John Henry lies about ticket prices, is booed

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

It’s not exactly new information that there is no correlation between MLB ticket prices and player salaries. Baseball Prospectus ran an article on the subject in April of 2003, nearly 20 years ago now. Early 2003 is so long ago in analysis terms that it was two years before I made my own debut at Baseball Prospectus, and three years since I became a regular there. It’s so long ago that the author of that piece, Nate Silver, was years away from being a divisive figure. It’s been known for some time that ticket prices and salaries don’t align like that, is the point. Here’s Silver on the subject:

Continue reading “John Henry lies about ticket prices, is booed”

Red Sox look to act even more like a business with potential merger

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

The Red Sox are owned by multi-billionaire John Henry, but really, they’re owned by Fenway Sports Group: Henry is just the primary money and decision maker behind that venture. Fenway Sports group owns a number of other teams in various sports, most notably Liverpool F.C. in the Premier League, and now they’re planning on getting even bigger by, per a Wall Street Journal report, merging with RedBall Acquisition Corp and then going public. RedBall’s co-chair, by the way, is Oakland A’s executive, Billy Beane.

Continue reading “Red Sox look to act even more like a business with potential merger”

Human rights are political

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one.

If you’re confused about how “Human rights are political” is the headline of a sports story in a sports newsletter, then you missed a couple of items from this past week in MLB. On Monday, MLB’s Twitter account tweeted out video of Giants’ players and manager Gabe Kapler kneeling during the national anthem, and then responded to a fan who wanted to “keep politics out of baseball” by saying, “Supporting human rights is not political.”

You might think hey, that’s a social media person, not an individual with any real power outside of the trust given to them to handle MLB’s social media messaging, so it is not necessarily a reflection of anything, but then Red Sox CEO Sam Kennedy said something similar in response to the enormous Black Lives Matter billboard (in Red Sox font) outside of Fenway Park, stating that:

Continue reading “Human rights are political”