IOW, what Andy's been saying.

What? I've been specifically arguing against the concept that high salaries cause high ticket prices. Even Andy acknowledged that's not an issue during the WS.

Besides which, it's still a revenue issue - owners trading short-term gains (from higher WS prices) for long-term gains (keeping as many ticketholders as possible).

There's a 100 level on the field. (Google "Veterans Stadium seating chart")

And again, 200 is the "box level" pricing at Veterans stadium for that World Series.

The "dugout box" price for 1996 is also the price for various other first tier seats that year.

1996 it was $$25 for bleachers, $45 dollars for tier reserved and then $70 for a variety of commonly available seats.

And do you think that if salaries were still set unilaterally by the owners, and remained at inflation-adjusted reserve clause era salaries, that ticket prices would have escalated to the 37-fold extent that they have?

Look at Major League Soccer or Arena Football. They pay an average player salary of 10% of that of MLB or the NFL, but price their tickets roughly around 50%. If salaries determine ticket prices, these tickets would be $4 and not the reality of $40.

According to an article from 1998 that I read the range for 1996 was at the very least $25-$90 based on confiscated tickets.

According to another article the World Series doubled their prices in 1998 and kept them the same in 1999 but jacked up the LCS's.

Without that kind of knowledge, you wind up raising completely irrelevant points about cheap phones and jumbo TVs, as if these have anything to do with ticket prices and what sort of seats you got for your money over the passing years. Which is pretty much the sort of irrelevant points you see being repeated here time and again. These arguments partly stem from the usual "free market" ideology among certain Primates who love to hammer square pegs into round holes and call it "principles", but less ideological types often advance similar arguments based on simple factual ignorance. Not having been there, they apparently have no idea of just how much more, in adjusted CPI dollars, a non-nosebleed or non-bleacher fan of today is being stuck for the same view that he was getting 35 or 55 years ago, and what it's done to change the demographics of the crowds in all of those sections.

Andy is the master of saying "A implies B," and -- when people point out that A does not in fact imply B -- loudly, vehemently, and insultingly proving A (ad nauseam) and then patting himself on the back for winning the argument. Has a single person on the planet, on BBTF or anywhere else, disputed that ticket prices are significantly up in real terns? No. So what does the above rant have to do with anything except Andy proudly displaying his misunderstanding of economics? It certainly has no relevance to his claim that player salaries somehow mystically "indirectly" cause higher prices.


Hint for Andy: the "cheap phones and jumbo TVs" are not irrelevant, as they relate to the discretionary income people have, which relates to the demand curve, which does directly relate to ticket prices.

And do you think that if salaries were still set unilaterally by the owners, and remained at inflation-adjusted reserve clause era salaries, that ticket prices would have escalated to the 37-fold extent that they have?

Yes, all other things being equal. Of course.

Let's just agree to disagree on this, since we've gone through this at least 3 times already. And as I've said, the sort of profits that would have resulted from the difference between modern prices and reserve clause salaries, would in turn have caused the entire system to disintegrate in the form of a strong player union---even w/o deserving HoFer Marvin Miller. It just would have taken 5 or 10 years longer.

If owners didn't have high salaries as an excuse, they would have simply found another excuse. There's no reason to think the excuse works all that well anyway; people still complain about ticket prices all the time. It's not like they're magically made happy about high ticket prices because they're subsidizing millionaire players like your half-baked theories would seem to require.

But again, I've never said that they've only used one excuse, only that the salary excuse resonates with fans more than any other, with one exception: New stadiums.

To belabor the point, we see this at work in college sports. Universities want to raise prices, but they can't blame player salaries. So they use other excuses besides "we want to bilk you dry." For example, they talk at great length and with great passion about how they need better facilities to keep up, and how endless stadium expansions, better practice facilities, etc., will keep them attractive for recruits.

Colleges have their own excuses for price increases, and since most of these excuses are couched in terms of "giving back" in one way or the other, there's little resistance, especially since the "giving back" is going directly to the fans' alma mater. The only analogy to pro sports is that in both cases the ticket price increases are justified in order to keep the team competitive. With pros it requires being competitive in the free agent market, which in turn requires higher prices. It's a simple and seemingly logical sequence. But if you remove the excuse that "we had to outbid the ______ in order to remain competitive", the whole explanation chain would break down.

I don't really know what WS tickets would tell us anyway. Demand is going to be really high regardless, yet teams would conceivably have a long-term interest in not pricing their season ticketholders out of the games (not so much an issue for the NFL, who can take more of a sky's-the-limit approach).

But this sense of competing interests is precisely why I'm saying that without the excuse of those skyrocketing payrolls, they would have found it much harder to justify the skyrocketing prices.

--------------------------

IOW, what Andy's been saying.

What? I've been specifically arguing against the concept that high salaries cause high ticket prices. Even Andy acknowledged that's not an issue during the WS.

But the point about the WS prices was that they're affected in part by PR factors, and that simple short term demand isn't always in control.

--------------------------

Look at Major League Soccer or Arena Football. They pay an average player salary of 10% of that of MLB or the NFL, but price their tickets roughly around 50%. If salaries determine ticket prices, these tickets would be $4 and not the reality of $40.

First, ticket prices are relative, and even at 50% of the NFL, they can be passed off as a "bargain". And second, for the hundredth time, I'm not saying that salaries are the sole determinant of ticket prices. If you want to argue against that, argue with some of the MSM writers.

--------------------------

According to an article from 1998 that I read the range for 1996 was at the very least $25-$90 based on confiscated tickets.

According to another article the World Series doubled their prices in 1998 and kept them the same in 1999 but jacked up the LCS's.

The most reliable way to determine ticket prices is simply to google image "19__ World Series ticket" or "20__ World Series ticket", because then you can see exactly where the seat is. It's imperfect only to the extent that you can't always find an image for every price tier, but it's still a pretty good approximation, and it's better than secondhand information. It's better than ebay since you're getting the images from more than one source.

---------------------------

Hint for Andy: the "cheap phones and jumbo TVs" are not irrelevant, as they relate to the discretionary income people have, which relates to the demand curve, which does directly relate to ticket prices.

Hint for David: the "cheap phones and jumbo TVs" (and DSL charges) cost a lot more (in monthly charges) than local phone service at no monthly TV charges cost BITD, and this directly impacts the discretionary income of today. The only things about those two that were more expensive BITD were the initial cost of the TV, and the cost of long distance phone calls. But one year's worth of cable bills more than eliminate the former savings, and BITD people simply restricted their long distance calls to special occasions.

And of course what isn't irrelevant in discussions of baseball ticket prices is---baseball ticket prices. I can see why you'd rather talk about cheap anything else rather than to talk about those.

Colleges have their own excuses for price increases, and since most of these excuses are couched in terms of "giving back" in one way or the other, there's little resistance, especially since the "giving back" is going directly to the fans' alma mater. The only analogy to pro sports is that in both cases the ticket price increases are justified in order to keep the team competitive. With pros it requires being competitive in the free agent market, which in turn requires higher prices. It's a simple and seemingly logical sequence. But if you remove the excuse that "we had to outbid the ______ in order to remain competitive", the whole explanation chain would break down.

There's no logical reason for the bolded statement. None. The Giants, for example, raised ticket prices after the WS win. I don't know of one single person who believes that they did it to pay Aubrey Huff's 2011 salary. People pay anyways.

Even if salary is sometimes used as an excuse, it's a transparent one. Ugh, why am I even bothering with this?

The most reliable way to determine ticket prices is simply to google image "19__ World Series ticket" or "20__ World Series ticket", because then you can see exactly where the seat is. It's imperfect only to the extent that you can't always find an image for every price tier, but it's still a pretty good approximation, and it's better than secondhand information. It's better than ebay since you're getting the images from more than one source.

I did all that. Since you didn't look up all of the years you did not have all of the info and your conclusions, in regards to labor strife and pricing, were wrong.

Do you even understand the difference between a direct cause and an indirect and partial cause?

No. It appears to be a nonsensical distinction.

And do you think that if salaries were still set unilaterally by the owners, and remained at inflation-adjusted reserve clause era salaries, that ticket prices would have escalated to the 37-fold extent that they have?

Yes. Do you really think this standard tactic of yours of asking, pseudo-rhetorically, whether people really think what they've already told you that they actually do think, makes any sense?

You've said that you do, but that belief comes with the complete avoidance of every factor other than pure owner autonomy, which is why it's bizarre to say the least.

The fact that you've repeatedly asserted, without either evidence or logic, that something ought to be a "factor" does not mean that "avoiding" it is bizarre. You haven't presented any reason why the laws of economics would be different for baseball than for any other industry.

EDIT: That last statement isn't really fair on my part; it's not that you think baseball is different than other industries, but you actually illustrate that you don't believe that there are any such laws applicable to any industry. Everything is just ad hoc. One industry raises prices based on A, another based on B, another based on C, etc. Baseball is one exception, college sports are a different exception, music is a third one...

This may be the dumbest thing I've seen written on this site.
Your complete lack of economic understanding floors me.

I know it's a lot to ask for basic human decency, but as it was proven by about a dozen or more posters, there were a score of ways to write this without being utterly rude.

I agree. I apologize for lashing out as rudely as I did.
The statement made is one I've had to field at work (and with friends) about the economics of payroll vs ticket prices on many occasions.
Even when I've laid it out in detail, people still disagree. That's when I tend to get snippy/rude.

In this case, I jumped straight to the rude response, without the intervening disagreement and refusal to believe.

There was no need for that.

Again, I apologize for being rude in my response.

Do you really think this standard tactic of yours of asking, pseudo-rhetorically, whether people really think what they've already told you that they actually do think, makes any sense?

I see what you did there.

There's no logical reason for the bolded statement. None. The Giants, for example, raised ticket prices after the WS win. I don't know of one single person who believes that they did it to pay Aubrey Huff's 2011 salary. People pay anyways.

Even if salary is sometimes used as an excuse, it's a transparent one. Ugh, why am I even bothering with this?

