The High Cost Of Sports

Even as the popularity of Major League Baseball is in an apparent decline, they keep raising the prices on tickets, parking, hotdogs and even the beer. Diehard baseball fans are still turning out for the games, but those fans considering other choices as well might just decide to take in the local zoo instead of going out to the ball park and being grossly overcharged at every turn.

How can they in all good conscience charge $15 for a not so great sandwich and then comeback with an $11 beer? How to the people running the concession stands look their customers in the eye? They probably don’t even try.

Dodger’s fans were thrilled when their favorite baseball team sold for a record busting two billion dollars, now that’s a lot of hotdogs and beer. But who will end up paying for that huge price tag. Already baseball parks around the country are more and more being built using public funds. Do the taxes paid out by MLB clubs begin to compensate for that money?

But the real money is in the television contracts and the real reason that those folks were convinced to pay such a huge sum of money for a baseball team was the future of the television contracts the Dodgers have with a new regional network set up by Time-Warner Cable company which will have exclusive broadcast rights to the Dodger’s games. That’s where the big bucks lie.

The Los Angeles baseball team stands to make over $8.35 Billion (with a B!) over the next 25 years from the new network. Now you begin to see why that $2 billion was not such a high price after all.

Up in New York, the YES Network is already broadcasting the New York Yankees baseball games and NBA basketball from the Brooklyn Nets and is reported as being very profitable. Other clubs around the country are already seen preparing to make the switch to their very own network.

The upcoming arrival of the SEC Network in August is seen as a major breakthrough is sports broadcasting and is predicted to bring in great wealth to the participating universities.

When you figure that ESPN alone gets around $5 per month from almost everyone who pays a cable or satellite bill, you can see how quickly the money adds up. Newer cable companies will certainly start to seek higher prices for their services as this trend continues to spiral into greater and greater sums of money.