value rise significantly in the past year. For the first time, Forbes valued two teams at $1 billion or more — the New York Knicks (at $1.1 billion) and the Los Angeles Lakers (at $1 billion) — and pegged the average franchise value at $509 million, a 30% increase over 2012. Forbes also reported the average operating income (earnings before taxes, depreciation, etc) for the NBA’s 30 teams was $11.9 million, the highest since Forbes started tracking the numbers in 1998.

So what’s driving the NBA’s financial success, and what does it foretell for Major League Baseball teams’ values when Forbes releases that list in March?

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It won’t be long before the e-mails start arriving in your inbox. “Don’t miss any of the action! Watch all* out-of-market regular season games on MLB.tv. Purchase the entire 2013 season now and save!” And there will be glossy pamphlets from your cable or satellite provider: “Act now to add MLB Extra Innings to your viewing package.  Watch every* out-of-market MLB game from the comfort of your home.”

The asterisks are necessary because neither MLB.tv nor MLB Extra Innings provides access to every out-of-market regular season game to every purchaser of their product. For one, the games broadcast exclusively on national TV — FOX’s Saturday Game of the Week and ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball — are excluded. Under the current MLB-FOX agreement, which will expire at the end of the 2013 season, only FOX may broadcast MLB games during a certain time period on Saturdays. That leaves many teams with the decision to either schedule Saturday games in the evening, outside the FOX window or have some Saturday home games not broadcast locally. And it leaves fans shut out from every game played on a Saturday afternoon, other than the one FOX broadcasts in their area.

There are other restrictions on the MLB Extra Innings and MLB.tv packages, particularly for fans who live in areas without an Major League Baseball team but within the broadcast territory of several teams. Iowa, for example, doesn’t have its own MLB team but is within the broadcast territory for the Cubs, Brewers, Royals, Twins, Cardinals, White Sox. That means fans in Iowa can’t watch those six teams on MLB.tv or Extra Innings because those games are considered “in-market” in Iowa. You can see the MLB broadcast territories on this map:

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Scott Boras has several clients who are yet to be signed for the 2013 season. Three of those clients — Kyle Lohse, Rafael Soriano, and Michael Bourn — received qualifying offers from their former teams, and rejected those offers. As a result, whatever teams sign those players will give up a sandwich round draft pick in June’s Rule 4 draft and a percentage of its draft bonus pool. Much has been written here and elsewhere about this new compensation system, which replaced the Type A/Type B free-agent system used in the old collective bargaining agreement. Not surprisingly, Boras isn’t too fond of the new rules, not only for their effect on his current free-agent clients, but for the effect on future clients who may be skipped over by teams that have lost a significant percentage of their bonus pool.

But Boras doesn’t look solely to the new rules as the reason his three big free-agent clients are still unsigned. No, he says teams are just being stingy with their payroll. Too stingy, he says, in light of booming MLB revenues. According to Boras, most teams have lower payrolls heading into the 2013 season than the highest payroll those teams had from 2000-2012. “Only five teams have higher payrolls,” Boras told Murray Chass over the weekend. “Everybody else is below even though revenue is up 200 percent and franchise values are up 300, 400 percent. What we’re seeing is not many teams are spending on payrolls despite the fact that their profits are extraordinary. You’d expect teams to have their highest payrolls, but they don’t.”

Is Boras right? Are payrolls lagging behind the growth in MLB revenues?

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Buster Posey will be a San Francisco Giant at least through the end of the 2016 season. The upcoming season will be his first as an arbitration-eligible player. He’ll have three more of those before he becomes a free agent. That is, unless Posey and the Giants agree to a long-term contract that buys out one or more of his free-agent years. Should Posey commit to the Giants long-term? Should the Giants commit to Posey? What kind of deal makes sense?

Hard to believe, sometimes, but the reigning National League most valuable player has played in only 305 major-league games and amassed only 1,255 plate appearances. His first major-league at bat came on Sept. 11, 2009, during a brief September call-up. (He struck out). In 2010, the Giants didn’t call Posey up from the minors until late May, as Bengie Molina continued to handle the everyday catching duties. Even then, Posey played first base for a month before the Giants traded Molina to the Rangers and installed Posey behind the dish.

In 443 plate appearances in 108 games, Posey hit .305/.357/.505 with 18 home runs. His 134 wRC+ tied him with Ryan Braun for 15th-best in the National League. Posey was named National League Rookie of the Year and guided the Giants’ vaunted pitching staff during the team’s World Series run. He earned $400,000 but delivered $16.7 million in value with a 4.2 WAR.

Posey’s 2011 campaign was cut short by the devastating ankle and leg injury he suffered in a home plate collision with Scott Cousins on May 25. In his 45 games that season, Posey dropped off from his sensational rookie numbers and hit only .284/.368/.389 in 185 plate appearances. The power numbers, in particular, looked concerning but may very well have stabilized during a full season. Posey earned $575,000 but delivered $8 million worth of value in just two months of playing time.

And then there’s 2012. National League Batting Champion*. National League MVP. National League Comeback Player of the Year. World Series champion. Posey played 148 games and had 610 plate appearances and he did the most with them. He hit .336/.408/.509 with 24 home runs. He led the National League with 8 WAR, and if his base running wasn’t so poorly rated, his WAR could have reached 10. The Giants paid him $615,000 and he gave his team $36 million in value.

What does all of this mean for a possible long-term deal between Posey and the Giants?

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With fewer than three months until Opening Day, major league teams are revving up their ticket-sales operations. For nearly all teams, that means working to attract new season-ticket holders, as well as single-game and mini-plan ticket buyers. Only the Giants, Red Sox and Cubs have waiting lists to become season-ticket holders. Even the Phillies — which saw a 257-game home sell-out streak end last August — are selling partial season-ticket plans on their website.

Teams use a variety of marketing tools and incentives to attract ticket buyers. There are bobble-head giveaways, fireworks nights and bring-your-dog-to-the-park days. There are food coupons and discounts at the team merchandise store. But I want to focus on the basics: the day and time of game, the opponent and the ticket price. Teams use these factors in a variety of ways to drive ticket sales and maximize ticket revenue.

We’ve heard the terms “variable pricing” and “dynamic pricing.” Occasionally, they’ve been used interchangeably, although they apply to different pricing strategies.

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