Estimating Postseason Revenue For Players And Teams

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.

To create these estimates, I analyzed each postseason team’s ticket price structure for the regular season, to the extent that information for the 2012 season was still publicly available. (The St. Louis Cardinals made this difficult, as they had already deleted seating/price information for 2012 from their website.) I then took the information we had about each team’s postseason ticket price range for each series (described in my earlier post), and estimated the ticket prices charged by each team for each postseason series. I also used each team’s 2012 ticket price structure to estimate how many seats were available at each price for each series.

This was, by far, the most difficult task. Some teams, like the Yankees, have intricate price structures where each small section of the ballpark has seats at a particular price. Other teams, like the Tigers, have just a few price levels for the 42,000 seats at Comerica Park. To the extent my estimates differ from actual ticket revenue collected, the largest variance will be found in how I divided up each ballpark into different price levels. I may very well have overestimated how many tickets sold at the highest ticket prices charged by each team.

Then I turned to the attendance figures, which I obtained from Baseball-Reference’s box scores for each postseason game. We heard some griping about empty seats at Yankee Stadium during the American League Division Series against the Orioles, and the attendance numbers show that only one of the Yankees’ postseason home games sold out, But the Yankees missed sell-outs by only a few thousand seats. The capacity at Yankee Stadium is just over 50,000. They reached capacity for Game 1 of the AL Division Series, and sold more than 47,000 tickets for their other postseason games. In retrospect, it seems the griping was unwarranted. The other postseason teams were also at or near capacity for each of their home games.

Using the San Francisco Giants as an example, here’s how I estimated how much postseason ticket revenue they brought in for the two Division Series games they hosted.

Division Series Ticket Price Range/Estimated % of Seats at Each Price

10% of seats at $275/ticket

20% of seats at $150/ticket

25% of seats at $100/ticket

15% of seats at $75/ticket

30% of seats at $65/ticket

I then used the average attendance for the two Division Series games to estimate how many tickets sold at each price point. Average attendance over the two games was 43,450.  That led to these calculations:

4,350 tickets at $275/ticket =     $1,196,250

8,700 tickets at $150/ticket =     $1,305,000

10,875 tickets at $100/ticket =   $1,087,500

6,525 tickets at $75/ticket =         $489,375

13,050 tickets at $65/ticket =      $848,250

Total for one game                             $4,926,375 per Division Series Game

Total for two games                           $9,852,750 for the Division Series

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I did the same kind of calculation for every postseason game, 37 in all: two Wild Card games, twenty Division Series games, eleven Championship Series games, and four World Series Games.

As a reminder, here’s how postseason ticket revenue is divided:

• 15 percent of the paid attendance receipts of every postseason game is contributed to the Commissioner’s Office.

• 50 percent of the paid attendance receipts from the Wild Card games is contributed to the Players Pool.

• 60 percent of the paid attendance receipts from the first three games of each Division Series is contributed to the Players Pool.

• 60 percent of the paid attendance receipts from the first four games of each Championship Series and the World Series is contributed to the Players Pool.

• All paid attendance receipts not paid to the Commissioner’s Office or contributed to the Players Pool is shared equally between the two teams in each Series or Wild Card game.