Do fans actually like small ball?

One other thing about payroll is you want to look at where we stand relative to the industry. Here is our rank over the past ten years:

2006 9
2007 15
2008 10
2009 11
2010 15
2011 15
2012 16
2013 16
2014 14
2015 23

I predict our 2016 ranking will decline further. In 2017 there will be a recovery. The interesting question to me is whether our decline in the ranks resumes after 2017 or does it stabilize.
 
I love small ball but I don't live in Atlanta. And if I did, I'd only go to see a matchup with a big time visiting team, where someone like Folty or Miller is scheduled to pitch.

And of course, they are not wholly ignorant of how things work, they had to know their moves would instill less enthusiasm for the team this season. Cost of doing business I guess.
 
Heywood said:
Even with a 100m payroll this year we are 23rd? Holy cow how much times have changed.
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We are at $97M. #22 is San Diego at 101M and #24 is Arizona at 92M.

Here is the website I got the data from:

http://www.stevetheump.com/Payrolls.htm

We've been on a relative decline mostly due to the local TV deals. We did renegotiate them last year and the CEO of Liberty made the claim that it would generate $500M in incremental revenues over the life of the contracts. He did not say how long the contracts are for. That detail matters a lot. Obviously 500M over 15 years is much more impressive than 500M over 30 years. The old "bad" contracts went through 2027. I suspect the new "good" contracts go quite a few years beyond that. I suspect what happened in the renegotiation is we got extra revenues in the front end of the new deal at the expense of less growth in the latter part of the new deal. Whatever the details, it has yet to arrest our downward slide in the payroll rankings.
 
Hart mentioned in an interview on opening day (with Jim Powell I think) that one of the benefits of the Kimbrel trade was that we have increased spending flexibility for the remainder of the 2015 season. To paraphrase his GM speak, he said we could either add pieces to help us this year if we end up being in contention or be creative and take on money in a deal that would help the club going forward. My interpretation of the second part is that we could effectively use the $ to buy prospects by taking a bad 2015 contract back in a deadline deal.

The point is, I don't think our current $100m payroll projection for 2015 is indicative of our true spending capacity this year. Watching how they played this offseason leads me to believe that $110m was the sweet spot they were shooting for.
 
I don't live in the area, but I will say that I had MLB.TV last year and decided not to renew for this season. That's partly because we're not expected to be competitive, sure, but the reality is that, even setting aside W/L records, this just isn't a very interesting team.

Re-building years can be fun, but the fun comes from watching young guys develop and take their lumps, finding little victories in their occasional flashes of brilliance. But right now, on a game-to-game basis our lineup includes multiple players from the following group:

Nick Markakis

Kelly Johnson

Chris Johnson

AJ Pierzynski

Alberto Callaspo

Eric Young Jr.

Jonny Gomes

And, yeah, some of those guys are off to good starts- AJ and KJ are raking, while Markakis is getting on base like a fiend. And that's great. But none of them are particularly interesting or compelling figures. If Gomes goes 2-for-4 with a couple RBIs in a mid-July win that pulls us to within five games of .500, what does that mean, really? That performance won't help the team contend, and it certainly has no relevance for the future.

Even when Fredi plays the young guys, you're talking about kids like Bethancourt and Peterson. You want to see them develop, but I'm skeptical either of them (especially Bethancourt) will be significant contributors in the future*.

Our eighth and ninth inning guys are Jim Johnson and Jason Grilli, respectively. Martin's reasonably interesting, but you can only really get so excited about a middle reliever you probably won't see in any given game, and after him the bullpen is just a collection of the lost and the damned.

Now, I would like to see Miller's and Foltynewicz's starts- those guys are interesting and might play a role in the future. Ditto Wood. But Eric Stults is pretty much the platonic ideal of the phrase "Boring baseball player."

There's a reasonable argument that a re-build was the right thing to do this season. But even granting that, there just isn't much to grab the attention right now.

*I like Jace, but I think he's likely a super-sub on a true championship-caliber team.
 
I've come to the conclusion that "north of 100M and south of 120M" should be interpreted as 100M plus one penny. It was a clever line to use.
 
Sadly, I don't live in Atlanta. I'm 6 1/2 hours away, so I can rarely make one with my job. My hours as a journalist are just weird.
 
nsacpi said:
We are at $97M. #22 is San Diego at 101M and #24 is Arizona at 92M.

