I purposly wanted to keep it low so to make the point that even a very conservative estimate shows a tremendous amount of potential money could have been made. Of course, to pursue that path does mean taking a financial risk and I think Sandy was more confident taking the more guaranteed route of cutting back instead.

I once did a rough calculation and came to the answer for every 160K of Attendance you made 25 Mil.

If thats one is correct then your number should be somehere near 35-45 Mil….

But it doesn’t matter which one is right we are still talking the price of a Pujols in Salary that would make even more money than the 13 Million Beltran got!

Any time. BTW, what do you think of my rough math estimates that $25,256,800 could have been made instead of just $12,628,400 that the drop in attendance cost them?

Especially easy if we had ADDED to the team and kept K-Rod as opposed to having a fire sale to get nothing but Wheeler who hasn’t won a single game for us yet….

You basicaly traded 2011 potential for 2013 potential…
And now it’s 2013, Wheeler is likely yo come up, tell us will we be getting that playoff this year?

Just as the hope following the Perdo and Beltran signings spurred a run on season tickets because everyone had hope of seeing a good team before a single game was played..The WInning also gives the same hope of seeing a good game for a ticket to a game that hasn’t been played yet.

But when you constantly tell fans well be HOPEFUL that in 4 years the team will be a good one they will wait those 4 years to go and buy the tickets because thats when the HOPE says it is worth buying….

What is missing is that August is also one of the best drawing months for baseball (Sept Playoff season excepted), Not every team has a good September but anyone within a sniff of a playoffs will have a great August. no team is mathematically eliminated in August (See Cards GB Atlanta in 2011!) and when your GM comes onto TV and says We aren’t going to win a thing your pretty much telling people to find something else to do in August….

They lost 316,935K in Attendance from 2010-2012…
How high might that attendance in 2010 have been if everyone knew Beltran was healthy and starting off the season? Could have made anywhere from 8-16 Mil more that year. Which would have left them with a loss of around 34 Mil instead of 50 Mil.

Instead they cut 18Mil (and considering what Beltran signed for just 13 Mil) of Salary And they saved a grand total of 3 Mil when all was said and done…

That doesn’t even count what they might have made if Beltran was hitting all those HRs for US instead of the Cards and had vaulted us past the Nats in the standing in Late June Early July.
Put an attendance value on THAT and you see we lost WAY more money than we saved by making decisions based on SPENDING not on what that spending could generate in reveue.

What many here do not get is no one says controlling spending is a BAD thing…You should always try and get the most bang for your buck and purge high salaries that don’t pay for themselves and generate revenue for you…
But thats not what we did…All the Salary we have purged since the start of 2011 has been the guys that actually generate enough income to pay for themselves and more.

You are totally correct in your assessment of the money situation that has enveloped this team as well as the blatant fact that the team was going nowhere even with Reyes and Beltran.

Unfortunately, the “haters” and the so called (LMAO) experts here refuse to accept the facts and will twist statistics to promote their insanity. Before Sandy traded away Carlos Beltran our .500 record was accomplished with mirrors that were going to be shattered because our pitching was horrible. Santana was hurting, Pelfrey was “Pelfrey” and the bullpen was erratic at best. That spells disaster for the last two months of any season.

Sandy Alderson was brought here to save this team for the owners! In retrospect we as fans would be elated if Fred had been forced to sell the team but it didn’t happen and it won’t because Sandy has done just what was needed. by slashing payroll and at the same time replenishing the roster with younger and salary controlled players. By being prudent these last couple of years the balance sheet on team finances is starting to level off. Another year will tell the story as Santana will be off the books and our future stars continue to mature.

As you emphatically stated…the old ways didn’t work and the owners have decided that they will no longer make the same mistakes by opening their wallets for the quick fix acquisitions when the team is not quite ready to compete for a whole season!

Keep up the good thought and comments. Your kind of contributions to this site are why I stay here amidst the insanity that 3-4 know it all guys keep churning out!

Well said too and I appreciate you bringing into it your own personal experience.

If this ownership just showed a respect for the average Met fan instead of indifference by pricing them (more made by less) or treating them with disdain by excluding them from entering half the entrances, blocking a large slice of left field for those in the promenade so to have an expensive restaurant below, escalators that don’t go to the top, etc, we might have been more sympathetic to the plight they found themselves in due to Madoff.