Beats me, since I've said about a hundred times that it's not a universally given reason.

----------------------------

And do you think that if salaries were still set unilaterally by the owners, and remained at inflation-adjusted reserve clause era salaries, that ticket prices would have escalated to the 37-fold extent that they have?

Yes. Do you really think this standard tactic of yours of asking, pseudo-rhetorically, whether people really think what they've already told you that they actually do think, makes any sense?

Well, if you or anyone else asserts that owners could get away with charging $200 for box seats with payrolls at 3% of what they are today, I do admit that I have a hard time believing that you're running on all cylinders. I seriously doubt if even you and your lawyer's income---never mind someone making $30 K a year---would be wanting to give your money to that sort of an owner, no matter how good a product he put on the field.

As for your point about my lack of "evidence or logic": Where's the evidence on your "sure they could get away with it" side as applied to any major professional sport? Your "evidence" consists of nothing but an assertion in a complete vacuum, based on an assumption that fans will swallow absolutely anything.

EDIT: That last statement isn't really fair on my part; it's not that you think baseball is different than other industries, but you actually illustrate that you don't believe that there are any such laws applicable to any industry. Everything is just ad hoc. One industry raises prices based on A, another based on B, another based on C, etc. Baseball is one exception, college sports are a different exception, music is a third one...

Yes, perish the thought that different industries and occupations might actually have different cultures, which in turn might result in different factors entering into their pricing decisions. Why, I've even heard in some cases such decisions have been taken out of the hands of robots and placed in the hands of actual human beings, some of whom price according to short range considerations (current demand) while others modify that consideration with a view to the long run (long range customer loyalty)!

Budweiser sells a bottle of beer to a retailer for about 70 cents. That retailer will then turn around and sell that bottle of beer for anywhere from $1.50 to $8.00 or more and people gladly pay it.

Out of that 70 cents the biggest chunk and probably the majority of the cost goes to advertising that bottle of beer.

Cost has very little to do with pricing.

Would some people ##### about $200 seats if the team's payroll was $12 million? Sure but those are not the guys who were going to be buying those tickets anyway. People will still buy those tickets if they are priced to meet demand of the market.

Build a winner and nobody is going to care about your payroll.

I seriously doubt if even you and your lawyer's income---never mind someone making $30 K a year---would be wanting to give your money to that sort of an owner, no matter how good a product he put on the field.

Except people make these sorts of transactions all the time. Labor's constantly getting screwed in all facets of the economy and, newsflash: no one much cares.

Cost has very little to do with pricing.

But when the local bar posts a sign saying, "Sorry we raised our prices on Bud, they raised their prices on us," and you as a customer say, "OK, that makes sense, I'll pay the extra," it's the height of tetchy lawyerliness to say, "The cost increase didn't cause the price increase, that's just an excuse."

In the same vein, continuing to pound the tautological, "Supply and demand are what cause price increases because ... well ... prices are determined by supply and demand" doesn't really add anything insightful or original. Everybody gets the tautology.

Budweiser sells a bottle of beer to a retailer for about 70 cents. That retailer will then turn around and sell that bottle of beer for anywhere from $1.50 to $8.00 or more and people gladly pay it.

Out of that 70 cents the biggest chunk and probably the majority of the cost goes to advertising that bottle of beer.

Cost has very little to do with pricing.

So you're saying that bar customers wouldn't complain if the retail price at the bar went from $1.50 / $8.00 to $5.00 / $75.00 or even $200.00 while the wholesale prices remained the same? Where do I find that sort of sucker?

------------------------------

I seriously doubt if even you and your lawyer's income---never mind someone making $30 K a year---would be wanting to give your money to that sort of an owner, no matter how good a product he put on the field.

Except people make these sorts of transactions all the time. Labor's constantly getting screwed in all facets of the economy and, newsflash: no one much cares.

That may be the mother of all non sequiturs. As if what happens to someone else (a worker you've never met and who may not be from a group you're overly fond of) is comparable to what I described (skyrocketing prices of tickets that you---not someone else---have to pay, with salaries remaining the same as they were [in adjusted dollars] at the end of the reserve clause era.

-------------------------------

In the same vein, continuing to pound the tautological, "Supply and demand are what cause price increases because ... well ... prices are determined by supply and demand" doesn't really add anything insightful or original. Everybody gets the tautology.

It's not that supply and demand aren't the overriding factors, it's that demand is often determined by many sub-factors other than "the product on the field", with public perception of the integrity of the ticket price being one of them. And that perception would be exponentially different if payrolls were 3% of what they are today, in spite of what some people here apparently think is a limitless supply of public credulity.

Andy, you went off track back in post #9, defending Jack's implausible notion that if owners had somehow retained full monopoly power to set salaries, then ticket prices would be lower today. Now you've spent two days defending this mistake, even though you said yourself in #6 that it's a totally implausible counterfactual ("Miller's efforts jump-started it...but even if he hadn't existed, everything that we associate with free agency probably would have been delayed until the early 80's at the latest, and probably not even that long"). Give it up -- this is just painful to watch. (And I say this as someone whose political/economic views are 100x closer to yours than, say, Ray's.)

In a counterfactual world in which ALL entertainers -- actors, singers, writers, athletes -- continued to be vastly underpaid, like they all were in 1958, you would have a point. Entertainment prices likely would be lower, because competition among all these entertainment forms would drive prices down closer to costs. Costs can impact price, but only when there is competition among sellers.

But you are talking about a counterfactual where only baseball players, alone among entertainers, remain vastly underpaid. And your argument is -- must be -- that fans would be so offended by this inequity that they would divert their marginal entertainment dollars away from baseball and instead buy more novels, NBA tickets, movie tickets, DVDs, etc. because they knew a higher proportion of those purchases would end up in the hands of the real creative talent. I suppose it's possible, but at best this is a vaguely plausible theory, hardly a "common sense" assertion. Do you have any evidence that consumers are more willing to spend money on entertainment forms in which the creative talent gets the largest share of revenue, relative to the owners/marketers? Any evidence that consumers think about this at all? If not, then please at least acknowledge that your theory is entirely speculative and there are good reasons for others to be deeply skeptical.

In this case, I jumped straight to the rude response, without the intervening disagreement and refusal to believe.
There was no need for that.
Again, I apologize for being rude in my response.

Hey, well, thanks for responding. Honestly, if I hadn't had a high fever and a terrible toothache I probably would have just left it alone. I was in a rather terrible mood myself.

Well, if you or anyone else asserts that owners could get away with charging $200 for box seats with payrolls at 3% of what they are today, I do admit that I have a hard time believing that you're running on all cylinders. I seriously doubt if even you and your lawyer's income---never mind someone making $30 K a year---would be wanting to give your money to that sort of an owner, no matter how good a product he put on the field.

WTF? Why would any sane person give a crap?

Here's my calculus: "How much does it cost?" "What else can I do with that money?" "Are these alternatives more appealing to me than the baseball game?" At no point does the owner's choice of how to divvy the money up among himself and his employees enter into it.

WTF? Why would any sane person give a crap?

Here's my calculus: "How much does it cost?" "What else can I do with that money?" "Are these alternatives more appealing to me than the baseball game?" At no point does the owner's choice of how to divvy the money up among himself and his employees enter into it.

Well . . . sometimes it can have an impact. The NFL labor negotiations have basically ended my following of pro football for at least the next few years.

That's not so much about the percentage of revenue as it is about the naked greed and disregard for players' health and safety, though.

Here's my calculus: "How much does it cost?" "What else can I do with that money?" "Are these alternatives more appealing to me than the baseball game?" At no point does the owner's choice of how to divvy the money up among himself and his employees enter into it.

All that means is that your brand loyalty is lower than that of hundreds of thousands, likely millions, of major league baseball fans and that your financial relationship with the owners of the team is more arms-length.

Nor is your second sentence an accurate reflection of a more broadly-held principle. In the days of holdouts (**) -- which still happen, though not as much -- a player's leverage ebbed and flowed with public perception of whether his salary demands were fair and whether or not the owner was being fair in resisting them. If the fans sided with the player, they'd be more likely to not put their money in the owner's pocket. The fans plainly weighed the "owner's choice in how to divvy the money up among himself and his employees."

(**) In all sports, not just baseball.

Andy, you went off track back in post #9, defending Jack's implausible notion that if owners had somehow retained full monopoly power to set salaries, then ticket prices would be lower today. Now you've spent two days defending this mistake, even though you said yourself in #6 that it's a totally implausible counterfactual ("Miller's efforts jump-started it...but even if he hadn't existed, everything that we associate with free agency probably would have been delayed until the early 80's at the latest, and probably not even that long"). Give it up -- this is just painful to watch. (And I say this as someone whose political/economic views are 100x closer to yours than, say, Ray's.)

GuyM, here was that exchange in #9, minus only my footnoted example of ticket prices at Nats Park.

But if he didn't, we'd be paying $15 to get in to the park and beers would be $3. All that money going in players' pockets is coming from somebody, and guess who that is.

This may be the dumbest thing I've seen written on this site.

It is pretty simplistic, but it's equally absurd to think that owners could have jacked up the costs of an evening at the ballpark to the extent that they have today** without having the salary explosion as a convenient excuse.

Jack hadn't said that under these circumstances that the ticket prices would be "lower"---he was talking about $15 seats (I'm assuming he wasn't talking only about nosebleed seats) and $3 beers, which wouldn't even account for inflation. I said that was simplistic, and I still do.

And of course it's a completely insane idea all around: The idea that with reserve clause era payrolls the owners could still get Madoff era ticket prices; and the idea that while all this was going on, the players would have just come back with "Whatever you say---you're the owner!" all the way from 1975 to 2011.

In a counterfactual world in which ALL entertainers -- actors, singers, writers, athletes -- continued to be vastly underpaid, like they all were in 1958, you would have a point. Entertainment prices likely would be lower, because competition among all these entertainment forms would drive prices down closer to costs. Costs can impact price, but only when there is competition among sellers.

