St. Pete Times best reporter - lately at least - Aaron Sharockman with this tidbit:
Silverman's sobering financial picture contradicts a report by Forbes, which suggested the team earns about $20-million a year.
But the Forbes projection does not include money still owed to former players or debt payments, Silverman said.
I talked about this a while ago and had the Rays making a ton of money despite the on-field performances.
Money owed to former players? Greg Vaughn's money was off the books last year and unless they mean Dan Miceli's 650K salary, I don't buy it. As for the "debt payments", I'm a bit curious what exactly they are, particularly to cost around 20 million.
Let's go through this one more time, the Rays get around 80 million from all of the MLB revenue deals and spent about 35,000,000 (now around 45 million obviously) on all players in the organization - add in the employees salary and we'll give a real generous estimation that the team pays out 40 million in salaries for everyone in the organization - essentially the MLB is paying all the employees.
There are stadium costs, but everyone has those, and for all the promotions and such there are costs, same with flights, but could they possibly top the amount of money the team makes?
Let's look strictly at ticket prices, from a MLB.com article:
Now let's do the math:
$23.19 x 16,000 x 81 = $30,054,240
The team donates to charity - tax write-off - opened some foreign camps, and did numerous other things, but we're talking about savvy business men who help to run the team - does anyone honestly believe that a team that made at least 110 million somehow lost money last year, particularly when the payroll was half of what the team got from the league?