Let’s help the owners make some money

It’s obvious that the owners are just sitting there like the Monopoly Man with his pockets emptied out. It makes me so sad for them. In our podcast, a few weeks ago, we talked about the lack of innovation and the inability to generate revenue by the owners. You can check that out here:

We discuss some ideas like expanding the distribution of MLB Network, having more national games in double and triple header form, and even using the parking lots to draw in fans on game day, drive-in movie style. Today, I’d like to expand those ideas a little further to see if we can find ways to pay the players’ prorated salaries, which would roughly be $2.5 billion for an 82 game season.

Have a raffle

If we should look anywhere for fund-raising ideas, we should look to the best shakedown artists in the world, the Catholic School system. If you have any friends or family with kids in this school system, you’ve bought a raffle ticket for some bull shit. I mean, hell, we even used this idea to raise money for charity. But let’s do something a little different here. For $250, which is roughly 6 dollars per game, you are entered to get the only 10 tickets to one of your team’s 41 home games. Now, I know what you’re saying: Chorizy-E, that means they’d have to sell 10 million raffle tickets to pay the players’ salaries. To me, that’s a piece of cake. You know how much StubHub, SeatGeek, VividSeats, etc would throw at these raffle tickets? To quote Wally$, sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit.

Prime Post-Season

If you needed $500 and you knew someone who thought $500 is what designer socks should cost, you’d call that person first. With that in mind, the owners should be dialing up Jeff Bezos immediately. Hey bud, you got a spare $2.5 billion laying around? We’ll put the entire 2020 post-season exclusively on Amazon Prime if you can just help us out this one time.

World Cup Style Tournament

You know what the owners would like even more than getting the money to pay the players’ salaries, not having to pay the players. The easiest way to do that is to not let all the teams play all of the games. If you started with Group Play in each division and over the course of let’s say 48 games, you reduce the playing field to 16 teams, all of the sudden that Miguel Cabrera contract is looking a lot better to these owners. In the round of 16, you play best of 7 games, so a 4 game sweep is the true owner wet dream.

MLB in-app purchases

If you’re not familiar with in-app purchases and advertising, you’re probably still rocking a flip phone. But just very quickly, a lot of apps will be free or very cheap, but then charge for additional content or features. They’ll also make you pay to stop showing you ads. The MLB app should be all over this. With no fans at the game, foul balls, home runs, etc will go unclaimed. Or maybe they can be purchased in an auction through the app. Maybe mlb.tv games can be purchased on a one-off basis when someone is throwing a no-hitter or someone is about to hit for the cycle. Just $1 gets you this hot content (you know what I mean). Seriously though, they need to have gambling in the app.

Cutting Corners

The owners can channel their inner Rachel Phelps. Start buying your jerseys from China like the rest of us. Make the teams ride buses everywhere. Give the umpire 6 baseballs for the whole game. If you break your bat, too bad, that’s what you use the rest of the game! Will this save the owners $2.5 billion? Probably not. But allowing Netflix to film this absolute disaster as a documentary might.

Expansion

When Bugsy Siegel couldn’t get enough money to open the Flamingo, what he do? He sold shares of the company that didn’t even exist. What’s wrong with 700 people owning 10% of something? Major League Baseball is in a different position however. They could theoretically add 2 teams for the 2021 season, let’s say Portland and Las Vegas. Price of admission for these new owner groups? $1.25 billion each. Is this how it actually works? I have no fucking clue. But I definitely want to be on the first White Sox weekender in Vegas.

-Chorizy-E