No argument there about the general point, but you might note that film stars in 1958 certainly weren't vastly underpaid. While Mickey Mantle was making $65,000, just one year later Cary Grant got $765,000 ($5,788,762.89 in 2011 dollars) PLUS a percentage of the gross---for one film alone (North By Northwest). In certain ways Hollywood's salary structure was a model for the A-Rods of today. And it's not as if Elvis or Francis Parkinson Keyes were exactly paupers by then, either.

But you are talking about a counterfactual where only baseball players, alone among entertainers, remain vastly underpaid. And your argument is -- must be -- that fans would be so offended by this inequity that they would divert their marginal entertainment dollars away from baseball and instead buy more novels, NBA tickets, movie tickets, DVDs, etc. because they knew a higher proportion of those purchases would end up in the hands of the real creative talent. I suppose it's possible, but at best this is a vaguely plausible theory, hardly a "common sense" assertion. Do you have any evidence that consumers are more willing to spend money on entertainment forms in which the creative talent gets the largest share of revenue, relative to the owners/marketers? Any evidence that consumers think about this at all? If not, then please at least acknowledge that your theory is entirely speculative and there are good reasons for others to be deeply skeptical.

As I said, it's an impossible scenario to begin with. But if you assume its premise for sake of argument---that baseball could stand alone with its antiquated reserve clause---then I think that the reaction would be so strong that it would be impossible on many levels to get away with the sort of ticket prices that we have today.

For one thing, do you really think that politicians would sit still while other politicians noted the absurdity of allowing tax writeoffs for luxury suites while the average player's salary couldn't even pay for one of those suites for his family? I'm not sure how those economic models being thrown about here would account for things like that, but I'm not sure whether those economic models could have predicted those steroid hearings, either.** And I would think it might be incumbent upon the "other side" to tell us just how it might see these prices upheld in the real world of such discrepancies, other than "Awk! Supply and Demand! Awk! The owners can do whatever they want, and nobody will ever notice! Awk! Polly wants a cracker!"

**Though I suppose that David's economic model would simply account for it by saying "politicians are stupid, but since we can't quantify their stupidity we can't take that into consideration".

For one thing, do you really think that politicians would sit still while other politicians noted the absurdity of allowing tax writeoffs for luxury suites while the average player's salary couldn't even pay for one of those suites for his family?

Yes. You're doing it again. I really really think that your theory is nonsensical gibberish, no matter how many different ways you phrase the same question and ask whether people "really think" it.

I'm not sure how those economic models being thrown about here would account for things like that,

They don't. We're talking about market forces, not non-market actors.

All that means is that your brand loyalty is lower than that of hundreds of thousands, likely millions, of major league baseball fans and that your financial relationship with the owners of the team is more arms-length.

It doesn't mean anything at all about my brand loyalty.

Nor is your second sentence an accurate reflection of a more broadly-held principle. In the days of holdouts (**) -- which still happen, though not as much -- a player's leverage ebbed and flowed with public perception of whether his salary demands were fair and whether or not the owner was being fair in resisting them. If the fans sided with the player, they'd be more likely to not put their money in the owner's pocket. The fans plainly weighed the "owner's choice in how to divvy the money up among himself and his employees."

I disagree strongly with this. The baseball owners have operated for years as if this were a correct analysis of the labor market; they have put all their efforts in CBA negotiations/work stoppages into making players look like greedy bad guys. And that usually worked. But it did not help the owners in negotiations in the slightest.

In any negotiation, a party's leverage is based on the objective reasonableness of his position. In other words, a player's leverage is based on whether his salary demands are commensurate with his economic value to the team, as well as whether he has any alternatives. (A holdout presumably doesn't; a free agent, of course, does.)

As I said, it's an impossible scenario to begin with. But if you assume its premise for sake of argument---that baseball could stand alone with its antiquated reserve clause---then I think that the reaction would be so strong that it would be impossible on many levels to get away with the sort of ticket prices that we have today.

If you mean the anti-trust exemption would have been ended by Congress, creating free agency, OK. But that's a political response, not a market response -- and it still means higher salaries, not lower prices. I guess it's vaguely possible Congress might have considered regulating prices in exchange for allowing the exemption to continue, but that's a bizarre and surely unsustainable solution. I just see no plausible scenario in which prices for baseball tickets remain significantly lower than they are today.

Again, the question is whether you have any evidence of any kind that sports fans' willingness to pay is influenced by the share of revenue going to the players. Unless you do, you simply have no case.

And of course it's a completely insane idea all around: The idea that with reserve clause era payrolls the owners could still get Madoff era ticket prices; and the idea that while all this was going on, the players would have just come back with "Whatever you say---you're the owner!" all the way from 1975 to 2011.

Nobody in the entire discussion has said that the players would just sit back and do nothing about this. The question under discussion has been whether ticket prices would change in an extreme low-payroll hypothetical, not whether such a situation could actually occur. It's about the behavior of the fans in isolation.

For one thing, do you really think that politicians would sit still while other politicians noted the absurdity of allowing tax writeoffs for luxury suites while the average player's salary couldn't even pay for one of those suites for his family? I'm not sure how those economic models being thrown about here would account for things like that, but I'm not sure whether those economic models could have predicted those steroid hearings, either. And I would think it might be incumbent upon the "other side" to tell us just how it might see these prices upheld in the real world of such discrepancies, other than "Awk! Supply and Demand! Awk! The owners can do whatever they want, and nobody will ever notice! Awk! Polly wants a cracker!"

There's actually a real-world example supporting this -- college basketball. Between 1975 (Bill Willoughby/Darryl Dawkins) and 1995 (KG), not a single high schooler jumped straight to the NBA and few, if any, prominent college players jumped after a year. Jordan played three years at Carolina, Magic played two years for Sparty, Bird played four years at Indiana State, Grant Hill played four years at Duke, and on and on and on.

The primary reason for that shift -- alluded to both explicitly and implicitly by the people involved -- was that, with the exploding NCAA tournament TV booty, the exploding coach's salaries, the coach's shoe contracts, the professionalization of the arenas and stadiums with luxury suites and club seating, the corporate logos on the jerseys, and the growing number of people in the stands wearing players' jerseys, the players noted the huge discrepency between what they were helping generate and what was in it for them and said, "No thanks." The elite players were happy playing for a scholarship when the other interested parties were taking a measured and tempered cut, but not when they were taking a piggish cut.

The NBA and NCAA, of course, tried artificial means to stem this tide, requiring everyone to play at least a year in college, but practically all the best players flee after a year and some, like Brandon Jennings, even do their required "college" year in Europe where they get paid. And the number of college players who make a batshit insane choice to leave school after a year or two -- guys who don't even get drafted or get drafted low in the second round -- has grown from essentially zero in the tempered, measured era to around two dozen, maybe more, in 2011.

For one thing, do you really think that politicians would sit still while other politicians noted the absurdity of allowing tax writeoffs for luxury suites while the average player's salary couldn't even pay for one of those suites for his family?

Yes. You're doing it again. I really really think that your theory is nonsensical gibberish, no matter how many different ways you phrase the same question and ask whether people "really think" it.

Any time I can afford you an opportunity to repeat your own cluelessness about the real world, I'm more than pleased to do so.

I'm not sure how those economic models being thrown about here would account for things like that,

They don't. We're talking about market forces, not non-market actors.

Yes, and if you drop a feather and an anvil in a vacuum, they'll fall at the same rate of speed, if you can seal out that nasty old oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water.

As I said, it's an impossible scenario to begin with. But if you assume its premise for sake of argument---that baseball could stand alone with its antiquated reserve clause---then I think that the reaction would be so strong that it would be impossible on many levels to get away with the sort of ticket prices that we have today.

If you mean the anti-trust exemption would have been ended by Congress, creating free agency, OK. But that's a political response, not a market response

Which would be a distinction without a difference as soon as it was enacted. Don't forget that free agency itself was enforced by court decision an arbitrator, not by any purely "market" forces.

-- and it still means higher salaries, not lower prices. I guess it's vaguely possible Congress might have considered regulating prices in exchange for allowing the exemption to continue, but that's a bizarre and surely unsustainable solution. I just see no plausible scenario in which prices for baseball tickets remain significantly lower than they are today.

Forget legislated price controls---How would today's prices hold up if Congress simply did away with the corporate tax writeoffs, or limited them to a deduction per seat so low that it completely deincentivized their purchase?

And of course it's a completely insane idea all around: The idea that with reserve clause era payrolls the owners could still get Madoff era ticket prices; and the idea that while all this was going on, the players would have just come back with "Whatever you say---you're the owner!" all the way from 1975 to 2011.

Nobody in the entire discussion has said that the players would just sit back and do nothing about this. The question under discussion has been whether ticket prices would change in an extreme low-payroll hypothetical, not whether such a situation could actually occur. It's about the behavior of the fans in isolation.

Actually what I've been discussing is whether the fans, the media, and the politicians combined would let today's prices stand. It's not as if the fans would lack for persuasive spokesmen who themselves had a fair amount of leverage, such as in whether or not to help the owners build those stadiums with luxury suites in the first place.

And if you, like David, choose to dismiss this as a "non-market" answer, then we might as well stop the conversation right here and take our feather and anvil race to outer space.

Time out for a few hours. Pile on in my absence.

And if you, like David, choose to dismiss this as a "non-market" answer, then we might as well stop the conversation right here and take our feather and anvil race to outer space.

I'm good with this idea. A space-based feather-anvil race would be awesome.

Well, if you or anyone else asserts that owners could get away with charging $200 for box seats with payrolls at 3% of what they are today, I do admit that I have a hard time believing that you're running on all cylinders. I seriously doubt if even you and your lawyer's income---never mind someone making $30 K a year---would be wanting to give your money to that sort of an owner, no matter how good a product he put on the field.

Andy, you're completely lost as to what drives consumer decisions and ticket prices.

Please do yourself a favor and quit while you're far, far behind.

They don't. We're talking about market forces, not non-market actors.

Yes, and if you drop a feather and an anvil in a vacuum, they'll fall at the same rate of speed, if you can seal out that nasty old oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water.

