Idiots Write About Sports

The Montreal Expos are on the move to Washington, D.C., to become the Senators III or the Nationals or whatever the hell the new owners wind up calling them — at least if initial press accounts are to be believed. Of course, if another team is going to move just a traffic-snarled 44 miles from Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Peter Angelos is going to need a big pile of money to look the other way.

Here’s how Major League Baseball plans to buy him off, according to ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark:

According to baseball sources, MLB has offered the Orioles owner two fascinating incentives:

• Baseball is willing to guarantee that the Orioles will earn a still-to-be-negotiated minimum in annual revenues. If their revenues fall below that figure, MLB would make up the difference.

• Baseball also is willing to guarantee a minimum franchise value for the Orioles. So if Angelos attempts to sell the team and can’t find a buyer willing to pay that amount, MLB also would make up that difference.

I’m no economist — mention the words “opportunity cost” and my eyes immediately glaze over — but it seems to me that option one, guaranteed revenue, would be an unmitigated disaster, dooming Baltimore fans to sub-.500 baseball for years to come.

Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re Peter Angelos — bitter, gnarled and, above all, driven by an insatiable need to collect wallet-sized portraits of dead presidents. Lord knows, you’re not very good at running a baseball team; the minute all the competent hirelings left your employ, you’ve been mired in fourth place of a five-team division. So this season, you opt to pony up some cash, paying men seven- and eight-figure salaries to field ground balls and smack doubles. And where has your largesse left you? Twenty-two and a half games out of first, at least as of this writing.

So suddenly, your old pal Bud Selig calls you up with a deal: he’s going to guarantee that you see so many millions in revenue no matter how many people make their way out to your ballpark next year and every year to come. It doesn’t matter if your team goes 0-162 and people avoid the Inner Harbor like there’s a federal quarantine — you know that, at a bare minimum, you’ll have X amount of dollars in the til at the end of the year.

So what’s to inspire you from bothering to field a competitive team? You know how much is coming your way, whether you’re paying for a line-up of all-stars or for a roster stacked with career minor-leaguers making the Major-League mininum. Or, to put it in economic terms, you know what you’re revenues are going to be. Wouldn’t you, money-grubbing villain that you are, look to minimize your expenses in order to maximize your profits?

I’m sure folks who possess a better grasp of economics than me — is there an economist in the house? — can point out the flaws in my logic. But a few years back, I wrote a microeconomics term paper on the folly of messing with market forces by citing a similar deal in which the City of San Diego agreed to guarantee a certain level of Charger ticket sales in exchange for… well… for the Chargers to stop making goo-goo eyes at Los Angeles. That deal ended poorly.

So I guess I would say to an Orioles fans out there, enjoy the third-place finish while you can. If Bud Selig winds up handing an oversized novelty check over to Peter Angelos, I don’t think you’ll be seeing too many more of those.

I wrote about this briefly on my blog today, but if MLB were to set a revenue level per win then it might actually be a good idea. Of course, whether Angelos would agree to that is a different story.

As you probably already know, Baseball Prospectus published something -- not as good -- on the same lines today.

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