Swartz: Indexing the minimum salary to MLBAM and TV revenue

From SABR member Matt Swartz at The Hardball Times on April 14, 2016:

The Collective Bargaining Agreement between players and owners is set to expire after the 2016 season, and negotiations are well under way to continue the 22-year labor peace and ink a new deal before any work stoppage. Both sides appear to expect exactly that. However, one issue that has repeatedly surfaced is the issue of the declining player share of revenue. According to my calculations, that share has fallen from about 56 percent in 2002 to about 39 percent last year.

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Recently, MLB contested this and purported to show that player share of revenue had remained constant over the last decade. While this is partly because MLB’s calculations start at 2006 (after much of the decline had already occurred) and partly because those numbers include amateur spending levels, a big issue is that MLB includes only net income from MLBAM, the streaming service that provides MLB.tv. That simply does not show the player share of revenue; it shows the player share of a mixture of revenue from non-MLBAM sources and revenue net of costs for MLBAM sources.

Read the full article here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/index-the-minimum-salary-to-mlbam-and-tv-revenue/



Originally published: April 14, 2016. Last Updated: April 14, 2016.