Schilling, unplugged

Please don’t him we sent you, he might eat us.

Ben,

In case you didn’t see this over at Baseball Musings, here is what i wrote in reply to your comment -
————————————————
Ben,

After reading your comment, I decided to contact Milner on his piece. Here was my question -

Brian,

Hello. I read your article today and a friend of mine was wondering about the following paragraph you wrote -

“Not even the Yankees, who sell out every game in a stadium that seats 10,200 (almost double the Jays’ capacity) and have a valuable televisiondeal, turn a profit in Tampa. “My guess is that it would be a loss for everybody,” Godfrey said.”

How do you or Godfrey know this to be true? It would have been nice if you would have contacted a few authorities from say the Yankees or the Red Sox and gotten their take. Maybe you did but felt the need not to print it. Do you have any more information on this?

Thank You,
JMM

HIS REPLY:

Hi Jason

Thanks for your inquiry. The information came from several executives (though not one from the Yankees) plus people in charge of the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues. The teams don’t make public their profits and expenses by segments. But as I tried to make clear, these are paper losses related to the accounting methods that teams employ. The Yankees,
for example, load all of the costs of their Florida operations,
including a rookie-league team and a class-A team and a year-round training facility, on to their spring budget. If I had had more space, I would have gone into it in more detail. Nevertheless, I should have made it clear that spring training, on its own, does make money for the teams that have 10,000-seat-plus stadiums and a healthy cut of all revenues,
which is about half of them. The Blue Jays are not among them.

Brian Milner
Sports business columnist
The Globe and Mail
And globesports.com
bmilner@globeandmail.com

I hope this was helpful. It sure was nice of him to be honest and upfront. He replied within a half hour of me sending him this question.

JMM
MY BASEBALL BIAS – AN AL EAST BIAS WEBLOG
http://www.mybaseballbias.com