Quote:
Originally Posted by kstater
There's a big ****ing difference between Kauffman owning the team in the 80s and the billion dollar plus(and equity in the station) tv contract of the 2010' s Cardinals
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Also remember that Kauffman knowingly and intentionally overspent. It wasn't that he couldn't have made money, it's that he didn't on purpose. He knew full well the Royals didn't have the financial wherewithal of the power players in the league at the time but he didn't care.
Didn't the Royals have the highest payroll in the league for a period? My memory is that he took serious heat in the early 90s from owners groups for driving salary inflation.
But ultimately, as has been noted, DVRs driving the value of live events through the roof and the creation of revenue sharing has changed EVERYTHING. 20 years ago teams were at least breaking even. Every couple of years you'd hear about a team that was struggling but there were never any risks of a team outright folding.
Over the subsequent 20 years, MLB revenue has increased
significantly faster than the share distributed to players. Things have tilted substantially towards the owners. So how can a system that was no worse than break even for the owners 2 decades ago be 'not all that profitable' when the succeeding 20 years have been nothing but favorable for the owners? Made readily apparent by the exponential increase in franchise value over that period of time.
Nothing Dewitt said there stands up to even a reasonable amount of scrutiny.