Market Research Implementation Plan Essay

This project investigates how salary and performance of offensive players in Major League Baseball are linked. We believe this is an interesting problem because it is traditionally believed that professional athletes play with hopes of earning a high salary, yet it often seems a batter’s performance is not linked to their salary (Jensen). Therefore, it seems as if the link between a player’s performance and their salary is different than their true performance. Performing a statistical analysis of this conundrum will give us great insight as to if it is accurate to say that performance changes salary drastically. Studies that prior statisticians have done differ from this study because their studies focus on salary and team performance rather than on the performance of individual players (Jane). Our study focuses on salary and individual performance in the current season. While there is extensive data on both game performances in the MLB and salaries, we can contribute to the statistical community by comparing how salaries are affected by different performance indicators for randomly selected individual players. Essentially, our hypothesis is an examination into how a batter 's game performance affects salary. We expect that the better a player’s statistics are, the higher their salary will be.

Having been tasked with developing and implementing a comprehensive marketing and promotional strategy for the Staten Island Yankees, the Class-A short season affiliate of Major League Baseball's famed New York Yankees, the first priority would be to conduct a thorough appraisal of the organization's current situation. Playing within the confines Richmond County Bank Ballpark, a 7,171-seat waterfront stadium on the northernmost tip of Staten Island, the team recorded a total attendance figure of 192,568 in the 2011 season. This figure means the average Staten Island Yankees game drew only 5,663 fans, or just 79% of the ballpark's capacity, which is unacceptable to say the least. Last season was even more disappointing in terms of local support for the team, and as the Staten Island Advance recently reported "Staten Island has seen an estimated 30 percent drop in reported attendance from a year ago, dipping to 3,934 fans per game through the first 22 home contests compared to 5,663 per game during the 2011 season" (Waggoner, 2012). After a 30-45 finish in last year's regular season, in conjunction with the MLB Yankees roster deterioration over the last offseason, it is reasonable to expect a decrease in attendance similar to the 30 per cent loss seen last year unless a concerted effort is made to revitalize fan support and rebuild the Staten Island Yankees brand. The following sales and promotional strategy report will

Teams with large payrolls routinely win at a higher rate than teams who cannot afford to spend the massive amounts of money other teams do. For example, in the last fifteen years the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, two teams which regularly are among the highest spending teams in baseball, won on average 94.7 and 86.8 games respectively. By comparison, the San Diego Padres and the Kansas City Royals, two teams who are not able to compete financially with teams with deeper pockets, won an average of 77.1 and 71.6 games respectively in that same time span (Major League Baseball). This disparity in season wins is a direct cause of Major League Baseball’s lack of a salary cap. Over the course of a 162 game season, teams with higher payrolls, and therefore better talent on their roster, will prevail more often than

He states, "This is not about stupidity, it is about what is fair in baseball, and what is not. It is about the overall appeal of the national pastime. It is about caring, interest, and most of all, competition. Right now, there is very little of any of these components outside of the 212 area code." Most importantly, he explains why baseball needs a salary cap by saying "it is the only way to put constraints on what the Yankees are doing and to return the sport to the interesting and suspenseful form of sporting entertainment it once used to be." The Yankees are at an unfair advantage all across the league, and nobody, not Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, or perhaps even Los Angeles, can acquire talent the way they can. The only way to prevent them from doing so is to put a cap on how much they can pay their entire team.

There’s always some people hating on the fact that MLB players are paid millions of dollars, but never have anything to back up how they are overpaid besides saying that it is ridiculous how much their paycheck is. Little do they know, that some of the money comes from fans, ticket sales, endorsements, and how well they perform. There is a lot more that goes into how they EARN that money.

The fans that come to watch the athletes and who pay nearly $20 to get in the ballpark are padding the pockets of these owners. Statistics taken from online site http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2001 /03/30/news/baseball/ show that baseball ticket prices have gone up from $16.67 to $18.99 in just one year. A quote from the same online site http://cnnfn.cnn.com/2001/03/30/news /baseball/ wrote by Chris Isidore says, "Baseball fans going through the turnstiles on opening day across the nation Monday will be paying about 13 percent more than they did last year, according to a survey of prices…The increase makes baseball the sport with the fastest growing prices." Baseball in the United States is no longer America's Pastime. Baseball has changed to a high priced business, where average players make millions and above average players make tens of millions. To make the situation even worse, the dumbfounded owners and greedy sports agents who contaminate the game and the talented young athletes playing in it, control this business.