And your ideas might be interesting if people hadn't already studied market forces and figured out the economics of these situations.

So you're saying that bar customers wouldn't complain if the retail price at the bar went from $1.50 / $8.00 to $5.00 / $75.00 or even $200.00 while the wholesale prices remained the same? Where do I find that sort of sucker?

This is gibberish. People would complain about $200 Budweiser not because it still only costs 70 cents but because the next guy down the street is still selling it at $4.50. That is why people ##### about going to theaters or ballparks and paying their prices. It isn't because they know the "true cost" of an item but because they know the market price for an item in an open market. Almost no consumers care how much it costs to make an item. They care how much it costs to buy the item.

If something makes a beer that costs $195 to make and they sell it for $200 they will still not even come close to a fraction of fraction of the total amount of budweisers that get sold. Nobody cares that the manufacturer only makes back about 2.5% of his cost. What they are concerned about is the price of the item.

But when the local bar posts a sign saying, "Sorry we raised our prices on Bud, they raised their prices on us," and you as a customer say, "OK, that makes sense, I'll pay the extra," it's the height of tetchy lawyerliness to say, "The cost increase didn't cause the price increase, that's just an excuse."


Well, having had to deal with numerous short term and long term price hikes I can tell you that the vast majority of consumers do not say anything like that. Short term hikes are usually absorbed by the seller while long term hikes force a change in the product or in the way the product is being sold. For instance Hershey Candy Bars have shrunk over the years, Coke uses cheaper sweeteners, hidden fees, new packaging, upselling, so forth and so forth.

Here's my calculus: "How much does it cost?" "What else can I do with that money?" "Are these alternatives more appealing to me than the baseball game?" At no point does the owner's choice of how to divvy the money up among himself and his employees enter into it.

I agree with this. Even for people who would sympathize with the employees, the actual behavior of the public does not change all that much. I'll bet a lot of people have on some level, a distaste for the practices of Walmart. But the company still rakes in the business.

I did a google search on ticket prices for college basketball. While the talent level is nowhere close to the NBA, that level of the sport still competes in popularity. Tickets that cost $5 30-40 years ago now sell for hundreds of dollars. The players are not, at least officially, making any more money than they did then. And I would not be surprised if due to stronger enforcement college basketball players are making less money under the table than they were back then.

For one thing, do you really think that politicians would sit still while other politicians noted the absurdity of allowing tax writeoffs for luxury suites while the average player's salary couldn't even pay for one of those suites for his family?

I don't see why the politicians would care one bit more about this than they do about the fact that the people who physically constructed those luxury suites, the people who sell tickets to them, or the people who provide services to the occupants of said suites can't afford them.

There's actually a real-world example supporting this -- college basketball. Between 1975 (Bill Willoughby/Darryl Dawkins) and 1995 (KG), not a single high schooler jumped straight to the NBA and few, if any, prominent college players jumped after a year. Jordan played three years at Carolina, Magic played two years for Sparty, Bird played four years at Indiana State, Grant Hill played four years at Duke, and on and on and on.

The primary reason for that shift -- alluded to both explicitly and implicitly by the people involved -- was that, with the exploding NCAA tournament TV booty, the exploding coach's salaries, the coach's shoe contracts, the professionalization of the arenas and stadiums with luxury suites and club seating, the corporate logos on the jerseys, and the growing number of people in the stands wearing players' jerseys, the players noted the huge discrepency between what they were helping generate and what was in it for them and said, "No thanks." The elite players were happy playing for a scholarship when the other interested parties were taking a measured and tempered cut, but not when they were taking a piggish cut.

Assuming arguendo that this accurately reflects the thinking of athletes, that's not a "real-world example" of what Andy's talking about at all; Andy is saying that fans, not players, will react to players being underpaid relative to ticket prices. The latter is a lot more plausible.

Well, having had to deal with numerous short term and long term price hikes I can tell you that the vast majority of consumers do not say anything like that. Short term hikes are usually absorbed by the seller while long term hikes force a change in the product or in the way the product is being sold. For instance Hershey Candy Bars have shrunk over the years, Coke uses cheaper sweeteners, hidden fees, new packaging, upselling, so forth and so forth.

The market for baseball tickets isn't the market for Coke and Hershey Candy Bars. In the market for baseball tickets, the owner announces the new prices, how they compare with last year's prices, and almost always gives a reason or reason to support the pricing decision. The pricing decision, and the owner's rationale are generally covered, reported, and commented on by the media and followed by big chunks of the fan base. There's no evidence to support the idea that no consumers consider the owner' proffered rationale in making their buying decisions.

Any time an owner says, "One of the reasons I raised ticket prices was because my payroll's higher," that assertion is factually true, and a fan says "You know what, he did raise payroll, makes sense to me, I'll pay the extra cost," it's plainly obvious that the increased payroll "caused" that buyer to pay a higher price for tickets.

The only way I can see veteran player free agency contributing to the rise of ticket prices is if free agency creates more demand for people to watch baseball. This very well could be the case, while fans love to complain about these greedy players jumping teams and showing no loyalty like the good old boys who stayed with their teams forever, it very well may increase their interest in the sport. People certainly love to have something good to complain about. Maybe even to the extent that team bringing in a free agent sees a larger increase in demand than the decrease to the team losing that free agent.

A space-based feather-anvil race would be awesome.


Dave Scott beat you to it on Apollo 15.

Assuming arguendo that this accurately reflects the thinking of athletes,

It does, both logically and on the empirical evidence. Not only have players fled college, their speed in fleeing hasn't diminished with the reduced earning power incurred by players making the jump caused by (1) the NBA's rookie wage scale, which cut rookie salaries for elite players by 50%+; and (2) the NBA's max salary, which causes elite players like the ones I mentioned to make 50%+ less than they would otherwise. Orthodox economic theory doesn't come close to fully explaining what's happened with college basketball players since 1975, just as orthodox economic theory doesn't come close to explaining the major league baseball labor and consumer markets since 1975.

that's not a "real-world example" of what Andy's talking about at all; Andy is saying that fans, not players, will react to players being underpaid relative to ticket prices. The latter is a lot more plausible.


I didn't say it was an example of "what" Andy's talking about; I said it supported what Andy's talking about.

do you really think that politicians would sit still while other politicians noted the absurdity of allowing tax writeoffs for luxury suites while the average player's salary couldn't even pay for one of those suites for his family?

There are 300 luxury suites spread throughout five levels at the Cowboys new stadium, ranging in price from $100,000 to $500,000 per year

Median NFL player salary: $770,000

It's a good thing players get tickets :)

that's not a "real-world example" of what Andy's talking about at all; Andy is saying that fans, not players, will react to players being underpaid relative to ticket prices. The latter is a lot more plausible.

I didn't say it was an example of "what" Andy's talking about; I said it supported what Andy's talking about.

That players might care what they're getting paid doesn't mean that fans do.

So you're saying that bar customers wouldn't complain if the retail price at the bar went from $1.50 / $8.00 to $5.00 / $75.00 or even $200.00 while the wholesale prices remained the same? Where do I find that sort of sucker?

It's the same sucker that pays $3-4 for a cup of fountain soda. That's an insane markup; the most expensive part of the fountain soda is providing the cup. And yet people purchase soda all the time, and rarely even blink at the price.

As McCoy says, the presence of competitors selling at a much lower price is what makes people feel like they're being taken for suckers. A baseball ticket is an entirely different story; there's no competitor selling a product that is of the same quality for a lot less, and so people willingly pay what the market allows.

It may well be that the market price now represents a greater luxury than it used to be, and that it has affected the social dynamic inside the park. We could argue that this is good or bad for baseball, or for people who like baseball. But that's a different sort of argument.

Practically no consumer cares what the movie theater paid for the film it is showing, or what the restaurant pays its wait staff, or what the sneaker company pays its workers. What they care about is whether the service/product is worth their dollar. I almost never buy concessions in a movie theater because I can get the same product for a third of the price. Significant changes in income haven't affected this: when I was earning twice what I'm making now, I still didn't buy concessions in movie theaters. (Maybe I indulged my laziness a bit more often, but then I was paying for the convenience, not just the product.)

Perhaps you are very, very different from the average consumer, but think about the last time you bought a more expensive product of comparable quality because you liked the morality of the seller. I'm not talking about when people pay more for a brand name because they trust that company to provide a quality product, or when people pay extra for better service. I mean you can buy Product A or Product B, of the same quality, and you pay more for B because A runs a sweatshop.

Any time an owner says, "One of the reasons I raised ticket prices was because my payroll's higher," that assertion is factually true....

Oh man. This is the crux of the debate - you're assuming things to be true that are not true.

First off, why on earth do you think that owners sign free agents to begin with? They do it in order to increase demand. And like I said way earlier, the player's salary in this case is essentially irrelevant here to the demand created, because that demand is fueled by attaining the player in the first place, and not by paying him a high salary. Say the Cubs had traded for Pujols back in 2003, when his salary was still controlled; that would have created heavy demand also, quite probably leading to a higher-than-usual 2004 increase, all despite the low salary.

Simply put, in your case the high FA salary is a correlating factor. You are saying, Team A acquired this highly paid player, thus increasing demand. But it just so happens that the player is highly paid - it's not the cause for why people want to see him play. Players not eligible for free agency, and who are not highly paid, can still popular enough to have the same effect.

If you don't believe me, try this thought experiment. Team A gives a huge free agent contract to a player who sucks, and no one cares about seeing him play. Does the owner raise ticket prices in this case? Maybe, if he's an idiot, but would good would it do him? Without the increased demand, such a price increase would almost certainly backfire (unless he was charging too little for tickets beforehand), because people would not pay for the tickets, regardless of whether or not the owner thought the payroll increase justified the price increase.

There are 300 luxury suites spread throughout five levels at the Cowboys new stadium, ranging in price from $100,000 to $500,000 per year

It's a good thing players get tickets :)

It's a good thing that the bench players get seats right on the sideline. And the starters' perks are even better: They get to be right in the middle of the action! Well, maybe not so good when the defense breaks down and you've got Ray Lewis ready to pound you into the turf.

