Moving forward, what are your expectations for payroll in comparison to the rest of the league?

[Frobby]

2 minutes ago, Bemorewins said:

And SD is below us in this metric, yet their payroll far surpasses ours. And even in a down year for them (last season) their attendance was 3rd and they drew almost double the fans that we did.

Just remember, our payroll hasn’t always been this low, either in absolute dollars or relative to the league.   It’s at a low point now due to the rebuild and the fact that our best position players are pre-Arb.  But they won’t be pre-Arb forever.  Same thing happened a bit in the 2012-18 period.   

I must say, the Revenue Sharing Market Score list is a bit of a head scratcher.   Tampa’s not in the bottom 10 but St. Louis is.   There are other anomalies.  But in any event, somehow the owners came up with this and live by it, so I assume it has some legitimacy or you’d see certain teams publicly complaining about it.  
 

[Aristotelian]

10 minutes ago, Bemorewins said:

Elias comes from HOU and before that STL and he prefers the Tampa model? What gives you the impression that he rejects the systems that he comes from and helped to build (and have produced championship success)?

In your opinion do you believe that Tampa's extremely frugal model is superior to HOU's or STL's?

I said I expect him to lean toward Tampa, not that he will copy them. We play in the AL East against two of the top market teams plus another mid-major market where free agency is not going to be a comparative advantage for us. Elias has shown every indication of valuing a strong farm system and it has paid off. I don't see a complete 180 from his approach.

STL is not a great comp as they play in the easiest division in MLB, and HOU is significantly bigger market than us. Sure, a top 10-15 payroll could happen with sustained success and higher revenues but I am not expecting it. 

I love the idea of hoarding prospects and then trading them for 1-2 years of Burnes/Cease types as needed. If we can fill our holes without getting into Chris Davis type contracts, yes, I think that is a superior strategy for a mid market team. 

 

[Bemorewins]

1 minute ago, Frobby said:

Just remember, our payroll hasn’t always been this low, either in absolute dollars or relative to the league.   It’s at a low point now due to the rebuild and the fact that our best position players are pre-Arb.  But they won’t be pre-Arb forever.  Same thing happened a bit in the 2012-18 period.   

I must say, the Revenue Sharing Market Score list is a bit of a head scratcher.   Tampa’s not in the bottom 10 but St. Louis is.   There are other anomalies.  But in any event, somehow the owners came up with this and live by it, so I assume it has some legitimacy or you’d see certain teams publicly complaining about it.  
 

I'm not sure that this is the sole or primary reason for the extremely low payroll at this point. The payroll should have gone up last year by a lot if we were serious about contending and it did not. Even this year we are up like what 20- 25 million? We never gave a single player a significant contract of any kind under this owner. As a matter of fact, have we even signed ANYONE to more than a 1 year contract under John Angelos' ownership?

It can be seriously argued that the payroll has been kept way down by an owner who had no interest in spending or really seriously competing for a title. It appears that his main interest was in making as much off of the business as possible.

I hope the new owners don't follow anything by way of the recent past of how this org was run.

[TAMC]

I am missing a key number.  I expect the new group to not NEED the team to be a significant income source as the Angelos family apparently did over the past few years.  However I also do not expect the new owners to operate at a loss over any significant time.  Maybe a year here and there if the team is really going all out for a WS win, but not as a standard practice.  Folks with this kind of money got it by being good investors and good investors don't like long term losses.  Since I don't know what the team's (and MASN's) net profits have been recently, it is hard to guess what the potential is for increasing payroll while still maintaining at least a modest profit for the ownership group.  We'll all find out together I guess.

[Bemorewins]

6 minutes ago, Aristotelian said:

I said I expect him to lean toward Tampa, not that he will copy them. We play in the AL East against two of the top market teams plus another mid-major market where free agency is not going to be a comparative advantage for us. Elias has shown every indication of valuing a strong farm system and it has paid off. I don't see a complete 180 from his approach.

STL is not a great comp as they play in the easiest division in MLB, and HOU is significantly bigger market than us. Sure, a top 10-15 payroll could happen with sustained success and higher revenues but I am not expecting it. 

I love the idea of hoarding prospects and then trading them for 1-2 years of Burnes/Cease types as needed. If we can fill our holes without getting into Chris Davis type contracts, yes, I think that is a superior strategy for a mid market team. 

 

Where are you getting your numbers for market analysis? Is it by city/metropolitan population size? By the numbers that another poster provided in this thread (that comes from MLB), I don't think those positions can be justified?

SD spends way more than us, TOR is a much larger city than BOS, HOU is not a top payroll team but there are in a top 5 city in terms of population size. And that applies to ARI (PHX) also.

The reality is that we are going to have to spend much more than we have in order to sustain winning.

I personally want the owners to spend. What they don't spend goes into their pockets. I have said this a million times before, but I have no interest in cheering for billionaires to make more millions.

[Guest]

I agree that the payroll is being overly suppressed, probably because of John Angelo’s’ intent and the plan to rebuild through 2022 at least - the team forced their hand more suddenly, if not earlier than they expected.

per a Duquette interview, he stated that increasing attendance and success allowed them to increase payroll (as it did toward the end of the last window). Obviously we have a different owner now, but the potential for huge attendance increase over the next 5+ years is huge, especially with the Nats rebuilding right now. It should give us a lot more financial leeway. 

