I’ve done my fair share of Randy Levine bashing over the years, but you gotta just love when the white collars have a slap fight:
“I’m sorry that my friend Mark continues to whine about his running the Brewers,” Levine told ESPNNewYork.com in a phone interview Tuesday morning. “We play by all the rules and there doesn’t seem to be any complaints when teams such as the Brewers receive hundreds of millions of dollars that they get from us in revenue sharing the last few years. Take some of that money that you get from us and use that to sign your players.
“The question that should be asked is: Where has the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue sharing gone?”
ZING! And Marchand nicely quotes longtime FOTB Maury at BizofBaseball:
In the initial seven years of the luxury tax, the Yankees have paid teams nearly $175 million in revenue sharing, according to the BizofBaseball.com. That is 92 percent of the total revenue sharing that has been doled out.
Take that!
Jason, Marchand seems to be confusing the luxury tax with revenue sharing. They're not the same thing, as we've discussed. I'll gather the numbers when I have a moment, but the Yankees have paid a lot more than $175 million in revenue sharing, and there's no way the Yankees have paid 92% of all of the revenue sharing dollars.
I'm not here to defend or criticize the Brewers' owner, but the comment from Maury is deceptive. Revenue sharing is one pot of money that the Yankees pay into which benefits teams like the Brewers (among many others). Luxury tax assessments, properly referred to as the competitive balance tax and the source of the $175MM figure cited, all go toward the Industry Growth Fund.
As for that $175MM figure, I wish more Yankees fans would think about it when making the often-claimed line that the team cares about its fans. That total is just $7MM short of the cost of two taxpayer-funded Metro North stations in the Bronx.
Larry: Using Maury's numbers, the Yankees have paid in about $174.2MM since 2003. You can see his data here: http://bit.ly/91wSAQ
Brad, that's the luxury tax number. The revenue sharing number is different. The two systems are frequently confused. For some explanation, you can look at my original guest post here, http://itsaboutthemoney.net/archives/2010/03/15/g….
We only have hard revenue sharing figures for a few years, but in 2002, 2003 and 2005 alone, the Yankees paid something like $155MM in revenue sharing, and the Brewers received about $50MM in revenue sharing. You can find these numbers on Maury's site (sorry, I'm at work, or I'd look this up). If you project the numbers through 2009, you're talking about more than just a couple of metro north stations.
Add to this that Forbes reports the Brewers having earned something like $100MM over the last 5 years, and you can see that Levine has a point.
I promise, Larry, we're on the same page.
If anyone is curious, here are the revenue sharing figures to which Larry was referring:  http://bit.ly/7J0YN2” rel=”nofollow”>;http://bit.ly/7J0YN2
Tyler Kepner has chimed in on this whole issue, and he notes that the "Yankees paid around $150 million last season in luxury taxes and revenue sharing." We know the CBT assessment was $25.7MM, so back o' the napkin math shows the team paid about $124.3MM into the central fund.
We also know that teams put a third of their CBA-defined income toward revenue sharing, though the Yankees got a deduction last year for stadium construction costs. And for some perspective on how much teams can receive when the Central Fund is distributed, the Pirates fot about $27MM in 2008.
Kepner's piece is here:  http://nyti.ms/9IiIW9” rel=”nofollow”>;http://nyti.ms/9IiIW9
Source on Pirates revenue sharing here:  http://bit.ly/rkbLY” rel=”nofollow”>;http://bit.ly/rkbLY
Brad, the only verified number we have for revenue sharing in 2009 is that the total paid out by all payor teams was $433 million. Any other number you see is a guess or a leak.
I don't know where Kepner got his $150 million number, but the same number was reported in the Wall Street Journal in November. It's a very round number, plus it's likely that no one HAD the final numbers for 2009 in mid-November. This looks like a guess to me. It's probably a reasonably good guess.
The $27 million figure for the Pirates is way too low, IMHO. Our buddy Maury at Biz of Baseball estimates that the Pirates received $49 million. http://www.bizofbaseball.com/index.php?option=com… The $27 million figure appears to be based on an email from an ex-Pirates executive which was first reported in the Boston Globe, and the reporting got repeated so many times over the Interweb that it began to look like a verified piece of information. The email claimed that the $27 million figure was leaked to the Wall Street Journal, though I can't find anything in the Wall Street Journal's archives to indicate that they ever reported this $27 million figure. I'd go with Maury's guess in Biz of Baseball over the guess of an ex-executive citing a shadowy leak in his email.
We really can't be too sure of anything when it comes to the numbers involved in revenue sharing.
"Our buddy Maury at Biz of Baseball estimates that the Pirates received $49 million."
What am I misreading over at Maury's. here's what he said:
But, for discussion sake, if we look at the largest receiver of revenue-sharing funds over the life of the data we have (Expos for 2002-2003, and Rays in 2005), we could apply an approx. 3 percent increase from then to now. That would give the team receiving the most revenue-sharing in 2009 (likely, the Marlins), $42.9 million in revenue-sharing funds."
Sorry. Goofed. Doing too many things at once. You're right. Maury did not say "$49 million" for the Pirates. Mea culpa. By Maury's methodology, the Pirates would be receiving $32-$33 million in revenue sharing at this point.
I think he's being conservative. Total revenue sharing dollars increased from about $310 million in 2005 to $433 million in 2009, so if we assume that the Pirates simply retained their 2005 share of revenue sharing in 2009, then they'd have received about $36 million in 2009. Of course, I'm guessing, same as everyone else.