As McCoy says, the presence of competitors selling at a much lower price is what makes people feel like they're being taken for suckers. A baseball ticket is an entirely different story; there's no competitor selling a product that is of the same quality for a lot less, and so people willingly pay what the market allows.

Last year's ticket prices condition the baseball ticket buyer, and serve as a useful frame of reference, in much the same way that competitor's prices condition the buyer of a normal product.

The elite players were happy playing for a scholarship when the other interested parties were taking a measured and tempered cut, but not when they were taking a piggish cut.

Sorry, but I'd like to see some documentation of this. It seems more likely to me that the elite players saw the millions of dollars they could personally make and said, "screw college".

Orthodox economic theory doesn't come close to fully explaining what's happened with college basketball players since 1975, just as orthodox economic theory doesn't come close to explaining the major league baseball labor and consumer markets since 1975.

I don't know enough about the economics of basketball -- and don't care enough about the sport to inform myself -- to address the argument about players turning pro, so I will simply say that nothing you have said is unexplainable by "orthodox economic theory," nor is anything about the baseball labor or consumer markets unexplainable on that basis.

I didn't say it was an example of "what" Andy's talking about; I said it supported what Andy's talking about.

Since it's unrelated to what Andy was talking about, it does not support it.

Orthodox economic theory doesn't come close to fully explaining what's happened with college basketball players since 1975, just as orthodox economic theory doesn't come close to explaining the major league baseball labor and consumer markets since 1975.

What????

So the college players think they'd be better off leaving college. Big deal. They may or may not be right about that, but it's hardly going to force economists back to the drawing board.

I don't know enough about the economics of basketball -- and don't care enough about the sport to inform myself -- to address the argument about players turning pro, so I will simply say that nothing you have said is unexplainable by "orthodox economic theory," nor is anything about the baseball labor or consumer markets unexplainable on that basis.

Consider it a free lesson, then -- a positive externality.

College players are leaving college early because they think it is unfair that the colleges are making a lot of money? No, the players are leaving early because they believe they have either maximized their earning potential already or that their earning potential is high enough to satisfy them*.


*obviously there are other reasons like say getting kicked out or having to post bail and such.

The market for baseball tickets isn't the market for Coke and Hershey Candy Bars. In the market for baseball tickets, the owner announces the new prices, how they compare with last year's prices, and almost always gives a reason or reason to support the pricing decision. The pricing decision, and the owner's rationale are generally covered, reported, and commented on by the media and followed by big chunks of the fan base. There's no evidence to support the idea that no consumers consider the owner' proffered rationale in making their buying decisions.



I'm willing to bet a BRef sponsorship that the vast majority of tickets getting sold to baseball games are sold to people who have no real idea how much the team's payroll is or if the team has increased their costs. You really think some guy in June is thinking about some blurb in some article in some paper he doesn't even read when he goes to buy 4 seats to next week's game?

Payroll doesn't really track ticket prices all that well. You'll find plenty of examples of ticket prices rising with a decline in payroll, with payroll staying the same and you'll find payroll increasing without ticket prices increasing.

Orthodox economic theory doesn't come close to fully explaining what's happened with college basketball players since 1975,

It doesn't? The players make the rational choice that a few million dollars a year trumps somewhat higher earnings over the course of a career. How is that confounding to orthodox economic theory?

I don't get the love that most writers and some fans have for Miller or the notion that some lawyer needs to be enshrined in the HoF. He was a labor lawyer and he negotiated very well on behalf of his clients. If there is a lawyer Hall of Fame enshrine him there. If it were up to me I'd leave enshrinement to players, coaches and managers. Peripheral characters like groundskeepers, ushers, owners, writers, announcers, & lawyers could be recognized with rotating exhibits within the museum. People will respond with a comment about how we already enshrine off field personnel and that is true. However, enshrining a commissioner or a long time owner is considerably different from enshrining a lawyer who's only connection to baseball was an adversarial relationship. Some of the arguments tend to be almost along the line of "I hated Bowie Kuhn and if he is in why isn't Miller in."* I'm not here to defend Kuhn or debate his selection for the HoF. However, I will say the role and responsibilities of commissioner are much more integral to the game.

* It does seem that some of the Kuhn v. Miller sentiment stems from an anti-establishment mindset. If anybody embodied "The Man" in the 60/70 it was Bowie Kuhn. He was not exactly cool. If tasked to find a typical senior corporate lawyer type Kuhn would be pretty close to type cast for the role. Miller would come across as more of a Ralph Nader anti-establishment type which appeals to some. While never exactly cool, Nader had a following and people mostly rooted for him against companies. Before this degenerates further, let go on the record as against Nader being enshrined in the hockey Hall of Fame.

think about the last time you bought a more expensive product of comparable quality because you liked the morality of the seller

It's funny; the other night I was at the Ballpark and paid $9 for a 22-oz. cup of draft Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. This is not bad, especially when the alternatives include $6 for a 16-oz. bottle of Coors Light. I could get 72 oz. of Sierra Nevada for $6.79 at the supermarket, but of course I wasn't at the supermarket, and it's better on tap anyway, and not many places have it on tap, let alone 22 ounces of it.

Anyway, the guy pulling the beer spills a little, pulls some more, and sneers as he hands it to me: "Just wanted to make sure you got your NINE DOLLARS WORTH." Interesting, a retailer more aggrieved than the customer over the ripoff. But I didn't go back to him for my next drink, perhaps out reverse psychology. He was identifying with the oppressed, but I just wanted to enjoy my rational purchasing decision in that context, and my irrational love of beer :)

Perhaps you are very, very different from the average consumer, but think about the last time you bought a more expensive product of comparable quality because you liked the morality of the seller. I'm not talking about when people pay more for a brand name because they trust that company to provide a quality product, or when people pay extra for better service. I mean you can buy Product A or Product B, of the same quality, and you pay more for B because A runs a sweatshop.

I actually do purchase more expensive products on this basis. I try to but US made products first, then if those are not feasible, "First World" (e.g. Europe, Japan, S. Korea), then non-China "sweat shop" countries, China only as a last resort. I view China as the absolute worst in terms of human rights violations, treatment of labor, environmental policy etc.

That said, I still don't agree with Andy. No one would change their ticket buying habits if ARod "only" made $3M, and the MLB min was $50,000.

Interesting, a retailer more aggrieved than the customer over the ripoff.

Actually, probably sick of hearing every other person insist (whether he was going to do it or now) that he fill the beer up to the very top "because you're already ripping me off" or the like. People love to complain to the guy doing the rserving, because, you know, he's the one who set the prices after all.

They don't. We're talking about market forces, not non-market actors.

Yes, and if you drop a feather and an anvil in a vacuum, they'll fall at the same rate of speed, if you can seal out that nasty old oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water.

And your ideas might be interesting if people hadn't already studied market forces and figured out the economics of these situations.

What "situations" are you talking about now, dear Ray? The economics of sports teams with 40 year old payroll levels that still charge today's prices, or the economics of feather-anvil races? Would those studies be found in Human Action or in Atlas Shrugged?

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Andy is saying that fans, not players, will react to players being underpaid relative to ticket prices. The latter is a lot more plausible.

As I repeated about five hours ago, what I've been discussing is whether the fans, the media, and the politicians combined would let today's prices stand, not just "the fans" in isolation. It goes without saying that in the real world the players would have demanded and gotten free agency, but I'm talking about the impossible scenario where for whatever flukish reason they were still stuck with the reserve clause and making 3% of what they are today, while the owners were trying to charge today's ticket prices and pocketing all the extra money.

-----------------------------------

For one thing, do you really think that politicians would sit still while other politicians noted the absurdity of allowing tax writeoffs for luxury suites while the average player's salary couldn't even pay for one of those suites for his family?

I don't see why the politicians would care one bit more about this than they do about the fact that the people who physically constructed those luxury suites, the people who sell tickets to them, or the people who provide services to the occupants of said suites can't afford them.

Yeah, and I can't see why politicians would ever care about steroids in baseball, either. You shouldn't confuse "should" with "would".

Snark aside, in the reserve clause era Congress held many hearings on monopoly power in baseball, and there's no reason not to believe that Congress wouldn't do so again, and even broaden their inquest, if the owners were charging monopoly prices while paying monopoly wages.

Of course the cynic in me admits that with David's and Ray's sort of congressmen up there, there might be relatively little interest in doing anything except abolishing Social Security, Medicare and the minimum wage laws, but Congresses come and Congresses go, and all it would take would be one Congress to get the job done. And I doubt if this time the fans and the media would be sticking up for the owners. Those irrational rent seekers may not be up to speed on their Von Mises or their Little Orphan Aynie.

-----------------------------------

I'm willing to bet a BRef sponsorship that the vast majority of tickets getting sold to baseball games are sold to people who have no real idea how much the team's payroll is or if the team has increased their costs. You really think some guy in June is thinking about some blurb in some article in some paper he doesn't even read when he goes to buy 4 seats to next week's game?

But that's only because by this time the causal relationship between 8 or 9 figure payrolls and ticket prices has been so firmly established in the minds of the MSM and the average fan, that there's little need to reinforce it. It's just taken as a given, even if the causative factor is greatly exaggerated. You ask the vast majority of fans if payrolls are a big factor in those prices, and they sure aren't going to say "never thought of that".

Anyway, the guy pulling the beer spills a little, pulls some more, and sneers as he hands it to me: "Just wanted to make sure you got your NINE DOLLARS WORTH." Interesting, a retailer more aggrieved than the customer over the ripoff.

Actually, the guy trying to make sure you got a full beer at that price was not the retailer. He was operating the concession for the retailer. In most stadiums a lot of your concession stands are actually operated by volunteers raising money for various charities. I've been doing it at Bengals games for years and when you are charging someone $8 for 50 cents of beer you feel you ought to apologize. Heck, when someone buys a few beers and I'm asking for north of $30 I feel I should be holding a gun since I'm robbing folks.

