Another example that signing big free agents helps the ball club at the gate:

In the week following Feb. 7, when tickets went on sale, the Orioles sold 1,200 new season ticket packages. That adds up to about 60,000 tickets and already puts the club near the amount sold for all of last season. In the next week, overall ticket sales will approach 1 million, Brightman said.
Meanwhile, the season ticket renewal rate is almost double that of last year, and the number of new season ticket sales is more than double that of last year.
Interest in tickets has been so high the team had to hire temporary staff to handle the call volume, said Don Grove, senior director of sales and fan services.
“The phone volume is out of control,” he said. “The level of interest is comparable back to when the team was in the playoffs — of the big years when there was a lot of Cal events going on.”

When free agency first hit baseball, some people thought it would destroy the game. Instead, fans wanted to come out and see what these high priced players could do, and interest in the game (and revenue) grew. Once again, fan interest is following the movement of the big names (and salaries).

There are lots of great posts over at Doug’s Business of Baseball Blog. Start here and keep scrolling.
To comment on a couple of Doug’s posts, I find it interesting that in the article on the Minnesota stadium proposal, the extended tax isn’t a new tax. The tax was going to disappear. As a voter, I would be upset if a politician tried to pull that on me.
Doug also comments on HBO’s Milwaukee’s Best which aired the Brewer’s dirty laundry. Doug doesn’t believe the Brewers management has been corrupt of venal, just imcompetent. I say, why not all three?

The Bench Coach links to an interview with Paul DePodesta on Baseball America, and comes away with the impression that DePodesta will be more flexible in drafting high school players than the Oakland A’s were. I found something very interesting in the article also (Emphasis added):

Whether Los Angeles outdrafted Oakland in the last two years and has a better farm system?we rank the Dodgers second, the A’s 17th?is, for now, a subjective opinion. DePodesta prefers cold, hard facts.
Which is fine with White. He believes in analyzing data from past drafts to find ways to do his job better. The Dodgers have done studies similar to the one Baseball America did last spring, which showed that high school picks yield a higher percentage of above-average big league regulars and stars than college choices.
“Paul likes research and reasons, and I’m into statistics and analysis too,” White says. “He’s open if you can prove to him what you’re saying is accurate. I’ll have information to show him.”

Now, the draft is not one of my strong points, but the way I understand the research I’ve seen, is that it’s perfectly fine to draft position players out of high school, but high school pitchers are a huge risk. In general, the younger a hitter is when he gets to the majors, the more likely he is to have a terrific career. But pitchers seem to do better in the majors when they’ve gone through college. So it’s perfectly reasonable to have a mixed draft strategy.

Dave Metz of Talking Baseball has a much more complete look at why ticket prices are going up. (Here was my brief take on the subject.)

Juan Vilafane makes, I believe, a flawed argument in his comment to this post on baseball economics:

I’m a yankee fan, but what there doing is ridiculous. when does the roof come in to play? higher team salaries mean higher ticket prices. Higher ticket prices mean less and less middle and poor people being able to attend games. that cant be good after all there is a hell of a lot more middle class and poor people than there is rich. isnt there? put a 100 million dollar cap for every team and bring prices down. after all how many good to great games have you seen since teams began passing the 100 million mark?

Juan has this backward. Higher salaries don’t drive ticket prices higher. Higher ticket prices drive salaries higher. And what drives ticket prices up? Higher demand. As long as the Yankees are drawing over 3 million fans a year, their ticket prices seem about right to me. If the Yankees were to cut the payroll to $100,000,000 and still have a winning team, they would not cut their ticket prices one bit. There is no reason to do so. They would just make more money. It seems to me the Yankees make so much money that they can just concentrate on winning. Lower ticket prices with the same demand would just mean the scalpers would make more money.