Last week, the St. Louis Cardinals’ chairman claimed that the baseball industry was not very profitable. With the MLB-Turner Sports agreement and Rob Manfred’s ESPN interview on Monday, DeWitt’s comments are even more tone-deaf than before.
When Bill DeWitt Jr. bought the St. Louis Cardinals before the 1996 season, the team was valued at $150 million dollars. As of 2020, according to Forbes, the Cardinals are worth over $2 billion dollars and are one of the top 10 most valuable teams in all of Major League Baseball.
Last season, MLB generated a new record $10.7 billion dollar revenue, which is the third straight year revenues surpassed $10 billion.
Notice the number of times “billion” was used when it comes to money in baseball??
Yet according to Mr. DeWitt on 590 the Fan, the game of baseball isn’t profitable. To prove this, on Saturday, MLB and Turner Sports reached a *checks notes* billion-dollar deal to broadcast one of the League Championship Series.
Wait…what?
Let’s just say Twitter was not happy.
Must be fake news. Baseball isn’t that profitable. https://t.co/YbToDlDHmo
— Dan Buffa (@buffa82) June 13, 2020
Poor Bill Dewitt. You people just don't understand baseball's economics. Don't you poors know just how much it costs to buy a new house every time the old one gets a little dirty?
— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) June 13, 2020
There is no other way to sugarcoat this. To channel my inner Stephen A. Smith, what Bill DeWitt Jr. said was blasphemous. To suggest that this game is not very profitable when all of the evidence is contrary to the claim is absurd. I personally thought Chicago Cubs’ owner Tom Ricketts’ comments about the losses MLB is taking on being “biblical” was the most ridiculous comment during these negotiations, but here we are.
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Now after commissioner Rob Manfred stated yesterday how he’s not confident in a season, where the owners will not agree to pay players their full pro-rated salaries but will agree to a TV deal that pays $470 million per year from 2022-2028, it is bad optics plain and simple.
Baseball may not be as profitable as other businesses, but to suggest that DeWitt hasn’t gotten returns on his business venture with the Cardinals is absolutely ridiculous.
I’ll end my post with this tweet a couple of days ago from FanGraph’s Craig Edwards.
Just a reminder that even using MLB's estimates on losses per game without including national TV revenue, on average, it would cost each owner less than $10 million to go from 50 games to 80 games paying players the pro-rated pay agreed to in March.
— Craig Edwards (@craigjedwards) June 13, 2020