As I repeated about five hours ago, what I've been discussing is whether the fans, the media, and the politicians combined would let today's prices stand, not just "the fans" in isolation. It goes without saying that in the real world the players would have demanded and gotten free agency, but I'm talking about the impossible scenario where for whatever flukish reason they were still stuck with the reserve clause and making 3% of what they are today, while the owners were trying to charge today's ticket prices and pocketing all the extra money.

Wait-

After all this debate, it's beginning to dawn on me that Andy doesn't care about economics of ticket prices or free agency or anything else in the real world. He's merely trying to argue that in his pointless, inane hypothetical - which is so ridiculous that even he acknowledges it couldn't have happened the way he's hypothesizing - things might have arbitrarily turned out differently.

See, when Andy earlier said that he wanted a "real-world test" or whatever, I naively assumed that he was arguing about things in the actual real world, and not some random fantasy rattling around his own brain. So for what it's worth, I apologize to Andy and everyone else who has been reading this, for not staying within the real terms of the debate, which are that Andy is just making up a parallel universe to argue for things that don't happen in this one.

What "situations" are you talking about now, dear Ray? The economics of sports teams with 40 year old payroll levels that still charge today's prices, or the economics of feather-anvil races? Would those studies be found in Human Action or in Atlas Shrugged?

It's pretty easy to find examples of sports that charge today's ticket prices while paying the players no more than they did 40 years ago: College basketball and football. Where are the congressional hearings for the benefits of the overcharged fans? Or the underpaid players?

This is not a debate about whether congress should get involved in something like that or not. They simply don't. The closest they get is making some noise about gas prices and oil profits now and then.

I don't get the love that most writers and some fans have for Miller or the notion that some lawyer needs to be enshrined in the HoF. He was a labor lawyer and he negotiated very well on behalf of his clients. If there is a lawyer Hall of Fame enshrine him there. If it were up to me I'd leave enshrinement to players, coaches and managers. Peripheral characters like groundskeepers, ushers, owners, writers, announcers, & lawyers could be recognized with rotating exhibits within the museum. People will respond with a comment about how we already enshrine off field personnel and that is true.

If you understand the rebuttal, then why make an argument that fails to address it?

However, enshrining a commissioner or a long time owner is considerably different from enshrining a lawyer who's only connection to baseball was an adversarial relationship.

In what way? And in what way was Miller adversarial "to baseball"? Seems like he was adversarial to the owners.

Some of the arguments tend to be almost along the line of "I hated Bowie Kuhn and if he is in why isn't Miller in."*

Some of which arguments? Who is making this statement, or is it just a strawman? Rather, I think the argument is that Bowie Kuhn was an incompetent boob who did lasting damage to the game of baseball, and if he's a fitting HOFer, then so is Marvin Miller. (Of course, if Bowie Kuhn is a fitting HOFer, then so is the whore who gave Babe Ruth syphilis; it's a pretty darn low standard. The larger point is that if everyone who sat behind a desk and made business decisions that affected the league for more than five minutes is in the HOF, how can Miller not be?)

I'm not here to defend Kuhn or debate his selection for the HoF. However, I will say the role and responsibilities of commissioner are much more integral to the game.

I will say that you're delusional. Long after people have forgotten every commissioner other than Landis (and, sad to say, maybe Selig), people will remember the contributions of Marvin Miller and his effect on the game.

But that's only because by this time the causal relationship between 8 or 9 figure payrolls and ticket prices has been so firmly established in the minds of the MSM and the average fan, that there's little need to reinforce it. It's just taken as a given, even if the causative factor is greatly exaggerated. You ask the vast majority of fans if payrolls are a big factor in those prices, and they sure aren't going to say "never thought of that".

And again none of that comes into play on a June summer day when some random guy wants to go see a ballgame. You think people are paying to see the Washington Nationals because their payroll is high enough to justify paying for the ticket?

The Pirates slashed their payroll by almost a third last year and yet they did not slash their ticket prices. Despite that they still had more people come to the game than they did the year before or the year before that. Where were these consumers who did not purchase tickets because of the low payroll? Apparently enough people didn't give a damn about the payroll to make it a moot point.

I actually do purchase more expensive products on this basis. I try to but US made products first, then if those are not feasible, "First World" (e.g. Europe, Japan, S. Korea), then non-China "sweat shop" countries, China only as a last resort. I view China as the absolute worst in terms of human rights violations, treatment of labor, environmental policy etc.

I do the same thing, and so do all of my friends. It's not uncommon, but of course it gets more and more difficult to do.

Now how about services?

It's pretty easy to find examples of sports that charge today's ticket prices while paying the players no more than they did 40 years ago: College basketball and football. Where are the congressional hearings for the benefits of the overcharged fans? Or the underpaid players?

College sports don't charge "today's ticket prices."(**) Their prices aren't as high as professional prices, and wide swaths of good to premium seats are set aside for student use only at practically every stadium/arena, generally at heavily subsidized prices.

(**) In 1981, before the school tightened up on use of student section seats by non-students, I scalped my Michigan-Notre Dame seat for $65. The face value of a Michigan/Notre Dame ticket 30 years later, is $85. And that's for the first night game in Michigan Stadium history.

The Washington Nationals routinely have one of the highest ticket prices in the majors and yet routinely spend in the bottom third of the majors. Last year was more of the same. Stephen Strasburg gets called up and suddenly tickets to the games where he is the starter start to move. Why? Adding Stephen Strasburg to the major league roster didn't actually increase the club's cost a single penny. Why were all these people who think that the Nationals are not spending enough on payroll to justify buying a ticket suddenly buying a ticket despite no increase in payroll?


People do not blindly except raw dollars as the mark of quality in baseball. This easily provable by simply tracking attendance and payroll. What you are doing is trying to use payroll totals as a proxy for quality and as we all know that simply isn't a reliable indicator. People will come out to watch quality regardless of how much it cost the team to produce it.

Were people not going to Cardinals' games back in 2002 or so because Albert Pujols was making the minimum?

I think payroll has to have played some role in low Oakland and Tampa attendance when those teams were winning. People had a perception that they shouldn't get emotionally invested in the team, because ownership was cheap and the team wouldn't stay as good as it was then. That must especially have played a role in Oakland, which has a large market to draw from.

Conversely, in St. Louis, fans always come out, even in down seasons and even though it's a relatively small market, because ownership spends enough that the fans expect things to get better.

It's no coincidence that, of the best teams of the past decade, the ones with: (1) relatively low current payroll; (2) relatively low expected prospective payroll; and (3) no mallpark, had by far the worst attendance.

Fans stayed away from the Rays because the Rays had been bad and inept for a long time thus not creating a fan base to actually get excited about a winning team. The Cardinals have been a well run club for decades and decades creating a large fan base that loves the product. The fans don't go to games because they think the owners will spend enough to win they go to games because ownership is good enough to put a good product out on the field consistently.

For the most part payroll discussions are for the diehard dorks like us. Nobody else really cares about the payroll of a team.

#245 Being a fan of the CFL I've had the chance to see what happens when management bucks the demand curve.

I have no problem believing clains of financial distress. There have been subtle clues (like teams folding -- or before that, teams selling for a dollar plus assumption of debts, or charters refusing to take off without a certified check, or creditors seizing team uniforms or ...)

Any the local team tried some simple logic one year. We lost X dollars, we drew Y fans so lets raise prices by X/Y. I'll leave you to guess how it worked out. Free clue though -- the team is no longer in business.

#239 As I believe I said before, I've found fairly convincing evidence that this is the case.

Basically (as I know I've said zillions of times) perception of team quality is broadly speaking twice as important as actual team quality in explaining marginal revenue.

And the factors that explain that perception are broadly (in rough order of importance)

Did you win the World series last year
What is the opening day payroll (and it probably matters how much that's changed since the previous year, but I haven't figured out how to model this aspect)
Did you make the World Series last year
Did you win the World Series recently (and if so, is the core of the team intact)
Did you make the playoffs last year
(gap)
What was your record last year

Note that there are probably other factors, but if it matters that you won your first round playoff series, or just missed out on the playoffs for instance, it doesn't seem to matter a lot. Nor does it seem to matter whether you made the playoffs by winning the division or via the wildcard.

It's no coincidence that, of the best teams of the past decade, the ones with: (1) relatively low current payroll; (2) relatively low expected prospective payroll; and (3) no mallpark, had by far the worst attendance.

Yep if only Oakland had spent like the Yankees they would have well over 3 million fans at the game each year. You mean to say that teams that consistently win year in and year out with big name stars draw better than teams that occasionally win with average players? I'm not seeing that as a nail in the coffin.

At the top you have the Red Sox and the Yankees. Do you really believe that people are shelling out big bucks to see them play because of the payroll? Or is it because they have good to great players, are storied franchises, play in a huge market, and win a lot of games?

Well, if you or anyone else asserts that owners could get away with charging $200 for box seats with payrolls at 3% of what they are today

Absolutely. Want some proof that goes beyond a mere assertion?

Chicago Fire of Major League Soccer: Fieldside tickets are $225.

Chicago Fire payroll: $4,794,742.

That is 3.79% of the Chicago Cubs payroll of $126,380,663.

Well, that isn't 3% now is it? Find me 3% and then we'll talk.

As I repeated about five hours ago, what I've been discussing is whether the fans, the media, and the politicians combined would let today's prices stand, not just "the fans" in isolation. It goes without saying that in the real world the players would have demanded and gotten free agency, but I'm talking about the impossible scenario where for whatever flukish reason they were still stuck with the reserve clause and making 3% of what they are today, while the owners were trying to charge today's ticket prices and pocketing all the extra money.

It's not clear to me why you think fans care what players make in this respect. Fans care about work stoppages, not player salaries as a percentage of revenue. Fans are always, by and large, on the side of management in labor disputes. If anything, fans think the less the greedy players make, the better.

(And since fans don't care, politicians don't, either.)

