L K said:
That's fair, although as a fan my interest in the Rogers pocket books is negligible. I understand that teams are going to have budgets but I'm not going to be happy about a team that does things like underselling their broadcast rights to themselves and then claims a lack of revenue to spend on the team. I'm also not impressed that we are hearing more of the "if the fans come then we will spend more, when the fans showed up down the stretch, bumped revenue by quite a bit and conveniently it's all going to go into the dollar loss.
I think one of the big misconceptions about what I've been saying about this issue is that I'm saying people should have personal interest in Rogers' bottom line. I'm not and I have all manner of personal and political issues with the Cable/Telecom industry in this country so people can "hate" Rogers all they want in my book.
What I've tried to argue is, I think, a few key points
1. Whether we like it or not, what Rogers spends on the team is tied to their revenues from the team.
2. It's not overly reasonable to get upset over #1 because it's true of basically every professional sports team in the world.
3. Rogers is, I think we can mostly agree, good at making money and probably know their business better than we do and if increasing the payroll significantly would end up being profitable, they'd probably do it.
4. In any case, none of this is Shapiro's fault. The Jays were going in this direction anyway.
As to the specifics of Rogers' decision this off-season I have something of a theory. I think we can all agree that whatever we might think about the team's profitability this year, we can all probably agree that the team didn't do terrifically well last year or the year before despite payrolls of 136m and 124m. By how much we don't know.
So let me just throw this idea out there, what if the increased revenues of this season basically told Rogers that even in a season like last year where virtually everything goes right, a 120-130 million dollar payroll is sort of the range they need to keep things in for it to still be profitable. After all, it's not super realistic to think that whatever revenue growth they had this year is going to be exponential(there are only so many seats in the stadium/TV sets in the country).
At that point, I guess each fan has to ask themselves if that 120-130 million dollar figure which represents a top 10 payroll in baseball is a level where they feel hard done by. Personally, and I can only speak for me I suppose, it's not.
PS Are you sure about the underselling the rights thing? I've looked for documentation about what Rogers pays itself and can't find anything.