[geschinger]

My guess if Elias was allowed to do what wanted is that eventually, payroll would settle in at a ~$150-$160m range in today's dollars.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Bemorewins said:

Where are you getting your numbers for market analysis? Is it by city/metropolitan population size? By the numbers that another poster provided in this thread (that comes from MLB), I don't think those positions can be justified?

SD spends way more than us, TOR is a much larger city than BOS, HOU is not a top payroll team but there are in a top 5 city in terms of population size. And that applies to ARI (PHX) also.

The reality is that we are going to have to spend much more than we have in order to sustain winning.

I personally want the owners to spend. What they don't spend goes into their pockets. I have said this a million times before, but I have no interest in cheering for billionaires to make more millions.

Another interesting side of this is that while we are in the smaller Baltimore market, we are also in the larger DC / Baltimore media market, which is around 10 million people - third after NYC and LA, and ahead of Chicago and the Bay Area, all of which also have 2 teams. Obviously there are distance factors (I wouldn’t expect people from Culpepper VA driving up regularly) but the Orioles have been here longer and are a lot of peoples original team. Lots of opportunity to grow right now with the Nats down, as there was in the 90s.

[Aristotelian]

2 minutes ago, Bemorewins said:

Where are you getting your numbers for market analysis? Is it by city/metropolitan population size? By the numbers that another poster provided in this thread (that comes from MLB), I don't think those positions can be justified?

SD spends way more than us, TOR is a much larger city than BOS, HOU is not a top payroll team but there are in a top 5 city in terms of population size. And that applies to ARI (PHX) also.

The reality is that we are going to have to spend much more than we have in order to sustain winning.

I personally want the owners to spend. What they don't spend goes into their pockets. I have said this a million times before, but I have no interest in cheering for billionaires to make more millions.

Frobby's numbers are a good benchmark which has us 23 (HOU 15, STL 26). 

Forbes has us 18 (STL 10, HOU 11).

Based on population we are 20 (HOU 6, STL 18). 

I don't care whether the owner profits or not, my priority is winning and I am not convinced that FA spending correlates that strongly with winning for small-mid market teams that don't have a comparative advantage in spending power. I don't want the owner to be a Scrooge but I also don't expect them to run the team at a loss. 

[24fps]

Maybe $110 million max after the trade deadline in 2024.  $150-160 million-ish by 2026 due to arb raises, one or two extensions and a couple of free agents, probably pitchers.  Like many, I don't expect the new owners to radically subsidize the team, but I do expect them to compete in a sustained way and that won't happen with just a first-class farm system.

[btownoriole]

My hope is that this ownership group looks for ways to increase revenue.  There are lots of ways to do that beyond increasing prices - better leveraging being part of the nation's 3rd largest media market is one way.  Creating a better fan experience is another.  "Camden Crossing" or whatever the redevelopment could be another.  A streaming version of MASN could be another.

I never got the sense that the Angelos family was business-savvy.  They made their money through lawsuits, not running businesses.

[baltfan]

My hope would be between $110mm and $180mm.  What I mean by that is that I would hope there would be years when the team is "all in" and others where they pull back to compensate for some overspending.  

[baltfan]

3 minutes ago, btownoriole said:

My hope is that this ownership group looks for ways to increase revenue.  There are lots of ways to do that beyond increasing prices - better leveraging being part of the nation's 3rd largest media market is one way.  Creating a better fan experience is another.  "Camden Crossing" or whatever the redevelopment could be another.  A streaming version of MASN could be another.

I never got the sense that the Angelos family was business-savvy.  They made their money through lawsuits, not running businesses.

You don't make over a billion dollars without business saaavy regardless of the field you are in.  Just like any industry there are people that are great lawyers and lousy business people.  I promise you they aren't worth a billion dollars.

[Bemorewins]

1 hour ago, Aristotelian said:

Frobby's numbers are a good benchmark which has us 23 (HOU 15, STL 26). 

Forbes has us 18 (STL 10, HOU 11).

Based on population we are 20 (HOU 6, STL 18). 

I don't care whether the owner profits or not, my priority is winning and I am not convinced that FA spending correlates that strongly with winning for small-mid market teams that don't have a comparative advantage in spending power. I don't want the owner to be a Scrooge but I also don't expect them to run the team at a loss. 

We actually do have the spending advantage in this division if the new owners decide to deploy it. They are worth more (net worth) than every other owner in this division including NYY. 

But I don't want to draw this point out any longer because it appears that you have made up your mind that the owner's net worth is less of a significant factor than whatever mean's are used to draw up market size.

Yet SD spends more in a "smaller market", resigns stars, and signs other stars in FA, and has one of the top attendance figures in the sport. They drew over 3 million people last year with their "small market". I believe that they are an example of what can be done in a given market if you engage your fans in a way that communicates we are invested and doing all we can to win. 

[Bemorewins]

52 minutes ago, btownoriole said:

My hope is that this ownership group looks for ways to increase revenue.  There are lots of ways to do that beyond increasing prices - better leveraging being part of the nation's 3rd largest media market is one way.  Creating a better fan experience is another.  "Camden Crossing" or whatever the redevelopment could be another.  A streaming version of MASN could be another.

I never got the sense that the Angelos family was business-savvy.  They made their money through lawsuits, not running businesses.

THIS! People are pretending like the Orioles have been a good brand in this market under the Angelos regime. But actually the opposite is true.

There is a LOT of room for growth with the Orioles in the market place. The Padres (while making bad baseball op decisions) are a great example of how to grow/maximize your market share.