I agree totally with your last paragraph. It wasn’t the business of baseball that caused the Wilpons to lose so much money. Even though the evil Uncle Bernie may have had a bad effect, he was easily outdone I think by the overall economy and particularly the mortgage and real estate meltdown. Businesses suddenly had holdings with reduced values, making turnovers and sales difficult to impossible. Liquidity dried up. Potential borrowers got scared and stopped borrowing. So if the Wilpons were lenders, their cash flow constricted. Yet their obligations to pay back their lenders remained intact and they had less ability to generate cash.

Regarding your middle paragraph, it found support from FDR’s wife. Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote: “We have reached a point today where labor saving devices are good only when they don’t throw the worker out of his job.”

To highlight his opposition to what he considered a Luddite view, one economist said: “Why should freight be carried from Chicago to New York by railroad when we could employ enormously more men, for example, to carry it all on their backs?”

Better, cheaper, faster ways of doing things are good, but they often demand smarter and more flexible workers. Yet these newer ways typically open new fields of business, such as we’ve seen with the development of the computer. The net result is more workers.

And the steps that lead up to that problem with the economy began long before anyone even heard of Bush or Obama.

Good example is the opening sequence from the classic Jack Lemmon comedy/drama “The Apartment”. It begins with Lemmon sitting at a desk doing his actuarial work with an adding machine surrounded by what seems to be more than a hundred others doing the same exact thing. Today, that work can be handled by one or two people with a computer. Won’t get into the business and political crap that also did us in.

But as many of us contend, it wasn’t the business of baseball that caused the Wilpons to lose so much money. Same with the Dodgers. And because franchises have a way of covering up television rights and other sources of revenue – even in a small market – only a few are actually losing money overall. A few years back even the Pittsburgh Pirates made $50 million in profit – thanks in large part to revenue sharing.

The headline reflects how the business of baseball runs the game of baseball. Both local and national businesses are needed for the financial strength to support baseball’s infrastructure. The tickets to go to a baseball game are just the top layer of money needed by baseball. Ballpark financing and operations require huge amounts for the various franchises to remain healthy. What happened to Digital Domain is a reflection of the turbulence in our economy. Yet our national leaders appear clueless to improve the economy.

Only 96,000 new jobs were created in the month of August. The country needs at least 250,000 jobs just to maintain the increase in work age population. In the past month some 368,000 people gave up looking for a job and are not counted as part of the unemployed. Thus the jobless rate fell from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent. (The unemployment rate is a Washington formula for cooking the books. It doesn’t reflect the total number of people, just those currently looking.) The current number of people not in the labor force is 88,921,000. Almost 100 million working age folks are not part of our economy right now! Wow! It’s catastrophic. Digital Domain is just a symptom of our screwed up economy.

Unclear who has the naming rights though (or gets that money). might be the mets to offset part of the rent?

deal was signed in early 2010, so have to assume the company was in much better shape back then.

actually, maybe Jessep knows, but the Mets down own the park. DO they even have anything to do with naming rights or those payments? Or is that PSL or the county (whoever owns the place?)

and anyway, still better than the Astros who got stuck with Enron park!

Unfortunately Ben, MOST(not all) business men are Crooks

Thank you, too.

And that was a wonderful and moving idea. Class all the way on your part!

Joey D. thank you.