Last Friday I wrote this post in which I estimated the amount of postseason ticket revenue to be shared among the Commissioner’s Office, the postseason teams, and the players on each postseason team. The Friday post linked back to another one I wrote in early October in which I explained the formulas used by Major League Baseball to divide postseason ticket revenue. Those formulas were agreed to by the owners and players in the Collective Bargaining Agreement that went into effect for the 2012 season, and will govern through the end of the 2016 season.

In the comments section, several readers asked about revenue generated by concessions during postseason games and by sales of postseason-related merchandise. They wanted to know if those revenues were shared among the Commissioner’s Office, the postseason teams, and the players on postseason teams using the same formula. The short answer is: No. The long answer is that concession and merchandise revenue are shared among all 30 teams, not just the ten teams in the postseason.

Now I will explain the longer answer.

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Last month, I explained the formula Major League Baseball uses to divide postseason ticket revenue among the Commissioner’s Office, postseason teams, and players on postseason teams. Now that the postseason has concluded, we have enough information to estimate the amount of ticket revenue collected and, therefore, the amount the Commissioner, the teams, and the players will receive.

Before I launch into the numbers, I want to emphasize that these are estimates. Rough estimates, in fact. We know the attendance figures for each postseason game, and we know the range of ticket prices each team charged, but we don’t know precisely how many tickets at each price were sold by each team for each postseason game.

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First, the national TV ratings for the World Series were released. The lowest in history! Lower than the last time the San Francisco Giants played in the World Series! Then came the commentary about how boring the series was — how it lacked national stars, how the ratings show interest in baseball is dying.

Stop. Baseball is alive and well. It’s simply not consumed on a national level and hasn’t been for some time.

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As we head into the 2012-2013 offseason, I thought it was a good time to take a snapshot of total payroll spending by the 30 Major League Baseball teams over the last five seasons, in order to see how much total spending had increased year-over-year and how that compared to the inflation rate in the same year-over-year time period. We relied on the team payroll numbers published each spring by the Associated Press.

First, actual year-to-year payroll numbers for the 30 major-league teams combined:
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The following sentence was buried at the bottom of Nick Cafardo’s Sunday notes column in the Boston Globe:

Tim Lincecum, RHP, Giants — He will be available in trade, and it will be interesting to see who bites on the two-time Cy Young winner.

Next season will be the last under Lincecum’s current contract with the Giants. Last winter, he signed a 2-year/$40.5 million deal with the team, taking him through the end of his arbitration-eligibility.

Cafardo’s column had no quote from a Giants’ official, off or on the record. No source. Just a declaration that Lincecum “will be available in trade.”  No matter, Cafardo’s comment was picked up by all the trade rumor blogs and then the Twitterverse. All on the eve of Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, which had Giants fans in a tizzy about the truth and timing of Cafardo’s comments.

Later in the day, San Francisco Chronicle baseball writer John Shea asked Giants GM Brian Sabean about Lincecum’s future with the team:

Timmy’s going to be a Giant,” said Sabean, reminding that his contract has one year remaining.

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The Oakland Athletics want a new ballpark. The team’s current home, the O.co Coliseum, is the only multi-sport stadium in use in Major League Baseball. The A’s share the Coliseum with the Oakland Raiders; in August, September and October, that often means football lines across the baseball field and diamond dirt on the gridiron. The conditions aren’t optimum for either team.

The Coliseum is also the fifth-oldest ballpark in the majors: only Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Dodger Stadium and Angels Stadium are older. It opened for football in 1966 and for baseball in 1968, when the A’s moved west from Kansas City. Renovations in 1995 — when the Raiders moved back to Oakland from Los Angeles — favored football conditions at the expense of baseball. The most egregious example, of course, was the erection of Mt. Davis where the open outfield vistas once stood. Click here for photos of the Coliseum before and after Mt. Davis.

A’s owner Lew Wolff says the team needs a new ballpark to stay financially competitive with other teams in the league. Wolff has said the Coliseum simply lacks the kind of technology, amenities and corporate sponsorships common in most — if not all — other major-league ballparks. Earlier this month, Wolff told CNBC that a new ballpark could generate $100 million in additional revenue for the A’s. The details behind that figure aren’t clear; in particular, we don’t know how much of that additional revenue is expected to come from ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise sales, advertising and corporate sponsorships.

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Major League Baseball had several reasons for adding a second Wild Card this season. The reasons we heard most frequently were that the new format would keep more fans interested and excited down the stretch and that it would give an advantage to teams winning their division. The one we heard less frequently — but which was no less important — was that two more postseason games meant more money.

More money for whom?

MLB has very specific requirements for how postseason ticket revenue is divided among the league, the postseason teams, and the players. The framework is set out in the Major League Baseball Rules, an internal document that is not typically shared with the public. The Collective Bargaining Agreement between the owners and the Players Association adds an additional layer. If the Rules and the CBA disagree on any of these points, the language in the CBA controls. Maury Brown of the Biz of Baseball website obtained a copy of the MLB Rules in 2010 and published it on his site. Here’s the link. The Players Association website has a link to the CBA here.

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We now have final attendance figures for the 2012 regular season. Overall, attendance increased by 1,443,909 compared to 2011, or slightly less than 2%. And while MLB touted that increase as “the largest year-to-year growth since the 2007 season total rose 4.6% over 2006,” much of the increase can be attributed to the additional 698,882 fans who bought tickets to see the Miami Marlins in their new ballpark. By contrast, there was no new ballpark opening in 2007.

In fact, attendance changes differed significantly across the league. The teams with surprisingly successful seasons — the Nationals, Orioles and Athletics — saw immediate rewards at the box office, with attendance increases ranging from 14% (202,221 more tickets sold by the A’s) to 22% (430,316 for the Nationals). Baltimore had a 19% gain over 2011, with 345,779 visiting Camden Yards to watch the Extra-Inning Miracle Workers.

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In September, we reported a number of stories related to the business of baseball.  There have been some recent developments, so we now provide this update.

Getting Home From Late-Night Nationals’ Postseason Games

We reported in mid-September about the difficulties facing Nationals fans when weekday games run very late due to the midnight closing time of the Washington Metro (the subway operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority). The issue had been brewing all season, and with the Nationals headed to the postseason — when games traditionally start later to accommodate the national TV broadcasts — concerns were raised about how to ensure that Nationals fans could reliably get home from weekday postseason games.  The Metro will stay open an hour later, but only if the person or company requesting the additional hour pre-pays a deposit of nearly $30,000.  The Nationals seemed poised to make that deposit, until Major League Baseball expressed concerns about “setting a precedent.”

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The Baltimore Orioles celebrated the 20th anniversary of Camden Yards this year. A few more winning seasons and the Orioles just might get back to the sell-out crowds that filled Camden Yards in 1992 and for nearly a decade thereafter.

The high-water mark for attendance at Camden Yards was in 1997, when the the Orioles won the American League East with a record of 98-64. That year, 3,711,132 fans filled Camden Yards to the brim nearly every game. It’s been a steady decline ever since. Still, even as the team floundered after the 1997 season, more than 2,000,000 fans bought tickets year after year, putting the Orioles in the top half of American League teams in attendance.

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