Barry Bloom of Sportico has spent five decades chronicling the history of labor and ownership in Major League Baseball and shares the financial concerns and strategic challenges facing the sport. He joins Nestor to discus new media, an aging fan base and neophyte ownership groups like the Rubenstein partnership trying to guess at future revenue in order to sign star players to enormous contracts while being gifted $600 million to make Camden Yards a place that lifts downtown Baltimore.
Nestor Aparicio and Barry Bloom discuss the financial and strategic challenges of Major League Baseball teams, particularly the Baltimore Orioles. Bloom highlights the Orioles’ $100 million payroll, placing them 15th in baseball, and notes the American League’s reduced spending compared to the National League. He criticizes the lack of a salary cap and revenue sharing in MLB, contrasting it with the NFL’s successful model. Bloom praises the Diamondbacks’ strategy of reinvesting profits and extending young players’ contracts. Aparicio expresses concerns about the Orioles’ long-term financial strategy and the impact of streaming rights on fan accessibility.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Major League Baseball, Orioles, revenue streams, stadium renovations, pitching investments, American League, National League, Diamondbacks, ownership, salary cap, free agency, television contracts, fan engagement, streaming rights, business of baseball.
SPEAKERS
Nestor Aparicio, Barry Bloom
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
Welcome home. We are W, N, S T am 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We are Baltimore positive. We’re positively into the baseball season. Lucas is monitoring all things NFL draft, as well as the Justin Tucker sweepstakes. We have a hockey playoffs, all sorts of things going on, including on democracy itself, which I’m trying to keep an eye on as well. But baseball has me distracted right now. We’re going to be a cost us on Friday, distracted by the Maryland lottery and the magic eight balls. We’re also going to get those back to the future scratch offs in the monopoly scratch offs out as well. We will be at Beaumont next Wednesday. We will be at Cooper’s north on the 23rd and we will be at Coco’s pub in laurelville on the 30th. Lots of great guests, lots of cool stuff going on, but nothing as good as this guy. Um, I did think of Barry bloom when I was in Toronto Opening Day weekend. So I went to the opening day game on Thursday. I got a big blister on my ankle in Toronto. I didn’t feel like walking in 35 degree cold. So I sat in my hotel room and I got takeout food in Toronto While Luke used his press credential at skydome, and I put the television on. And as it always is in Toronto, the hockey games on. So the hockey game is on, and I look up and the Florida Panthers are playing some blue circle puck that says Utah on it. Now looked at it. I’m like, is this some sort of like minor league, Major League wrestling? What is this Utah? I swear to you, Barry, it was March, whatever, 27th before I realized that you don’t have a hockey team anymore in Arizona, and I know you were like a yoke sky. It has passed me by this whole Utah era of nameless hockey.
Barry Bloom 01:48
Yeah, talk about you. I mean, the Utah Hockey Club is dead to me. I haven’t watched one minute of it. I don’t follow them. I don’t care, even the NHL. I’ve watched sparingly this year. It’s and I watched some of those, all national games between Canada and US, and I clicked on the TV yesterday to CEO betkin Break Gretzky’s record. But that’s been pretty much it. It’s like, yeah, the Utah hockey club. I don’t see how they make ends meet any better Salt Lake City than they did in in Phoenix. But, you know, that’s not my problem anymore. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 02:29
we got baseball in Phoenix, which is why I’m reaching to you and Diamondbacks, but I do, I mean, you were a guy in on the coyote like it failing there is kind of crazy and how it works in places like Tampa and fails in other places. Um, you know, I’m befuddled by it. I’m befuddled by sports. I’m befuddled by the n, i L, just sort of the new ownership here. I know you and I have talked about them, healing wounds and all of that right now, on the field for the baseball team here in Baltimore, high expectations off the, you know, three digit wins two years ago, and new ownership, it’s been a little bit of a stumble out of the gate here so far. Barry,
Barry Bloom 03:05
well, getting, you know, back to, you know, finishing up on on the coyotes. I mean, what? Basically you have 5000 or 6000 you know, really hardcore hockey fans here, and you’ve never had good ownership. You’ve never had a good Arena in approximate area where they could play the last guys who own the team. Morello was a complete crook, so it was bound to fail here. And you know, then the Diamondbacks right now are in the middle of trying to get the state legislature to approve a capturing of the sales tax so they can rebuild chase field. So, I mean, you have a basically ethos where, you know, really people in the Populists don’t want to spend public money to help owners build facilities, but
Nestor Aparicio 04:03
we had no problem doing that here, billion to 600 million to Bucha 600 million now to Rubens. I mean, Rubinstein is one of the reasons that was made the deal so attractive for him. You know, billion eight and 600 million gets rebated in stadium renovations that he can pass on to the customers. That’s the business of baseball, especially now that the RSN model’s falling apart.
