The Business of Major League Baseball

It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life. --Mickey Mantle Yankees Hall-of-Fame Outfielder (1951-1968)

Baseball is too much of a sport to be called a business and too much of a business to be called a sport. --Phil K. Wrigley Cubs owner (1932-1977)

Free market economics is the process of driving enterprises out of business. Sports league economics is the process of keeping enterprises in business on an equal basis. There is nothing like a sports league. Nothing. --NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue (Sports Illustrated, Sept. 10, 1990)

well run club has a regularly recurring reasonable The goal of a well-designed league is to produce adequate competitive balance. By this standard, Major League Baseball is not now well designed. . . . Proper competitive balance will not exist until every well run club has a regularly recurring reasonable hope of reaching postseason play. The Report of the Independent Members of the Commissioner’s Blue Ribbon Panel On Baseball Economics, July 2000.

Entertainment– not autos, not steel, not financial services– is fast becoming the driving wheel of the new world economy. --Michael J. Wolf Author, The Entertainment Economy

The Business of Major League Baseball

Club Business Assessment & Ranking November 2011

could one day afford to buy a baseball team. What has happened is that all your life you operated businesses in such a way that you could one day afford to buy a baseball team. And then you buy the team and forget all the business practices that enabled you to buy it. --George Steinbrenner Yankees owner (1973-1990, 1993-2010)

The Business of Major League Baseball