Here is the website I got the data from:

http://www.stevetheump.com/Payrolls.htm

We've been on a relative decline mostly due to the local TV deals. We did renegotiate them last year and the CEO of Liberty made the claim that it would generate $500M in incremental revenues over the life of the contracts. He did not say how long the contracts are for. That detail matters a lot. Obviously 500M over 15 years is much more impressive than 500M over 30 years. The old "bad" contracts went through 2027. I suspect the new "good" contracts go quite a few years beyond that. I suspect what happened in the renegotiation is we got extra revenues in the front end of the new deal at the expense of less growth in the latter part of the new deal. Whatever the details, it has yet to arrest our downward slide in the payroll rankings.
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Iirc the games we renegotiateD were the Peachtree tv 45 games. Peachtree still had rights to those games even though they hadn't produced a game since 2010. They were sort of "leasing" the rights to fox since 2011 for those games. Fox bought the rights to those 45 last year and Braves renegotiateD the price to those. The other 115 that Fox and SportSouth signed in 2006 are still going to haunt us for a long while.
 
nsacpi said:
The low attendance this year might also reflect a feeling of being mislead or short-changed. I believe that John Hart declared payroll would be north of 100M and south of 120M this year in a conference call with season ticket holders, but we started the season at about 96M and that includes money being paid to Uggla and Quentin. I suppose we could add to payroll over the course of the season and get to 100M, but I think a fair reading of Hart's words might lead to the conclusion that he mislead season ticket holders.
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He said that before the Kimbrel trade. I imagine had the Kimbrel trade gone down earlier in the off-season, we would have spent a bit more money, particularly on the rotation.
 
Carp said:
He said that before the Kimbrel trade. I imagine had the Kimbrel trade gone down earlier in the off-season, we would have spent a bit more money, particularly on the rotation.
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That's a good point. Before the Kimbrel trade, payroll was going to be 104M. We would have ranked 20.
 
while I think trading away several fan favorites is a factor, remember the Braves usually do not pull well until school lets out, add to that, that so far, only 2 series have been played at home over a weekend. If you take the 6 games played at home on Friday Saturday and Sunday, the average for those 6 games in 33,428. Which is much better than the 22,000+ of all games.
 
depley said:
while I think trading away several fan favorites is a factor, remember the Braves usually do not pull well until school lets out, add to that, that so far, only 2 series have been played at home over a weekend. If you take the 6 games played at home on Friday Saturday and Sunday, the average for those 6 games in 33,428. Which is much better than the 22,000+ of all games.
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While that's true the Braves are still -6,137 per game through the first 16 games of the year compared to last year which is the largest dropoff for any team in baseball to this point. Attendnance is horrible and I doubt it gets much better.
 
thewupk said:
While that's true the Braves are still -6,137 per game through the first 16 games of the year compared to last year which is the largest dropoff for any team in baseball to this point. Attendnance is horrible and I doubt it gets much better.
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From the AJC article half of that drop is based on 1 less weekend series. Its still not good but the numbesr are not indicative of the true drop in interest.
 
thethe said:
From the AJC article half of that drop is based on 1 less weekend series. Its still not good but the numbesr are not indicative of the true drop in interest.
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You can spin it however you want. The Braves currently have less fans per game comapred to last year then any other team in baseball. It's bad and people shouldn't be that surprised. The team got gutted and ownership told the fans we will compete in 2017 when we move to a new stadium. See you then.

Attendnace is going to be a problem this year. Braves will be near the bottom of the league. I mean Braves fans didn't show up to games when the team was winning. You know they won't show up when they are expected to lose.
 
Heywood said:
Iirc the games we renegotiateD were the Peachtree tv 45 games. Peachtree still had rights to those games even though they hadn't produced a game since 2010. They were sort of "leasing" the rights to fox since 2011 for those games. Fox bought the rights to those 45 last year and Braves renegotiateD the price to those. The other 115 that Fox and SportSouth signed in 2006 are still going to haunt us for a long while.
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Yeah, that's how I remember it too. The previous deal was bad enough that the 45 game re-up is probably a pretty meaningful revenue increase, but we'll never know the exact numbers.

We'll have a better read on actual 2015 attendance and payroll later this Fall and will be fun to revisit this to see how wrong my guesses were. :Bowman:

One of the biggest unknowns on payroll right now is which guys will hit performance bonuses. I budget for this conservatively in my current estimate of $100m, but some of the possible outlays are considerable. For instance, Grilli can earn up to $4.4m in performance bonuses this year alone. Remains to be seen how much of that pool he'll earn (and with which team), but it's something for which the Braves have to budget.
 
Seing as how the Braves traded so many good/expensive players and knew they would suck this year, why not lower ticket prices accross to the board to compensate?
 
It's funny how an offence that is supposed to be mediocre at best, makes good pitching look mediocre and prevents mediocre pitching from putting up Nolan Ryan/Steve Carlton/Greg Maddux/ type outings.
 
HR are important in modern baseball if you want to win. If you go back and look at the division winning and WC teams all the way back to 1990, you will see that almost always a winning team is league average or better when it comes to HR hit. Of course there are anomalies along the way, but they mostly reside in pitching friendly parks located in pitching friendly divisions (San Francisco) or caught lightning in a bottle in a terrible division.

But, HR are not the only consideration. You can lead the league in HR hit and lead the league in HR allowed and/or poor defense and still finish last. You can establish a line up with no balance full of SO and poor averages and OBP and fail as well.

Hart's plan is obviously pointed to 2017 no matter how much he says he expects to contend today. And that's ok. However, while the pitching acquired may play well in 2017, I don't see much in the system that will provide the bats (with power) needed in 2017 and that's concerning.
 
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