Barry Bloom 04:22
Well, what? And in most places, especially out west, it just doesn’t happen anymore. You don’t get that kind of money. You mean, the A’s got $400 million from from Nevada to pay for that part of the stadium infrastructure, but they’ve got to come up with 1,000,005 themselves. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a completely different, you know, ethos out here, and, you know, and as far as the Orioles go, I mean, you know, they’re spending money this year. I mean, I was just looking at the list. I mean, they’re 15th in baseball at 100 $80 million right now. So it’s not like they’re not trying to plug holes and build a deeper team, but you’re just competing in, you know, division with the Yankees and Red Sox, where, you know, those are really the only two teams in baseball in the American League anymore that that spend that kind of money. So I’ve been gobsmacked by the fact that the American League stopped spending money. Houston stopped spending money. Texas is okay. The angels do what the angels do, and they they don’t really spend money wisely. But I mean really this winter, only the Yankees and and Boston signing Bregman spent any money. So it kind of cements that they’re going to win either the division or they’re going to win a, you know, they’re going to win a wild card. And, you know, I was on the field at Steinbrenner field, talking to one of the Tampa Bay co owners, Brian halt and he made the statement that he thinks nobody in the American League is going to win more than 90 games, and that Tampa Bay is going to win their division with 88 wins. And I told them, you’re absolutely crazy. Many Yankees won 98 games last year, and they didn’t have coal for a good part of the season. They had a lot of injuries in their starting rotation. The Yankees are going to win between 90 and 100 games, and they’re probably going to win the division, and they’re probably going to walk into into the World Series again, because you have a whole division in the American League, in the central that doesn’t spend any money. They’re all under under 100 million, I think the last I looked so, I mean, you can’t have that kind of imbalance. If you look at the National League, you know, eight or nine teams are really spending money, and the National League, the National League spent. National League West spent almost, you know, over a billion dollars, including the Dodgers and the rest of the teams just trying to keep up with Dodgers. You have four teams that are trying to keep up with the Dodgers. So, I mean, and you’re looking at the standings right now, and you know, the Giants have had a fantastic spring training. Very rarely do you have a great spring training and then open the season eight and one which they have. But you know, the giants are, are a much better team with a good pitching staff and a settled front office now without bar Han there, replaced by Posey and all the guys he brought in, it’s like being the old giants again. So that is going to be a super competitive division, you know, all season, you know. And so will the the Al east, although I just don’t see, you know, Tampa, with the type of offense it has, being able to compete with the rest of the bigger bumper teams in the American League.