Hi Boomer,

I thought besides division races, there was something called a wildcard.

The attendance dropped off because the team was out of contention. On July 27, 2011 (the actual day Beltran was traded though MLB rules prevented him from formally accepting the trade until the 28th) the Mets were 52 – 51 and 13.5 games out of first. Thats the real reason that Beltran was traded, the team was going nowhere.

But they were still obligated to pick up a heft portion of Beltran’s remaining salary for 2011 because nobody was going to give up a prospect as good as Wheeler and pay the remaining $6.5 million of Beltran’s contract for a 60 game rental.

The problem with you guys who just hit around tossing insults at people who don’t agree with you and insist that if we just went back to the good old days of bringing in high priced FAs is you seem to forget the good old days didn’t work.

On another note, i think some of the people on this site don’t appreciate how much financial abuse the Wilpons have let loose on this team. They are not poor but the Mets are. The stadium built by our “unsophisticated owners” was so mispriced it is hard to put into words. Building a small stadium – with limited luxury boxes – as a shrine to their beloved Dodgers to feed their own ego has left the Mets with little room for error. That SNY is a separate investment shows how owners really view the team. It is a hobby that gets them into better parties and country clubs. Without the Mets Jeff and Fred Wilpon are just another bunch of Madoff enabling real estate investors. This is their toy.
Lord Bud has sent bean counter Sandy to save the sinking met ship….and the torture continues.

Found the attached which only further proves your point and with good explanation as to why 2012 attendance figures are so misleading when it comes to the actual revenue being brought in..

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/sports/2012/08/6385785/mets-ticket-sales-are-looking-dire-too

Notice the author mentions all the emails he received by the Mets encouraging him to go to the ballpark to see Jose Reyes? Even after not wanting to re-sign him they still were exploiting him to sell tickets. Have to admire their marketing – they don’t miss a trick!

Did some rough projected calculations of my own. Remember that estimated $241 spending per fan that appeared in that article I posted a few weeks back (the Mets being the fifth most costly game experience in the majors)? Well, multiply that by 1,310 x the 40 games after KRod was sent and that represents a hypothetical loss of $12,628,400 in which they could have pocketed. But had the Mets stayed in the wild card hunt through let us say early September, it is not far fetched they could have drawn an extra 1,310 fans per game instead (more important games in August would have counteracted the lower attendance that would have come nevertheless those last few weeks in the season.

So 2,620 x $241 per game and that comes up to $25,256,800 that could have been made instead of $12,628,400 that was lost.

Even if the Mets were just an 85 game winner that season, the fact that if neither Beltran or KRod were traded there would not have been such a backlash that simply turned many from coming and just having a good time watching their team play. As the article points out, the attendance figures for 2012 to that date were very misleading as far as revenue was concerned.

Salaries never stay static they just keep going up.

The 208 MIl the Yankees spent in 2005 bought more and better players than thier 206Mil did last year!

At some point bough is going to break for the players…Between the Luxury tax and the cost of average players going up to what elites used to get, the Players are going to start taking less or find there to be no takers….

And it’s not FA that is killing it, it’s a small part of it…
It’s the Arbitration and high Qualifiers that accelerate the payscale and as a result you wind up paying the REAL stars a premium.

SO we are going to get to the point where the average salary in 150M and the top spenders will be spending 250M+, The Luxury tax will have to increase and then throw all those metrics on 20+Mil for superstars or a lot of average players will find themselves out of work…
But something is going to break within the next 10 years.

Avg per game attendance 2011 Start til July 28th (Day Beltran got traded) 32,095
Avg Per game Attendacne the rest of the way 30,785

A drop of 1,310 Tickets PER GAME!
Add up the cost of a Ticket and Food plus Parking….
Multiply by that number and tell me you don’t lose a hell of a lot of money once Beltran and K-Rod are gone!

Now go do the same thing for 2010 as any use of 2009 numbers is skewed by the opening of a new stadium.

TO BE a competitive team or NOT TO BE.

Believe me it is nobler winning rather than losing.