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Sports   Mogul   blog

Would There Be Baseball After Thanos?

6/2/2020

6 Comments

 
At the beginning of Avengers: Endgame, the camera flies over an empty Citi Field, showing us that major league baseball is just one of the casualties of Thanos' "snap". If the baseball season can be cancelled for a virus that has killed 100,000 Americans, then surely it would be stopped by a super-villian killing more than 160 million Americans.

Right?
Citi Field (Empty)
Citi Field, abandoned after the Thanos snap.
Well, arguments have been made on both sides. But what we do know is that, financially, Major League Baseball would be fine. Eliminating 50% of all major league players would cause team payrolls to drop by 50% — but demand for tickets would only drop by about 30%. At least in the short term, Major League Baseball would actually be more profitable.
To understand why, we look at the research I did for Baseball Mogul's economic engine. This analysis showed that team revenue doesn't grow linearly with the number of people in that team's fan base. Roughly speaking, team revenue is a function of the square root of the population in the team's metropolitan area.

For one example, look at the Philadelphia Phillies and Baltimore Orioles. Baltimore's metropolitan area (2.8 million people) is 54% smaller than Philadelphia's (6.1 million), but the Orioles' 2019 revenue ($256 million) is only about 35% lower than the Phillies' revenue ($392 million).

According to this relationship, if Thanos made 50% of all Philly fans disappear, team revenue would only drop by about 33%. The country would be in shock. But unlike our current situation, there's no economic reason baseball couldn't return.
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6 Comments
Clay Dreslough link
6/2/2020 01:43:06 am

(Note that other factors affect team revenue — including everything from fan income to the team's history of success. But even after these are factored in, this relationship between population and revenue holds.)

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Charles Jackson
6/2/2020 05:06:02 pm

Thanos would clearly become the new GM of the Yankees.

What we're overlooking is there would absolutely be teams contracted from the league to insure the proper amount of Major League talent in on the field. Tampa and Miami goes away, Oakland too. Bye bye Padres and Pittsburgh and Kansas City. Toronto, Arizona, Minnesota can kiss Thanos' gauntlet.

Then there would have to be a Major League Draft as all teams must start from scratch. The talent pool would include any surviving Japanese and Korean players as well as all Cubans. Mike Trout goes first overall because you know he survives anything.

Most importantly, A-Rod gets vaporized and J-Lo survives and she's dating me.

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Mike Stuker
6/2/2020 06:13:07 pm

This seems like the Marlin's operating model.

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Kerry
6/2/2020 06:20:25 pm

Let's take a slightly different slant to half the world disappearing. And let's not try to remember how annoying this version of Peter Parker is upon his return....

If everything is split in half that would leave baseball with 15 teams. That's right I'm talking about contraction. This might actually be beneficial to the game, beneficial to fans and stop this nonsense of strikes and players and owners threatening to destroy a portion of our happiness.

Based only on the numbers posted above, and the fact that Thanos is a number man, he would remove the lowest revenue teams. If Clay's numbers are correct, and i have no reason to doubt they aren't, every team starting with the San Diego Padres moving down in the chart would no longer be in existence.

Let's talk about the c word...contraction. Would baseball be better with fewer teams? Maybe... Contraction would send shock waves through sports and American industry but it would be realistic--it happens in every day life and sports should be no different.

Clay, my question is your fault. What teams should be put out of the misery because they can't compete on a yearly basis allowing (theoretically) for a better product?

Reply
Charles Jackson
6/2/2020 07:00:49 pm

This is my point above. Revenue is no longer valid. It's going to have to be regional, right? If half the U.S. population is gone then people are going to move/migrate to where jobs/supplies are plentiful. You probably can't support two teams in Chicago or LA or NY initially. You may have to have a west coast league or an east coast league because half the pilots have been vaporized so there will be flight issues.It's all about logistics in the post Thanos world.

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Clay link
6/3/2020 03:17:21 pm

FYI here's where I got the 2019 revenue numbers:

https://www.forbes.com/mlb-valuations/list/

That's a total of $10.374 billion.

If you cut that by 30%, it's still more than the NBA.

If you cut it by 50%, it's still more than the NHL.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_sports_leagues_by_revenue]

So my gut feeling is that they wouldn't bother contracting. They would just have lower salaries. But I also believe the argument that there would be contraction.

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