Nestor Aparicio 08:02
Barry Bloom is here. He’s been my friend for a long time. I’ve been a reader of his most of my life with the Associated Press covering the Yankees and a real baseball historian now working at sportico. You can find all of his work out online. He sends it over to me. It’s a lot of baseball stuff, but sports and the respect I have and one of the reasons I love having you on is because of your knowledge of the business of baseball, because it’s always been my feeling on the radio. 35 years now, here in Baltimore, you could not discuss baseball without understanding money, where the money’s coming from, the revenue streams going back to the strike in 9094 going back to the strike at 81 when I was a kid. And in the modern parlance of all of this, the stadium revenue, the club seat revenue, the ticket revenue, local sales, sponsorships, but the yes network nesting, what the Dodgers have in regard to the giant part of their brand, what the Braves had for a minute with Turner and with the Cubs tried to do with the superstation and being corporately owned. I don’t know where Rubenstein fits in this, whether he’s the rich uncle and you know, the do gooder in this who’s going to spend money over top of what they’re making based on the fact that he’s 74 he wants to win. It’s fun for him. He’s got his own bobblehead next week already, Barry, so no ego involved here at all with the ownership here, but they’re trying to not be Angelos. I don’t know what they can do for pitching when they’re buying 41 year old pitchers, 35 year old Japanese pitchers. They went and bought Kyle Gibson a couple of weeks and they still have enough pitching, and the notion that they can compete be in this thing, maybe make it trade, because they have some depth in their organization, and they have money, and they have, you know, major league players that they could deal from as well if they needed more pitching. But the one thing the Orioles have not done investing in is drafting pitchers, developing pitchers. They have it, and right now it’s kind of coming back to haunt them, because it gets real pricey. When you go buying it on the open market?
Barry Bloom 10:01
Well, you know, I think that’s something that they’re going to have to do with, you know, recent ownership here, that’s something you build in your baseball operations on the long term. And they’ve got good baseball operations. So, you know, I’m sure they’re eyeing it and trying to figure it out. I mean, there are some teams that go out and buy pitching, and they build through the organization. They do one of the others. You know, there are other teams like, like Dodgers that do both. So, I mean,
Nestor Aparicio 10:29
this feels very philosophical if you look at their draft since Elias and Mike Dell have been here that they invest in position players because they don’t blow their arms out allegedly, they actually get to the field, as opposed to half these pitchers getting Tommy John.
Barry Bloom 10:43
And it’s something, something to be said about that, because, you know, look at the injury. The Dodgers just spent, what, $180 million on on Snell, and he’s out with inflammation in his shoulder
Nestor Aparicio 10:55
already. No, everybody wanted Gary Cole till they can’t pitch, right, right? So,
Barry Bloom 10:59
Garrett, calls another one who just went under, you know, the knife and had Tommy John surgery. I mean, they keep popping up all the time. I mean, the fact is that you know Corbin Burns, who went from the Orioles and signed as a free agent with Diamondbacks. Excuse me, he hasn’t had an arm injury, but that’s now. I mean, eventually pitchers are just going to have them.
Nestor Aparicio 11:26
Well, the Orioles would have Bradish, they would have wells, they would have means, and they would have Rodriguez. I mean, that that to me on paper, with the way those guys pitch, that looks like something that feels like 100 wins with this team, what they have right now. I mean, I’ll give you efflin. The rest of this is just a bunch of number four, number five starters. And I wonder if that’s going to be good enough, and whether they’re going to hit the ball and score six or eight runs every night. Well,
Barry Bloom 11:52
it’s the same thing with Tampa Bay too. You know, losing their their top starter before the season started. And there, there’s a rotation is a bunch of number number twos, threes and fours. Also, it’s pretty good, you know, they’re but they don’t have the offense to offset it. So, I mean, it’s a the pitching thing is, is a huge problem. You can’t avoid the injuries with the amount of torque that guys put on their arms, the amount of abuse they have as as as young pitchers coming up through the system, going through all the camps and things that they do, it’s just like Japan, where high school kids are pitching, throwing 200 pitches a game, And they and the coaches at that level don’t care. And then by the time they get to the major leagues, either in Japan or over here, you know, they’re just candidates for their arms to wear out. And basically, the arms are dispensable, and you just have to keep cycling people through until you get a couple that stay healthy for a while,
Nestor Aparicio 13:01
Barry Bloom is here. We’re talking some baseball. The Orioles are out in Arizona. He now resides out in the Valley of the Sun, um, you know, on the Diamondbacks and on West Coast baseball in general. Um, just based on your accent, everybody knows you’re an east coaster, but the the LA San Diego thing and the money being spent there, the fact that the Oakland A’s couldn’t make it and ever, and have just hit the exit button and they’re going to play in Sacramento, and the amount of money in the desert in Arizona, where you’re trying to compete with the Dodgers. What is that franchise at this point, the Arizona Diamondbacks. I’ve never seen it is anything really vibrant. Maybe it’s playing inside of the big bubble there. And I’ve been to games through generations over the last 2025, years out there, World Series games out there, a bunch of years ago with Gonzales and and Randy Johnson and those guys, what is the state of that franchise? Is? Is it a strong franchises? You know, it would have wanted buck. Would have wanted it to be 30 years ago.
