Baseball blogs

When I started this blog, I had the idea in my head that it would to some extent deal with issues about baseball. But eventually it just dampened down to a left-wing news oriented blog with very little baseball involved at all. But not to worry, Doug Pappas the genius of baseball economics has a blog that's worth a read for any baseball fan. Particularly interesting is this post on the evil, EVIL practices of the Tribune Company, who own the Cubs (and apologies for inserting an entire post here, I justify it because the point is to introduce Pappas' blog):

Want to buy front-row seats for the Yankees' visit to Wrigley Field this summer? A $45 ticket will cost you $1,500 from "Wrigley Field Premium Ticket Services." If the bleachers are good enough, WFPTS will sell you a $30 ticket for $155.

WFPTS sits a block from Wrigley Field, on land owned by the Tribune Company. Its President, Mark McGuire, is also a Vice President of the Cubs. Its books are handled by the Cubs' accounting department. It sells tickets which the Cubs have never made available to the general public. According to McGuire's deposition in a lawsuit brought by fans challenging the practice, these are "VIP tickets" which would otherwise not be available to the public at all. Yet a WFPTS spokesman insists, "We're not related to the Cubs ticket office."

Of course not. Illinois law requires the Cubs to sell their tickets at their stated face value. The Tribune Company thinks it can avoid this law by establishing WFPTS as a separate corporation, selling many of the club's most popular tickets to this corporation at face value without ever offering them to the public, then allowing WFPTS to resell them at scalper's prices. A more contemptible treatment of the Cubs' die-hard fans, the ones who stand in line for hours during a freezing Chicago winter to obtain single-game seats as soon as they go on sale, is hard to imagine.

And MLB has every reason to crack down on this practice, too. Like the Cubs' "negotiations" for TV and radio rights with commonly-owned WGN, this related-party transaction allows the club to move revenue off the team's books, where it would be subject to MLB's revenue-sharing formula, into another of the Tribune Company's pockets. If MLB is serious about reducing the financial disparity between clubs, increasing the portion of shared revenues isn't enough. The next step must be greater auditing of club books to ensure that all money properly attributable to baseball operations is shared.