The Los Angeles Dodgers signed former Houston Astros outfielder (and former Chicago Cub outfielder) Kyle Tucker to a 4 year, $240 million contract Thursday. $60 million a year is an astronomical amount, no pun intended. Let’s not try to argue otherwise.
I don’t care about “Oh, well, half of that goes to taxes, and don’t forget about California state income tax!”, or “Sure, but a lot of that is deferred, so it’s really only $57 million present day value.” And I don’t care about “well if you break it down, the value of a single WAR is this much, and Kyle Tucker projects to be worth that much WAR, so it’s actually a good deal.” Just look at the W2 you got this month, and then look at Kyle Tucker’s figure again. $60 million is a lot of money. $57 million is a lot of money!
You’ll have to pardon me if I’m not celebrating this as a victory for “the little guy”, who is getting their bag from “the big man” that is the owners. This is no defense of the billionaire owners, but the athletes are no longer “the little guy”. They haven’t been for some time.
The only “little guy” left is us, the fans. Baseball players and athletes are making more and more money, and it’s because sports teams are making more and more money. But is the average fan making more and more money at that rate? No, we’ve just stayed the same. But we’re giving more and more money.
If I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, it’s probably because at this point, I am one, but going to the ballpark used to be an affordable family entertainment option. What do you want to do this weekend? Maybe let’s go to the museum, or go to the zoo, or hey why don’t we catch an Astros game? It wasn’t that long ago that MLB tickets were on par with those other options. Today, to take your family of four to see an Astros game and not sit where you need binoculars, it can easily set you back several hundred dollars. That’s not “weekend plans” money. That’s “let’s plan a vacation” money.
So who’s to blame for this? Who do we blame for the fact that we are getting priced out of supporting our favorite sports teams? I don’t blame Kyle Tucker at all. If someone gave me a piece of paper that said I could have close to a quarter billion dollars for 4 years of work, I’d sign too.
And this may be unpopular, I don’t blame the owners either. I blame us, myself included. The Dodgers agreed to give Kyle Tucker $60 million a year, not because they were planning to just donate that to him. They strongly expect to spend $60 million on Tucker, and then bring in much more than $60 million in return, because we will give it to them.
We will keep paying the ticket prices that increase 50% from one year to the next. We will keep buying official team merchandise from Fanatics, despite the fact they are of poor quality and you’d never buy it if it didn’t’ have a specific sports logo on it. We will keep handing over larger and larger percentages of our disposable income. We’ll complain about it, like I’m doing now, but we’ll still do it.
We don’t stop, because we’re pot committed. So many people have made fandom of their favorite sports team part of their personal identity. The guy from Pittsburgh who can’t imagine himself not being a Steelers fan. The Bruins fan who makes his username “bruins4evah” or something like that. I’m guilty of it too. I look at my bio line on X and Bluesky and it starts with “Writer. Gamer. Astros, Sabres and Bills fan.”
Part of it is that these sports team have been such a local institution, that fans conflate supporting a team with supporting the city. When the Buffalo Bills were in danger of being relocated to another city, a friend of mine asked me if I would continue supporting them if they moved to San Antonio. “No,” I replied, “because when I say I’m a Buffalo Bills fan, I’m a fan of Buffalo moreso than I am a fan of the Bills. I’m rooting for Buffalo and the people of Buffalo.”
This type of attachment of a sports team to the identity of a city is what causes sports team owners to be able to get cities and taxpayers to pay for new stadiums instead of paying for it themselves. If you’re not willing to consider the alternative of not being a fan, then you have no bargaining power. Until consumers find a way to say “no”, sports teams have us hostage. And they can make us build the stadiums, and pay the higher ticket prices, and buy anything and everything that has their logo on it.
So where is our limit? How far can professional sports leagues push their fans financially before we push back? To borrow a phrase from my friend and former Crawfish Boxes writer CKuno, where are the “limits of fandom”? Because $60 million a year suggests there aren’t any in sight.
(Feature photo courtesy of Pixel Pete.) This piece is also cross-posted on Hatter’s personal website, AreYouInsane.NET, where he yells at clouds on a regular basis.
The other component is the companies and sponsors that can afford to pay huge prices for season tickets. My wife, son, and I had a mini season ticket plan for 15 years. We had incredible seats, right behind home, in front of the old press box (now Insperity Club). We gave them up after 2018 when the price for the three tickets rose to an average of $500 per game. Plus parking, plus concessions.
Some dedicated fans can swing that but not us. But there are plenty of willing buyers at those prices.
The total cost for the Dodgers for Kyle Tucker is $119.9 million annually, totaling essentially ~$480 million dollars across his 4 year deal. Jim Crane bought THE ASTROS for ~$615 million. The numbers are absurd.
I’ve long been critical of the owners, particularly for their treatment of minor leaguers and the fact they seemingly always choose short short term financial profits over what is beneficial for the game long term. The players, in my opinion, were no better. Selling out the lower level players to keep the potential for the highest earners unrestricted. The latest CBA helped push a bit that in the opposite direction.
There’s been a ton of research showing that player payroll does not have a direct correlation to ticket prices. Teams will charge what they believe they can based on market, competitiveness, etc (Robert Arthur at Baseball Prospectus has a great article on it called – Moonshot: Big Contracts Don’t Make Tickets More Expensive).
With that said, prices have become absolutely outrageous, especially after shutting down minor league teams in masses as a cheap alternative for families to expose kids to baseball with. Couple in blackouts of viewing rights and MLB does what it can to make it as hard as possible to attract new fans. It’s another example of teams looking at a profit ledger today instead of considering if there will be a future generation of baseball fans.
I couldn’t agree more that so much allegiance gets tied to sports teams, how much it becomes part of people’s identity. And how teams, which understandably are businesses, do everything they can to exploit that allegiance for profit.
As gambling revenues help fill MLB owners coffers, a new CBA showdown begins next year and no end to rising prices – I can’t help but think we will eventually hit as you said the “limits of fandom”, but I’m not sure how a change in that direction happens.
Maybe in the next iteration of the CBA, they need to add a 4th layer of Payroll tax that pays for stadiums so the “poor” teams aren’t begging the taxpayers to cover that bill, or pays for free seats in other markets to increase attendance of smaller teams.
Enjoyed your old man ranting at the cloud article!!
[…] Still expensive though, as all sporting events seem to be now. The Rockies were the worst team in the NL playing the worst team in the AL at the time, the A’s, and the tickets still were no bargain. That just seems to be the state of professional sports these days. […]