Barry Bloom 14:01
I think it is now. I mean, I think that they’ve just made a decision that they’re going for it because, you know, they’ve signed, they’ve gone out and signed big money players. I mean, look at corporate. And Scott Burris came to to to Ken Kendrick, and said, You know, I’ve got a picture here, who lives here, wants to play for the Diamondbacks. What, what can we do to make that happen? And, and they were not in the market for that kind of money to spend on a pitcher, and they were able to work out with some deferred money. And, you know, a walk away after two years that, you know, they could, they could afford to, like, allocate $200 million for a guy like him, and then put him somewhere in the rotation, which is already pretty good. I mean, they’ve got as deep a rotation as the Dodgers do for that kind of franchise with in this market that that. It’s pretty incredible. So and Ken Kendrick, the owner, has always said, hey, if we make money, we’re always going to put that money back into the franchise. We’re not going to make it. We’re not going to keep any of that money. So evidently, now, you know, with coming off the World Series Two years ago, they had the highest growth in attendance in Major League Baseball last year. You know, their season ticket base is really good that even though they lost their television contract, they’ve made up all but 30% of it through their MLB TV deal. And so, you know, they’ve, they’ve extended out a lot of their young players. They just extended out Marte again. They they had originally, you know, extended Corbin Carroll. You know it, you know they’ve just decided to go for it and compete. And you know, God bless them, because you don’t know how it’s going to work out with injuries, you know. And you know right now, they’re they’re 500 team, but it’s early, and you have the other three padres, Dodgers and giants that they have to compete with
Nestor Aparicio 16:09
all year. Well, if the Orioles were the rocket ship that they were two years ago, and just get to a World Series and fall flat or whatever, the Orioles haven’t won post season games in these years where they have been a regular season rocket ship, and then rushman fell apart last year. The pitching fell apart last year. They didn’t hit the ball in October last year. And then the new ownership settles in and spends all of this money on remnant one year pitching, but they don’t have any money on the books next year, and they have this flood of Hall of Fame potential players, maybe the likes of what we haven’t seen in a decade, maybe with the Cubs, back when they were on the front end of Rizzo and those guys there, and Anderson holiday, westburg Houser now hurt with the thumb injury, but you know, even mayo and beside you at The at the at the AAA level, saying their top 20 prospects in the game, they figure to field some level of an all star team here, not before too long. And a lot of these guys not even arbitration eligible for a few years.
