The Twins' "Budget"

1) They saved $1.5M trading Delmon Young and Jim Thome. If this was truly an issue they should have had the damned fire sale. Why in the world did they stretch their budget to lose 99 games?! This would be a good reason to fire Bill Smith.

Obviously, they didn’t know at the beginning of the season that they were going to lose 99 games, or they wouldn’t have stretched payroll. They considered a fire sale (although really, their only tradeable assets were Cuddyer and Kubel, maybe $7M worth of contract between the two of them) but were within five games of first place at the trade deadline and decided against it.

2) We have heard for years that major league payroll and the draft come out of separate budgets. The draft just got cheaper – all players have to sign for slot.

Players don’t have to sign for slot – instead, the team is given a cap on the total they can spend based on their draft picks’ positions, so they can go over slot for a few players as long as they’re able to under slot for some others.

Anyway, whether they come out of separate budgets is irrelevant from an overall team finance perspective – it’s still money that the franchise has to spend. If you have to pay $2000 to fix your car, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t reconsider buying a big-screen TV just because “it comes out of a separate budget”.

3) Attendance was down by 55,000 people. That’s not enough to explain a $15M drop in payroll, especially when season ticket renewals are flat.

Like cmathewson said below, they’re anticipating that ticket revenue will be down overall next year because the team was bad (and might not be all that great this year). They didn’t see attendance drop off last year until it was established that the team sucked, but the dropoff will be much quicker this year if they are bad again.

All that said, there is a pretty good counterpoint to all these, which is “If payroll is half of revenue, then a $100M payroll implies that revenue is still $40M more than when the payroll was $80M, so you can spare an extra million bucks for freaking Michael Wuertz, who is from Minnesota for crying out loud.”

This was their lineup in August:

Revere
Tolbert
Cuddyer (injured)
Valencia
Tosoni
Hughes
Plouffe
Nishioka
Butera

That’s a AAA lineup. Also, the only healthy starter was Pavano.

My POINT is, they will have a .500 club with what they have on the roster right now. And, fans will come back. But they can’t plan on fans coming back and filling Target Field until they see a .500 club for a couple of months. Until then, they need to stay within their revenues. Twins fans are fickle. This very post is exhibit A.

Do sports stadiums increase a city’s economic growth as much as education, energy, water, roads, etc? Studies I’ve read indicate that they don’t — that, in fact, they don’t increase growth at all. And since those other expenditures you mentioned are proven to make a real difference, and there’s only so much money to be spent, then building stadiums has to be at the bottom of the priority list.

That doesn’t mean you can’t build them. Just that it has to be seen as a pure luxury purchase, once the other more valuable infrastructure needs are met. If the budget’s tight, you shouldn’t be skimping on important things for stadiums, IMO. Others may disagree and place sports above schools, which is their prerogative.

But the claims regularly made by sports teams seeking new buildings are almost all false. They DO (as the original post is mad about) generally end up keeping the extra profits more than they spend on players (after the first six-eight years or so) or reinvesting locally. Stadiums DON’T benefit the local economy as much as schools and roads. But teams keep saying stadiums will mean better teams and local growth. It’s just not a valid argument. Saying “give us cash, we’ll keep it, and it’ll be worth it because you enjoy the sport so much” would be more honest. In fact, it’s been suggested that cities would be better off if they just gave team owners their expected increase in profits and stopped building stadiums — then at least they could put the remainder of the stadium’s cost into something more productive.

Do i enjoy baseball? Sure. Now that Target Field’s been built, will I watch the Twins in it? As long as I enjoy baseball, sure (but more from home than at the ballpark since ticket prices are higher.) But if you’d handed a ballot to me and said “keep the Twins, or help kids get an education” I’d have lived with the team leaving. That’s my stance, others have theirs.

Your angry response is more intelligent than my angry responses usually are!