Wait-

After all this debate, it's beginning to dawn on me that Andy doesn't care about economics of ticket prices or free agency or anything else in the real world. He's merely trying to argue that in his pointless, inane hypothetical - which is so ridiculous that even he acknowledges it couldn't have happened the way he's hypothesizing - things might have arbitrarily turned out differently.

See, when Andy earlier said that he wanted a "real-world test" or whatever, I naively assumed that he was arguing about things in the actual real world, and not some random fantasy rattling around his own brain. So for what it's worth, I apologize to Andy and everyone else who has been reading this, for not staying within the real terms of the debate, which are that Andy is just making up a parallel universe to argue for things that don't happen in this one.

It's taken you this long to figure out that there aren't any comparable real world tests for the hypothetical I've been talking about? The entire point I've been driving at is that this hypothetical situation---2011 baseball ticket prices with 1975 CPI adjusted payrolls---could never possibly exist! You're the one who's been imagining such a scenario, not me.

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It's pretty easy to find examples of sports that charge today's ticket prices while paying the players no more than they did 40 years ago: College basketball and football. Where are the congressional hearings for the benefits of the overcharged fans? Or the underpaid players?

As has been noted many times before, the pricing dynamic of college sports has by definition nothing to do with professional sports, since the players aren't paid and never have been, and everyone takes that as a given. Pricing in college sports is justified by other factors: Coaches' salaries; recruiting expenses; scholarships; money for the school in general; new stadiums; etc. College player "payroll" is a non-issue for anyone other than critics like Zirin and a bunch of agent wannabees. It's a completely different world.

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Well, if you or anyone else asserts that owners could get away with charging $200 for box seats with payrolls at 3% of what they are today

Absolutely. Want some proof that goes beyond a mere assertion?

Chicago Fire of Major League Soccer: Fieldside tickets are $225.

Chicago Fire payroll: $4,794,742.

That is 3.79% of the Chicago Cubs payroll of $126,380,663.

I'm not sure where on the field those Fieldside tickets are, because the color code doesn't seem to correspond to any actual sections. The midfield tickets on both sides are $70, which are the equivalent of the best seats in a baseball ballpark. You're also talking about a 30 game schedule, which puts individual games at a premium.

But beyond that, this is just another apples / oranges comparison. Total payrolls are often low as the league is still trying to get the attention of the largely oblivious American public, but a great part of the attraction of that stupid sport (/ducks) is the presence of premium import players like Beckham, whose five year contract is over $32 M, and who can "afford" to play at that paltry sum because of his extra $200 M endorsement money. You can dig up all the niche sports and amateur sports and rock musicians you want, but none of them have anything to do with the only four professional sports (if you include hockey) that the U.S. public gives a rat's patooie about for more than a week or two at a time. And in all of those cases, payrolls---and especially the superstar individual salaries---are used to justify IN PART those ticket prices.

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It's not clear to me why you think fans care what players make in this respect. Fans care about work stoppages, not player salaries as a percentage of revenue. Fans are always, by and large, on the side of management in labor disputes. If anything, fans think the less the greedy players make, the better.

Of course that's exactly why owners so often related their ticket prices to payroll. It's an argument that finds plenty of resonance with fans and with writers who will accept any statement about "greedy players".

(And since fans don't care, politicians don't, either.)

Well, according to your other favorite book of cliches, fans never cared about steroids, either. So where did that pair of steroids hearings come from? Were they conducted at gunpoint?

You have an unprovable assertion that the only way it can be rock solid is if we stick our heads in the sand and ignore evidence that doesn't perfectly line up with your unprovable assertion.

I'll give you birds credit for one thing: You're making me do more digging than I really had wanted to, which of course may be the best benefit of the whole BTF enterprise. And it leads to some serendipitous discoveries.

Here's one rather fascinating webpage I found while digging into the world of soccer:
Fan Demographics Among Major North American Sports Leagues

The whole page is worth reading, but what really stands out is the divisions of the fan demographics among the six sports that they surveyed. Here are the percentages of fans of the six major sports with household incomes of over $75,000 / $25,000 and under. It's pretty obvious that while there are differences among them, all major U.S. sports are catering more and more to the uppermost demographics.

NBA: 47.3% / 8.7%

MLS: 43.9% / 11.3%

MLB: 42.5% / 10.7%

NFL: 41.2% / 11.5%

NHL: 41.2% / 11.0%

NASCAR: 35.9% / 12.6%

Total U.S.: 26.6% / 28.2%

I should note that by "fans" it appears to be referring to those professing their fandom, and not those necessarily attending the events. That said, maybe the most interesting number on the webpage is this: Of the six sports surveyed, the one with the lowest percentage of its fan base made up of African American fans, and the highest percentage of white fans is----the NBA. The sport with by far the highest percentage of African American fans is the NFL.

And hey, is Russell Martin a Clutch God, or what?

Basically (as I know I've said zillions of times) perception of team quality is broadly speaking twice as important as actual team quality in explaining marginal revenue.

I'm curious as to the details of how this conclusion was reached, because team payroll seems like a dicey variable to use in predicting marginal revenues - mightn't teams adjust their payrolls based on the amount of revenue they expect to take in?

It's pretty obvious that while there are differences among them, all major U.S. sports are catering more and more to the uppermost demographics.

It's also pretty obvious that the chart you're referencing is f'ed up and all your numbers are wrong. Handy tip: never trust a chart that tells you that the NHL has more black fans than the NBA.

It's pretty obvious that while there are differences among them, all major U.S. sports are catering more and more to the uppermost demographics.

It's also pretty obvious that the chart you're referencing is f'ed up and all your numbers are wrong. Handy tip: never trust a chart that tells you that the NHL has more black fans than the NBA.

That's possible, but it's also possible that the NHL attracts more black fans than we might imagine, especially since this survey wasn't about game attendance. I do know that whenever the talk on our local sports radio (WTEM) gets around to hockey, it's obvious that both of the black co-hosts (John Thompson and Doc Walker) are big hockey fans, and that a fair percentage of their black callers share their interest. It surprised the hell out of me when I started hearing this, too.

And remember that in the case of those NHL-NBA comparisons, there's also the possibility that the overall numbers for hockey are so relatively low, that even a margin of error statistical blip would have reversed the order. The one non-surprise in the African American numbers is the enormous popularity of the NFL compared to the other sports.

Anyway, as far as the ethic breakdown goes, I'd mentioned it only as a curiosity. The poll was conducted by Rasmussen, which whatever you might think about their alleged political bias is still a fairly reputable company. And the poll's numbers relating to income breakdown would only surprise Rip Van Winkle, even if some of you clueless wonders seem to imagine that the affordability of a sport has nothing to do with its overall popularity.

And since I'm sure that that last sentence will be misinterpreted as my saying that "the affordability of a sport is the only factor in a sport's popularity", please read it twice before responding. In spite of the wish of the lawyers to make it that way, life can't be reduced to a series of simplistic Yes / No, Either / Or choices.

over $75,000 / $25,000 and under

Well, if your HH income is under $25,000, you probably shouldn't be wasting money on an over-priced luxury like professional sports tickets (unless you're retired and living off savings), when you can see every game on TV for a pittance, and minor league ball is much, much cheaper.

That's possible, but it's also possible that the NHL attracts more black fans than we might imagine, especially since this survey wasn't about game attendance.

What I'm saying is that you misread the chart. If you read the intro paragraph, you'll see that you've identified the columns incorrectly.

I don't blame you, really, since the article doesn't label the columns, making for a very confusing chart, but ... well, some of us are more naturally cautious than others with counterintuitive assertions, I guess. Sort of sums this thread up in a nutshell.

Brian,

I'm assuming that the order of the columns is the same as the order in which the sports were listed in the introduction, which was MLB, MLS, NASCAR, the NFL, NHL and NBA. If that's not the case, where does it say otherwise?

And the last two columns in the Race/Ethnicity box, Black/African American row read 11.7% and 8.5% respectively. How does that not correspond to the NHL and the NBA?

EDIT: On further review, I think the problem isn't with either of us, but with the page itself. If you look at this sentence....

The data, gathered during a year-long period ending in September '09, also shows that MLS is the only major league with fans ages 18-34 as the largest portion of its base (37.8%).

you'll see that the number corresponds to the number in the chart, as labeled. So far, so good. But if you look at the following sentence....

NHL fans spend more time on the Internet than fans of other major leagues, with 14.9% spending 20+ hours on the Web per week.

the number matches the one in last column, which according to the order listed in the introduction, should be the NBA.

So either that sentence is wrong, or the last two columns were accidentally transposed and mislabeled. It has to be one or the other.

Personally, I'd go with the last explanation, and I suspect you'd agree. I'm willing to believe plenty of counterintuitive numbers when the differences are relatively minor, but the NHL / NBA comparisons seem more intuitively correct if the two row labels are reversed.

I don't blame you, really, since the article doesn't label the columns, making for a very confusing chart, but ... well, some of us are more naturally cautious than others with counterintuitive assertions, I guess. Sort of sums this thread up in a nutshell.

It doesn't strike me as counterintuitive at all. The NBA has a whiter fan base than intuition might suggest, because it has a lot of white fans for whom the frisson of liking a "black" sport is appealing in itself. And the NHL has a lot of black fans who fly under the media radar because, for whatever reason, the media don't see a "story" there.

Moreover, the NBA's popularity is suffering a precipitous drop, suggesting that its fanbase and appeal are in significant demographic flux. Pro basketball was a fairly solid third in American's "most favorite" sport polls for the 10+ years through 2003 (**), fell sharply in 2004 (**) (counterintuitively, as that was the year LBJ and Dwayne Wade entered the league); and has continued to plummet through 2010.(**) In 2010, pro basketball's advantage over hockey as the favorite sport of Americans was a mere one percent -- 6 to 5. In 2002, the spread between the sports was 8 points; in 1998, it was 10. Hockey has slowly and surely, with little fanfare, substantially grown in appeal; pro basketball has, quite quickly, substantially diminished in appeal.(***)

Interesting demographic extremes in the 2010 poll: Forty-five percent of African-Americans picked pro football as their favorite sport, the most of any group. Six percent of African-Americans picked baseball as their favorite sport; the least of any group. NASCAR is the favorite sport of essentially no African-Americans. I've unfortunately relegated myself to an area where my favorite sport has little appeal; a mere four percent of "Easterners" picked college football. They're missing a great party.

