Competitive balance will exist only when every well-run baseball team has a regularly recurring reasonable hope of reaching post-season play. The path to this involves, among other things, recognizing that the term "local revenues'' is a misnomer. No revenues result exclusively from the sale of a local product. It takes two teams to have a game. Any team that doubts that it is selling not just, say, Yankee baseball, but also major league baseball, is sorely mistaken. Significantly more of the industry's revenues should be as just that: the industry's revenues.
A sports league is a mechanism for producing roughly equal competitors. If 30 widget companies are competing, it is reasonable for each to hope to achieve lasting dominance, and to hope to reduce many competitors to anemia, even extinction. But 30 baseball teams, associated for the purpose of producing, day in and day out, balanced competition, must evolve mechanisms for insuring 30 healthy competitors.
One of baseball's strengths-its long tradition, running deep into 19th century America-has a debilitating cost. Baseball's anachronistic economic model predates the formation of the modern market for professional sports; it predates, to take just one example, the advent of broadcasting. The funds raised from broadcasting could be distributed to decrease competitive imbalance, but the economic model prohibits this function of revenues to aid single teams.
Some people say baseball can solve its problems simply by increasing its revenues. Those people misunderstand the perverse dynamic of baseball's prosperity. Baseball's gross revenues almost doubled between 1995 and 1999. But under the game's current economic arrangements, this prosperity exacerbated competitive imbalance: In 1995 top quartile teams spent about twice as much as bottom quartile teams on players; in 1999 they spent about three times as much.
Fans are tired of competitive imbalance. The owners say they are. So do the players, competitors all: Earlier this year a poll of major league players revealed that they ranked competitive balance at the top of their list of things needing fixing.
Q1
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
A: The majority of baseball teams that currently play are not well-run, which is why they cannot compete with top quartile teams.
B: Larger cities often make more money from baseball games because they charge far more for the broadcasting rights to their games.
C: If the baseball commissioner allowed broadcasting revenues to be distributed to bottom quartile teams, all baseball-related revenues would rise.
D: If baseball revenues were more evenly distributed, baseball games would become more competitive, which would please players and fans.
E: Baseball revenues will continue to increase at the same rate in the future as they did in the period 1995 to 1999.
How to solve this?
A sports league is a mechanism for producing roughly equal competitors. If 30 widget companies are competing, it is reasonable for each to hope to achieve lasting dominance, and to hope to reduce many competitors to anemia, even extinction. But 30 baseball teams, associated for the purpose of producing, day in and day out, balanced competition, must evolve mechanisms for insuring 30 healthy competitors.
One of baseball's strengths-its long tradition, running deep into 19th century America-has a debilitating cost. Baseball's anachronistic economic model predates the formation of the modern market for professional sports; it predates, to take just one example, the advent of broadcasting. The funds raised from broadcasting could be distributed to decrease competitive imbalance, but the economic model prohibits this function of revenues to aid single teams.
Some people say baseball can solve its problems simply by increasing its revenues. Those people misunderstand the perverse dynamic of baseball's prosperity. Baseball's gross revenues almost doubled between 1995 and 1999. But under the game's current economic arrangements, this prosperity exacerbated competitive imbalance: In 1995 top quartile teams spent about twice as much as bottom quartile teams on players; in 1999 they spent about three times as much.
Fans are tired of competitive imbalance. The owners say they are. So do the players, competitors all: Earlier this year a poll of major league players revealed that they ranked competitive balance at the top of their list of things needing fixing.
Q1
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
A: The majority of baseball teams that currently play are not well-run, which is why they cannot compete with top quartile teams.
B: Larger cities often make more money from baseball games because they charge far more for the broadcasting rights to their games.
C: If the baseball commissioner allowed broadcasting revenues to be distributed to bottom quartile teams, all baseball-related revenues would rise.
D: If baseball revenues were more evenly distributed, baseball games would become more competitive, which would please players and fans.
E: Baseball revenues will continue to increase at the same rate in the future as they did in the period 1995 to 1999.
How to solve this?
