Back to Virtue.

Virtue can be proven, it can even have excel spreadsheets to help understand it. They are available if need be.....

Following along the with the ongoing discussion:

While it is true that Carl Pohlad MORE than has the money to throw at the Twins if he chose to (he's a billionaire after all, and George Steinbrenner is just a lowly hundred-millionaire), I think the issue should not be how much out-of-pocket money the owner is willing to put toward the team. It should be how much they have, based on their revenues from ticket and fan product sales. That will HELP toward the understanding that the Twins and the Brewers really do work in a different world. So, let me make three inter-related points:

#1. The Twins work in a smaller market, with a population with less disposable income than the Yankees.
#2. Twins tickets and merchandise are cheaper than Yankees tickets and merchandise
#3. The Twins do more with the money that they have

#2 and #3 are incontrovertibly shown in the attached document. If he argues with #1 then you just have to give up on him because he's "touched." As you can see in my table, the Twins have an average ticket price more than $10 cheaper than the Yankees. This combined with a smaller market probably explains why their annual revenue is less than half of the Yankees'. In fact, they are at exact opposite ends of the rankings in revenue: the Yankees bring in the MOST and the Twins bring in the LEAST money of any major league team.

All that said, you can also see that in 2006 the Yankees had 97 wins and the Twins had 96. That puts the Twins at 27th in cost/win and the Yankees once again in first. So, obviously, the Twins are somehow able to muddle through with WAAAAAY less money. Now we're getting to the crux of the issue. The market in Minnesota and surrounding states is pretty well tapped. I don't see the kids out in Souix Falls and Brainerd shelling out for a cable channel (they tried it with hockey, and if Minnesota won't pay for hockey then they certainly won't pay for baseball), nor do I think you'll get away with big ticket price-raises in the new stadium (which, by the way, will seat about 10,000 fewer fans) or $100 Santana t-shirts. So, go ahead and come up with "creative" ways to make more money... all you're really saying is pass more of the cost on to the fans, and I'm saying that just won't fly in the thrifty Midwest. And it's not like we're selling a lot of caps overseas like the Yankees are.

So, we come back to the owners. I hold out hope that Pohlad will crack open that vault of his and throw a little money to us lonely beggars so that we can field a competitive team in the new stadium. However, I don't really think that's fair to him. Why should he have to pay for the mistakes of others? Because, really, I'm not mad at A-Rod. A-Rod is an all-star and I'd love to have him on my team. His salary is exorbitant, but it's not really like Jason Bartlett is going to go into contract negotiations with THAT salary in his mind. The problem is all the failures they've paid too much for. All the young kids who got those signing bonuses and never made it big. The slow and steady increase on players just out of serf-dom.

I was mad when it was big names, because it made me jealous. But really, the Twins were never in that market much. They weren't bumping up payroll by acquiring veterans from other teams, they were slowly losing their own veterans to the better deal elsewhere. That was always upsetting, but usually the Twins had someone in the background who was as good, or better, and would make the minimum (Mientkiewicz becomes Morneau, Pierzynksi become Mauer, Guardado becomes Nathan... the list goes on).

The scary thing to me is now the infiltration into those younger ages. If we can't compete for veterans, and so are destined to always be a young team, then we have to have faith that the people working in our AAA and AA and even A systems are the next Mauer. But if we can't afford the next Mauer either, because he gets a big signing bonus elsewhere, or because he knows we won't pour money all over him the first time he comes up for arbitration, then we are, as the pope would say, fucked.

And I don't blame Pohlad for not opening his purse under those conditions. "Penny wise and pound foolish" you say? Well, that may be true for some players, but when they are that young you can hardly KNOW that... if you have $200 million to throw around, you can afford to hand out signing bonuses to every kid you get that tingly feeling about, and you can give your feisty whelp with 3 years service time 5 million dollars in the hopes that he'll remain worth it. But when your market only brings in $2 million to the Yankees $4 million, you might not be able to just go on faith like that. And honestly, Midwestern values back in action, I don't think you SHOULD.

Oh, and just to throw it out there, the real reason I hate the Yankees is because they assume I love them. I hate New York and I hate LA because they think they're better than the Midwest and they expect us to agree. The Yankees are NOT "America's Team." The very thought sickens me.