Barry Bloom 17:15
Yeah, well, they’ve got $40 million committed already for next year, and that’s near the bottom of the league. So they’ve got a lot of places where they can, you know, there’s room to move, and it really a lot of this is going to depend on, you know, where MLB is going with its labor contract, where MLB is going with the revenue sharing on regional sports networks, and how they can convince the big market teams that you can that you mentioned earlier, Yankees, Red Sox giants, you know, dodgers, that basically, it’s, it’s essential for them to share their own, you know, regional television money off their network with the rest of the major leagues. For the survival of the major leagues, you
Nestor Aparicio 18:08
better bring Pete Rozelle and art mode del back to negotiate that, like the merger,
Barry Bloom 18:12
yeah, well, they should have done that, that in 1960 and they wouldn’t have had that problem. So, you know, it they were, they didn’t have that kind of foresight in Major League Baseball. I mean,
Nestor Aparicio 18:23
well, Barry, you’ve been covering this 50 years. It’s never even been even on the table or close or even talked about, not when the Orioles were poppers in the 70s, or the rich guys in the 90s, when Angelos took over, or then the self inflicted poor guys that they’ve become now with the Washington team being here that you know all along, if always, would have been a great idea to have a floor and a ceiling, or what the NHL went to war over and the NBA went to war over, which is, if we have a cap, the players will all make more money, and the teams will all do better. And baseball, really, every time we talk about it. It’s the original sin, really, for basically,
Barry Bloom 19:05
I’m getting back to first of all, the Orioles had their best era in their history before free agency. It was the 60s and early 70s where they were really, you know, great at it and assembling teams. Well, they
Nestor Aparicio 19:20
were the first ones to get picked apart in the mid seven the mid 70s, when it happened, right? Everything was under their control. I had talked to sensei on two weeks ago talking about it, right? So,
Barry Bloom 19:29
you know. But the you know, the fact is that if you looked at the the market, television markets back in the 60s, when some owners didn’t even want to broadcast their TV games locally because they thought it would, it would, it would kill their gates. If Major League Baseball had said at the time, we’ll give you $2 million and we’ll take over your market, I think most of the teams in baseball before expansion, you get to say 19 six. 61 and then, you know, basically you buy all the markets. They wouldn’t have had this trouble. It would have been what Pete Rose, Pete Rizal did with the NFL before the merger, before anything. He said, Let us take care of this, and we’ll take care of your market. And that was the key thing they ever did. All the rest of it is dressing on what happened with the NFL. So you’re basically that’s where baseball started, and then the absolute proclivity by the owners in the Marvin Miller era, when basically they hired him to basically put some strength into the baseball union the proclivity of of trying to maintain the reserve clause godless regardless of anything that killed them.
Nestor Aparicio 20:54
Well, I go back to Kurt flood and Andy Messer Smith and all of that. But then we take it to where we are right now, which is we’ve got a new owner here. He has professed his wealth and want to win and desire to win, and how much is enough, and every time I get Luke on the show, we’re spending his money right. We need more relief pitching. We just spend more money, invest more like it really can be a bottomless pit, if Mr. Rubenstein so chooses for it to be maybe the way Seidler did in in San Diego, or the way the Tigers really were run with the Little Caesar’s Empire for a long, long time, to just say it is a civic trust. It’s not like a normal business. But if the Orioles are trying to run this nut on nut, I really do wonder where the money’s coming from Barry, because it’s not going to come from big business here. It’s not coming from big money ticket holders and leather seats buying home plate the way it is in Toronto, where I saw it last week, or New York, where there’s a lot of money. And then the whole notion of this, the future of streaming rights revenue, and what an Oriole fans investment is going to be to have the games on their screen and or Apple TV on Friday nights and all the breakups of all this. Everybody I talked to smart about baseball doesn’t believe that they really know what they’re doing, and I think that that’s probably to some degree why people don’t want to spend a whole lot of money guys new to it, like Rubenstein, because I don’t think they look at 2930 31 five years from now and and know that there’s revenue there. I mean, the ESPN broke, a breakup happened that if they have to go out and sell this door to door and only get baseball fans to fund it the way hockey had, inevitably, hockey had to go sing for its supper, and in places like Phoenix, it didn’t work. I worry about baseball in smaller places, and I not just the ability to compete, but I see now crazy college sports has gotten and how quickly it’s all happened, and I worry for whatever’s going to happen with this Tampa Bay franchise and the Vagabond A’s that are moving around, because at some point they need to find money in a fan base in order to survive, and they’ve been looking for that in Tampa for 30 years. Man,
Barry Bloom 23:06
