Thursday, July 16, 2009

Brief Thoughts on the Business of Sports

Just a quick addendum to my previous post and some comments following the Tao's incredible take on the prospect of trading Halladay: I don't give a damn about business. I don't care if Rogers survives or fails (jokes, current employers!) and I don't spend much time thinking about the business side of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball club. That said, we can't ignore it. We can bluster all day about passionate fandom and losing yourself in the game, but when it comes to brainstorming and/or spitballin' ideas for why JP should stay/go, we'd be fools to ignore it.

Which is why we must all promise to cease begging Rogers to dump the Laotian GNP into payroll or demanding Vernon Wells humbly reorder his contract for the good of the team. These are pie in the sky hopes and dreams that have nothing to do with the beauty and poetry of baseball. We're asking publicly traded corporations and private citizens to forsake millions of dollars so our favorite TV show has a better ending. Not going to happen. Let's focus on baseball instead.

10 comments:

  1. The Jays are run (manipulated) by the typical corporate groupthink fucks

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  2. Right you are. So fucking what. It isn't changing anytime soon. Let's move on, shall we?

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  3. You move on, this bullshit should be discussed in detail.

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  4. Why? Will it change your feelings about the team? If you answer yes, you're just looking for a reason to jump ship. Just go.

    I won't get into details (there is good stuff in the Tao post linked above) but I feel this way:

    Rogers looks at the Jays as a business and expect it to run profitably. They are not a vanity toy to brag about on the yacht. The team doesn't make a lot of money (any?) if they spend 80-120 million WIN OR LOSE. I don't think a bump in attendance will impact their bottom line to terribly much.

    If they don't care about wins and losses until they start affecting the bottom line, it won't be priority. They'll work to streamline the operation and run it like everyone else: internal development and cost-controlling contracts.

    Just remember: THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT WINS AND LOSSES except on Bay Street. We just need to make peace with it and move on.

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  5. The Tao's link is so good, that it automatically directs you back to this post.

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  6. Right you are, er, were. Fixed.

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  7. Spending time watching things being done the wrong way is bullshit.


    Ownership cutting back payroll is one thing, then there's management's deceitful tactics with the fans, and the ineptitude and waste that's made them unable to put together a single year with a solid roster.

    Sure watching the team play is still fun, but the decisions of these idiots have taken away from what should have been a great team by now. Fuck being apathetic or adhering to what's become the science of Blue Jay management apologism

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  8. I'm with you 100%, as long as you understand my post about VW wasn't asking him to give anything up. It actually would've given him an extra $8 million.

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  9. oh yeah an extra 8 million IF he plays 4 extra years... and structured so that if he decides to retire when he's 40 he actually loses 4 million over his current year I'm sure he'd be jumping for that...

    Think about what you would do before posting crazy ideas like that. Lets say you're 30 years old and make 100k per year. Would you take 50k per year to work until you're 75 instead of 50 as you had planned before?

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  10. Alex, I'm not going to turn this site into an argument about my post on a site that's not this one. My bringing it up here was a mistake. Sorry, Drew.

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