J-Roc wrote:Schad wrote:Centre Court wrote:Thursday's game is already sold out vs Oakland. The entire Yankees series is sold out. At least one Tigers game at the end of August is sold out as well.
If we're selling out mid-weeks and pulling massive merch sales through the remainder of the year, Rogers now has a very good idea of what peak regular season revenue looks like for his club. Which means that this offseason becomes the definitive answer to the "why won't Rogers spend like a big market owner?"...one would think that the increased cash is more than enough to spur action to protect their profits, so if we don't see payroll escalating significantly to ensure that this revenue isn't a one-off, it's never going to happen under their leadership.
But they did spend a couple of years ago, and there was a surge, but the team sucked and fan interest went back to normal. What you're suggesting is a real Yankee model where you just keep spending to repair the team and never rebuilding. That's a lot of money.
I also want them to spend, but I can see they already got burned not that long ago.
I'm kind of hoping, however, that the added economic benefit of new platform delivery and the networks' competition for that content changes the landscape for Rogers. The current Jays TV ratings give it another leg up on TSN, whose CFL and other properties are running at a third to half of a Jays broadcast. And keeping the Jays competitive would cost a fraction of the money it cost Rogers to buy the NHL rights. For roughly $500m per season, it gets much of the Canadian rights to the NHL, not all, and has to make that and more back from advertising alone to justify the cost. Even if it attributes part of the cost to "good will" - helping it secure primacy in the various channels where it goes head to head with Bell/TSN - that might be a hard investment to quantify, let alone cover. By contrast, if the Jays are hot, TV ratings soar - they are running at about half the level of an NHL playoff game involving two Canadian teams. This is for the regular season. If the Jays are in the playoffs, one would expect a much higher level. And since it doesn't have to compete for the Jays regular season TV rights - though it would for post-season rights - it can recover the attributed costs of those rights at the gate. The ad revenue bulge should be gravy. The ability to get people to subscribe to mobile packages based on watching the Jays on their tablet or handheld should be gravy. If they plow another $30m into the Jays, they stand to get another 500,000-1,000,000 tickets sold at the gate, covering the payroll bulge.
This is all very logical, but I've applied this logic before to Rogers, and they never failed to act with a different logic.