well, you know, they, they are the revenue recipients, revenue sharing, Kings of rep, of revenue sharing. And they, you know, the rates have lived on that for years. So have the A’s. The A’s are just starting to spend some of it for the first time. So, you know, there’s a lot of money in the game, and I’m convinced that there’s not an owner in the game that that has, doesn’t have the money, either through their own resources or their revenue, to be able to build a good team. You know, it’s just what they choose to do what they don’t choose to do. And, you know, there are the their argument has always been, hey, go to the union and get the union to help us out. So we’re going to try and, you know, we’re going to jam a salary cap down your throat again, just like we’ve tried for 50 years, instead of coming up with an idea of saying, Look, we want a salary cap and a floor, this is what we’re going to give you for it. This is how to your point. It’s going to benefit you. All your people, in your union, we’re all going to make money off of this. You know, rather than, excuse me, just try to storm our strong
Nestor Aparicio 24:26
Barry Bloom is here. He is with sport to co you can follow his workout covering Major League Baseball as well as the business of sports. Nobody is more astute and has been covering it longer and through all of the wars of Bowie Kuhn and Marvin Miller and reserve clauses and the things just roll off of his tongue, um, the one thing I would say for the future and for things like massen and the money that it poured off for the Angelos family, that it’s now sort of a dried up, well, especially cable revenue, and I mean, the Orioles, one of three teams that don’t have you. Know, it’s streaming in market. It’s messy. Do you have the confidence that Rob Manford knows what he’s doing in regard to this? They even that they even know what they want their outcome to be in baseball?
Barry Bloom 25:15
I’m in the frame of mind now that, I mean, Manfred is going to be around for only three more years, he’s got the one more collective bargaining that you know, basically they’re going to try and get through without doing too much more damage. And then my hope is that Major League Baseball goes out and gets a CEO, entertainment business guy who’s going to take over, somebody who can react and interact regularly with the media, with the other owners, and be able to move the sport forward. I just don’t think that. You know, I have a lot of respect for Rob, and I’ve known him, and I’ve worked with him for 20 years, but I just don’t think at this point, I think the group of labor lawyers that they have who are in control of of the commissioner’s office. I don’t think you’re going to move much further along the way with those guys anymore, and so basically it’s just, let’s see what Rob can do on an interim basis here. But I don’t think anything’s going to really change it till you get new commissioner.
Nestor Aparicio 26:20
There’s been a level of arrogance here that I’m writing about this week, where this young lady from Seattle has come over to run the team. There are a whole lot of former Angelo’s people still very much buried within the framework of the warehouse. They’re trying to talk about change and shift. They’re getting all this money. They’ve moved the left field wall out. They moved it back in, um, they fixed the sound a little bit in the stadium. Amongst other things, they’ve obviously spent a lot more money on baseball players, at least in the near short term, with the pitching and the players they have. But the thing that that it lacks for me being a sophisticated guy who’s done this on the radio for 35 years and done nothing but talk to people like you about it is, I’m looking for the overall strategy top down, for baseball, for the Orioles, for Rubenstein, for this organization, to give some semblance of a public strategy and to gain some level of consumer confidence. Other than I love boogs barbecue. I’ve been an Oriole fan forever. I’m with you when I can’t get the games on my phone, when the MLB TV goes down on opening day, they don’t have enough gerbils and hamsters in the in the machine to make it run this Friday night. Disgrace Barry, I went Toronto two weeks ago Opening Day weekend, and Luke went to the game, and I didn’t go to the game that night. They were giving away some jerseys to kids, or Bucha jersey or whatever. And I thought like I could stay in my room and watch the game. The reason I saw Utah playing hockey was because the Blue Jays and Orioles weren’t on TV. They weren’t on in any bar in Toronto. They weren’t on in any bar in Baltimore because they were on Apple TV. And I’m thinking to myself, How in the world can they even look in the mirror and say they’re trying to grow the sport when I’m in a cosmopolitan city and it’s Game Two, and people have no access to the game unless they want to, like, sign up for some new mafia to be involved in it. And I just think that’s not a 56 year old squawky guy talking to a guy who might be 57 or 58 or squawky. That’s talking to 23 year olds are just saying, I watched the hockey game. I watched the basketball game. I’ll go without I’ll do what me and my wife just do when they put the peacocks on the NFL. We just don’t watch it. And I, yeah, I love sports, but I don’t know what they’re doing or how they’re managing it, and for me to sell it on a day by day basis, and talk to very astute people like yourself, and none of us really can even parrot what the strategy might even be, because I don’t. And the more fellas like you I talk to, yeah, we’re going to stream something, and people will pay for it, and they’ll be my I don’t know where all that’s coming from, because I don’t know who these people are, because every time they offer me something new to pay and buy, I get real skeptical about giving them my credit card. I think a lot of other people do too.