(**) To the question, "If you had to choose, which ONE of these sports would you say is your favorite?

2003: Pro Football 29; Baseball 13; Men's Pro Basketball 10; College Football/Auto Racing 9
2004: Pro Football 30; Baseball 15; College Football 11; Men's Pro Basketball/Auto Racing 7
2010: Pro Football 31; Baseball 17; College Football 12; Auto Racing 7; Men's Pro Basketball 6.

(All numbers from Harris Interactive, easily obtainable through Google.)

(***) As, for that matter has college basketball, plummeting from America's third favorite sport in 1989 at 10% to its seventh most popular at 4% in 2010.

Personally, I'd go with the last explanation, and I suspect you'd agree. I'm willing to believe plenty of counterintuitive numbers when the differences are relatively minor, but the NHL / NBA comparisons seem more intuitively correct if the two row labels are reversed.

That's a Bingo!

Which makes the chart basically worthless, by the way. We can infer from the clues given that the second column is MLS and the last one is the NHL, but other than that, who knows. And given the haphazard presentation of the data, I'm not even sure how much I'd trust the writers of the introduction to have gotten it right.

Not that I understand what point you were making anyway. You go from saying that the numbers "really stand out" originally to calling them "relatively minor" differences in your last comment, and of course "the most interesting number" you got turns out to be wrong. Oh well.

It doesn't strike me as counterintuitive at all.

And yet, it would appear that my intuition was absolutely right; the numbers seemed suspicious, I double-checked them, and they turned out to be wrong.

The NBA has a whiter fan base than intuition might suggest, because it has a lot of white fans for whom the frisson of liking a "black" sport is appealing in itself.

Whatever.

By the way, here is the Harris survey that SBB was referring to but was too lazy to link.

Allow me to translate the Methodology section at the bottom into layman's terms:

This poll is pretty much crap. Please do not take this poll seriously. You know how TV psychics always have a "For Entertainment Purposes Only" disclaimer at the bottom of the screen? It's kind of like that.

Which makes the chart basically worthless, by the way. We can infer from the clues given that the second column is MLS and the last one is the NHL, but other than that, who knows. And given the haphazard presentation of the data, I'm not even sure how much I'd trust the writers of the introduction to have gotten it right.

Not that I understand what point you were making anyway. You go from saying that the numbers "really stand out" originally to calling them "relatively minor" differences in your last comment, and of course "the most interesting number" you got turns out to be wrong. Oh well.

I said that the racial numbers really stand out because they were so counterintuitive, not because they were all that far apart. Same thing with the "interesting" comment. I specifically said that I mentioned them "only as a curiosity".

And my "overall point" was about the household income demographics of the fan base in all major sports, not the ethnic breakdowns for any particular league. You can transpose the rows randomly and that point would barely change at all.

What does your "overall point" have to do with payroll and the price of a ticket?

Only that it shows the way that big time sports have been gearing their product more and more away from the non-upper income fan. The rest of it we've already been through 103 times and you can believe whatever you wish about the ability of baseball owners to have raised their ticket prices from 1975 to 2011 levels while still maintaining their 1975 level payrolls.

What does your "overall point" have to do with payroll and the price of a ticket?

It's part of his plan to point out all the reasons other than payroll that have caused ticket prices to rise, so that he can pretend that none of this would have ever happened if the reserve clause was still in place.

Or something. I don't get it either. Maybe he thinks that striking down the reserve clause caused demographic changes in wider society? Hard to say at this point.

What does your "overall point" have to do with payroll and the price of a ticket?

It's part of his plan to point out all the reasons other than payroll that have caused ticket prices to rise, so that he can pretend that none of this would have ever happened if the reserve clause was still in place.

I have no idea why you seem compelled to reduce every complex question to one simpleminded answer, but that's your privilege. And of course I'm no more a fan of the reserve clause than you or Marvin Miller, who AFAIC should have been in the HoF long ago, for reasons I've advanced long before your arrival on the BTF scene.

Or something. I don't get it either. Maybe he thinks that striking down the reserve clause caused demographic changes in wider society? Hard to say at this point.

It certainly did help trigger many changes in the world of sport, some for the better and some for the worse, but there's a difference between being one catalyst among many and being a deus ex machina that explains everything that follows. Someday you might begin to understand that arguing for the former is not the same thing as insisting upon the latter, but so far this distinction seems to have escaped you.

I'll give you credit for being reasonably skilled as a sophist, Andy. It certainly takes a lot of effort to keep up with your various tricks, and the way you resort to ad hominems (e.g., the little dig about how long I've been "on the BTF scene") can be downright subtle at times.

I will point out that it was you who originally presented the repeal of the reserve clause as a deus ex machina (in the sense that you mean the term, I suppose), claiming that the world would never stand for high ticket prices if it hadn't happened. That you have proceeded to simultaneously back away from this assertion (e.g., your "catalyst" wording above) while repeatedly reiterating it doesn't change the fact that you're chalking up current conditions as directly caused by a single act that happened long ago.

(And by the way, whether you see it as the whole cause or single cause among many or whatever is beside the point - you're still attempting to argue for direct, "if A then B" causation. That you may see other effects doesn't change your assertion in any fundamental way.)

Only that it shows the way that big time sports have been gearing their product more and more away from the non-upper income fan.

"More and more" indicates a changing trend. The data posted (combined with percentages of families in the various income brackets) shows higher income families are more likely to be sports fans than lower income fans. But we don't know if this is any different than it was in 1975 (other than the obvious fact that all the income brackets would have been lower).

Marketing to people who have money instead of those who don't - not exactly a revolutionary business concept.

if Bowie Kuhn is a fitting HOFer, then so is the whore who gave Babe Ruth syphilis

This was plagiarized straight from Kuhn's Cooperstown plaque, wasn't it?

I'll give you credit for being reasonably skilled as a sophist, Andy. It certainly takes a lot of effort to keep up with your various tricks, and the way you resort to ad hominems (e.g., the little dig about how long I've been "on the BTF scene") can be downright subtle at times.

It wasn't a dig at all, only a wish not to have to prove to you that I'm neither a fan of the reserve clause nor an opponent of Marvin Miller. We had plenty of Miller threads before you came along, and I was simply acknowledging that you might not have seen them.

I will point out that it was you who originally presented the repeal of the reserve clause as a deus ex machina (in the sense that you mean the term, I suppose), claiming that the world would never stand for high ticket prices if it hadn't happened. That you have proceeded to simultaneously back away from this assertion (e.g., your "catalyst" wording above) while repeatedly reiterating it doesn't change the fact that you're chalking up current conditions as directly caused by a single act that happened long ago.

Actually all I've ever claimed is that payrolls were one cause of increased ticket prices, more perceived than actual, and that 2011 ticket prices couldn't exist with 1975 payroll levels, for reasons I've spelled out many times by now and you've contested with equal persistence. The deus ex machina line simply referred to the thought that payrolls alone aren't the cause of ticket price increases. With the reserve clause still in place, I'm sure CPI adjusted ticket prices would have risen, perhaps at a considerably higher rate than they did before 1975 (as payrolls might have as well), but I can't imagine that they'd be what they are today. And as we've both agreed, the idea that the reserve clause could have ever survived another 36 years is little but an owner's wet dream to begin with.

(And by the way, whether you see it as the whole cause or single cause among many or whatever is beside the point - you're still attempting to argue for direct, "if A then B" causation. That you may see other effects doesn't change your assertion in any fundamental way.)

Once an owner signs a player to a ballbreaking contract, it's not unnatural that he would look for ways to pay for it, increasing ticket prices among them. I might even do so myself. This doesn't mean that without such contracts he'd hold the line, but he'd have less direct financial necessity to do so.

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Only that it shows the way that big time sports have been gearing their product more and more away from the non-upper income fan.

"More and more" indicates a changing trend. The data posted (combined with percentages of families in the various income brackets) shows higher income families are more likely to be sports fans than lower income fans. But we don't know if this is any different than it was in 1975 (other than the obvious fact that all the income brackets would have been lower).

Marketing to people who have money instead of those who don't - not exactly a revolutionary business concept.

Sure, but there's a point where the targeting becomes insanely focused on only a microscopic percentage of the population. The targeted marketing of luxury suites and other premium seats alone, which didn't exist before the 70's and didn't take off in full until the late 80's and 90's, would seem to most people to be more than enough evidence to answer that particular point. And when your best seats jump in price from a CPI adjusted 18 bucks ($4.00 then) in 1974 to $325 today**, it doesn't take the proverbial rocket scientist to figure out what's going on.

**This is the Yankees, and it doesn't count the luxury suites, which are priced even higher. And the Yankees are pikers compared to the Knicks, whose courtside seats in the same era have gone from an inflation-adusted $46.90 ($10.50 then) to a mere $3,000.00 to $3,600.00 today.

Once an owner signs a player to a ballbreaking contract, it's not unnatural that he would look for ways to pay for it, increasing ticket prices among them.

Which begs the question: what kind of idiot f##king owner would sign a player to a contract that he can't pay for? Perhaps you've missed the last 20 years of Royals history (and Pirates, and A's, and Brewers during the Selig era, etc.) who have whined and complained that they can't sign free agents - or even keep their own guys - because they can't afford the big contracts? It's like the plight of the small market team has just escaped your notice. Remember Selig's "hope and faith?" It was a thing back in the day.

REVENUES COME FIRST. THEN BIG CONTRACTS. IT'S NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. If I could get you to understand this amazingly obvious point, all the time spent arguing with you will not have been in vain. Look at how the Brewers' payroll has increased the last few years - notice how that happened AFTER attendance started climbing? They didn't try to raise attendance by raising payroll first, because THAT'S COMPLETELY F##KING DUMB.