Forbes: Most Valuable Sports Brands

Click-fest from Forbes. “Top 40 Brands” = Top 10 for each of Businesses, Teams, Athletes, and Events. It takes them 45 pages to list the 40. So to cut to the chase…

How do you place a value on a brand?

...For sports business brands, this means quantifying the amount the business would fetch in an arms length transaction in excess of what a comparable rival would be worth.

...For athlete brands… (those) whose endorsement income exceeded the amount their peers earned by the largest amount during the past year.

...Sporting events are valued on the amount of revenue they generate per-event-day from media, tickets, sponsorships and licensing.

...Team brand values are calculated by applying the same multiple we use to value the entire team to those revenues not associated with the size or demographics if its market, or its portion of league-share revenue.

So brand value isn’t franchise value. It’s the value the franchise gets from the brand name they’ve built - the name recognition, the amount people are willing to spend for their product instead of something similar from someone else.

Purely MLB-related:

#7 business - YES - $625 m
#8 business - NESN - $510 m
#9 business - MLBAM - $480 m
#2 team - Yankees - $443 m
#6 team - Red Sox - $237 m
#7 team - Dodgers - $225 m
#5 event - World Series - $135 m
#10 event - MLB All-Star Week - $86 m

USDA Forest Service: Rate of shattered baseball bats 50 percent less, thanks to Major League Baseball, Forest Service

Your tax dollars at work!

The research team found that inconsistency of wood quality, primarily the manufacturing detail “slope of grain,” for all species of wood used in Major League bat manufacture was the main cause of broken bats. Also, low-density maple bats were found to not only crack but shatter into multiple pieces more often than ash bats or higher-density maple bats. Called multiple-piece failure, shattered bats can pose a danger on the field and in the stands.  Slope of grain refers to the straightness of the wood grain along the length of a bat. Straighter grain lengthwise means less likelihood for breakage.

NY Times: New Kind of Baseball Bat Is Tapered for Safety and Comfort

Now Grady Phelan, a graphic designer by trade and an inventor by predilection, has created a bat with a different look. The knob is slanted on one side, with the raised edge gradually disappearing so that side of the hand rests on a flat surface rather than grinding against the knob during a swing.

Maybe not a big difference, at least in appearance. But Phelan says it may do two important things: prevent injury and reduce the risk of the bat flying out of the batter’s hand when he swings.

Smithsonian.com: A Brief History of the Baseball

Like the football, it’s hard to attribute its invention to one person, especially considering that in those heady, mustachioed, pre-professional days of baseball, balls were made by cobblers from the rubber remnants of old shoes, with rubber cores wrapped in yarn and a leather cover – if you were lucky. In some regions, sturgeon eyes were used instead of melted shoe rubber. In the 1840s and ’50s, it was anything but an exact science and pitchers often just made their own balls.

philly.com: Fishtown baseball factory to become 30 homes

The biggest Philly real estate baseball news since Richie Ashburn’s grave was desecrated

The Zoning Board of Adjustment voted Wednesday to grant a handful of variances to Domani Developers, which is planning to convert a former baseball factory at 1701 Tulip Street in Fishtown into a 30-unit apartment complex. (Yes, that’s an empty factory that used to make baseballs: the A.J. Reach sporting goods company.) [Linked to: www.workshopoftheworld.com/fishtown/reach.html]