Barry Bloom 29:14
Yeah, I think there’s just a lot of variable ways of viewing sports these days. And you know, the Ulta cocas, like us, are basically having to adjust to it. And, yeah, I mean, I think it’s kind of crazy that you decided to stay in in your hotel room and not go to a game, when you could have gone to the game, even if you had to buy a ticket. I
Nestor Aparicio 29:36
had a blister on my heel. I bought a ticket the first day. Well, okay, I mean, I walked around the Skydome long enough to get a blister on my ear,
Barry Bloom 29:45
got an Apple TV game on a Friday night. Yeah, and I wasn’t doing
Nestor Aparicio 29:49
that. I ain’t paying under 599, or whatever, getting my credit card.
Barry Bloom 29:52
But that’s baked into the whole, you know, repertoire of the of the television contract through the whole season. You know. Yeah, some days you have, like, box, some days you have TBS, well, it’s just
Nestor Aparicio 30:04
baked into be watching less baseball. You know what? I mean, like, like the other night the Orioles had,
Barry Bloom 30:09
and you’re not going to spend, you know, like, $100 a year to watch, watch it on MLB TV either. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 30:16
in market, you wouldn’t get it so, you know? So I, let me just say this the other night, and the orals have been, Katie Griggs has been on all of their properties talking about their Birdland value menu, $5 beers, five, you know, $3 this, $5 that, and all that. And then I went, and there’s nobody at the games, right? I mean, they everybody was their opening day. I i paid 50 bucks to walk around on opening day. I paid to get in. Then on Wednesday, and they played a Thursday afternoon game here, there’s nobody there, and the Red Sox are in town. There not any Red Sox fans there. And I went to go online to buy ticket, tickets for like, 32 bucks to get in. And I’m thinking to myself, well, I mean, the $5 beers are nice and all, but if you don’t get my 30 for the cover charge to get in, I mean, they really are in whatever they’re going to get you one way or another, or you’re just going to walk away. And I’m getting old enough now that, like, I just wasn’t going to pay to do it two days in a row. When I did it on Monday, I gave Major League Baseball money in Canada on Thursday, and I gave Major League Baseball money at Camden Yards on Monday. But I’m not doing it every day, and I’m not putting more quarters in the machine, like I’m at the, you know, down on the block in the wrong side of town to watch the games on Friday night. I got to put more quarters in to get the Friday night game. It’s, I just, I don’t, I don’t understand philosophically, how that’s going to be palatable. That’s
Barry Bloom 31:33
how you generate the revenue to put the players on the field. I
Nestor Aparicio 31:38
hear it. It’s not going to be $5 beers buying gunner Anderson, right? So,
Barry Bloom 31:42
and you’re that duplicate the Baltimore experience by most of the lower level teams around baseball, but I can tell you if the Diamondback can do it, if the Diamondbacks can offer, you, know, pass for the season for $45 or whatever they do. And you can sit anywhere in a ballpark that seats 48,000 people on most nights. Then other teams have to come up with creative ideas of how to do it, too. So look, I gotta go because I
Nestor Aparicio 32:12
love you. I appreciate you. He’s in the desert Diamondbacks. Go see Barry bloom out of sportico and follow all things he’s doing. I am Nestor. We are W, N, S, T AM, 1570 Towson, Baltimore. We never stop talking Baltimore, positive.