"The biggest problem is the owners that are willing to pay these astronomical salaries. Until the owners all get together and agree something will never happen." (Zook) There are wealthy owners that can just go out and buy a winning team. The Yankees will always be in contention year after year as long as George Steinbrenner is the owner. He has the money to have a yearly team payroll of around $115 million. So being a rich owner in theory gives your team a better chance on winning in the Major Leagues.

Like you I also wrote about the Yankees and the constant increasing prices for professional sports. The new Yankee Stadium cost $1.3 billion dollars and the average ticket will be approximately $72 dollars. There are 50,287 seats in the new stadium that equals $3,620,664 dollars per game or $296,894,448 dollars per season just in ticket sales. It is crazy what we pay to follow the teams we pull for. Like you said with the Memphis Grizzlies ticket prices high in any professional sport. Thanks for your post!

Summary: In this article, Baseball Almanac talks about the different post-seasons versions that the Major league had. They also talk about how much the baseball players would receive if they won the championship. They created this source to inform the audience that the MLB had different versions of championships games before the World Series was created. It also allows the audience to learn more about how much these baseball players got paid for playing in the big leagues, and how much they received for winning the whole thing. It has great information about the development of the big leagues.

In Major League Baseball the general belief is that the more a team spends on their payroll the more games they will win. With the absence of a salary cap baseball may seam unfair to the smaller market teams who can't bare the salary costs that the larger market teams can. In Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Lewis depicts just how the Oakland Athletics have been winning in an unfair game for almost a decade. The A's are a small market team that doesn't have nearly the amount of money at their disposal that their competitors in the American League do. However this past season the A's won their fourth American League West championship in the last seven years while having the lowest payroll in their division. In

Television revenue is now big business in sports today with television networks paying large amounts of money to secure the right to broadcast sporting events. The Super Bowl (which is the championship game in the NFL) is consistently the highest rated broadcast every year, which allows the lucky network to charge ungodly amounts of money in advertising. The NFL and MLB both enjoy large television contracts although their revenue sharing plans are quite different. The NFL currently receives 2.2 billion dollars a year in television revenue, which amounts to 73 million per year per team. MLB currently receives 340 million dollars per year in television revenue, which is divided up among the teams in a formula so complicated that you need understand quantum-physics and theoretical mathematics just to gain a rudimentary understanding of the distribution structure. These numbers are interesting in that there are less football teams to televise which means that the NFL must garner obscene ratings to demand that much money. Baseball games are on almost every night on a variety of different channels and ratings can be considered dismal when placed in comparison to the NFL. I believe the main reason for the ratings difference is season length. The NFL season is so short and every game means so much that the drama level is much higher when compared to the daily rhythm of 162 baseball games where losing one or two

In regards to a customer profile those aged between 26-35 years old with children, an income between $22,500 to $75,000 would attend under 5 or 2 games per year. They would not necessarily be a baseball fan but are looking for family entertainment. This gives an understanding to motives behind why this market is attending and how to create a market strategy to their ideals.

In the United States, new sports stadiums are commonly seen as a vital part of the redevelopment of a city having a great economic growth with the production of jobs and a positive income builder. After this, the owners of the pro sports teams with millions and millions of dollars of subsidies for the construction of new stadiums and arenas and expect these facilities to generate economic benefits exceeding these subsidies by large margins. However, a growing body of fact indicates that professional sports facilities, and the franchises they are home to, may not be engines of economic benefit anywhere claims Sachse, “. In reality, sports franchises typically account for a very small proportion of the total economic output of the cities in which they reside.” Some economical studies on the amount of income and employment in US cities find no evidence of positive economic benefits associated with past sports facility construction and some studies find that professional sports facilities and teams have a net negative economic impact on income and employment. It just shows that these results suggest that at best, professional sports teams and facilities provide non-pecuniary benefits like civic pride, and a greater sense of community, along with consumption benefits to those attending games and following the local team in the media; at worst, residents

The 10 year contract which Tom Hicks and his team proposed for Alex Rodriguez was one of the biggest ever in the history of Baseball. It was a major Investment decision for the group. The Group had taken over the Dallas Stars few years earlier and spent on buying quality players. This worked wonders for the team and Dallas Stars went on to lead the group. Tom Hicks had a policy of spending 50-55% of team revenue on team payrolls. If that is maintained he always gains an operating profit of 10-15%.

Because there was a rumor about the owners were hiding profits with some accounting tricks. The burden was heavy on Ahern’s shoulders because his decision would effect the ongoing contracts and negotiations. Major league is consisted of 26 baseball teams. Most of the teams’ annual revenue were between $20 million and $30 million.