Norm in Oregon wrote:

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mpaxisa wrote:

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qutennis5 wrote:

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templeUsox wrote:

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The Steinbrenner fortune was shipping-based. It is now Yankee-based. The YES Network prints money and the Yankees have sold 3 million tickets for the last decade. I can safely assume that the Yankees' payroll does not ebb and flow with the trends of the shipping industry. At the very least, the Yankees are self-sustaining.

and wasn't the new stadium basically a gift from NYC? i dont think they're paying any of that money back (though could certainly be mistaken) and are benefitting from the increased revenue.

Uh, no. They're paying for the entire thing. The only thing the city did was give them interest free bonds, basically a loan without interest. The city did pay for all the infrastructure stuff (subways, etc), as it should.

To quantify it, the break on the $942 million on the tax free muni's amounts to a subsidy of $366 million, money taxpayers would have had in their pockets otherwise. That's an obscenity any way you slice it or dice it. No surprise they went on a shopping spree. And because the Yes network is, just as mentioned above, a license to print money, the subterfuge that they'd leave if they didn't get what they wanted - admittedly a ploy they haven't used in a few years now - is absurd. They would never cut loose from any portion of that cash cow, which is what leaving town would mean. None of that TV money (disclaimer: the Sox are in the same boat but with a cheaper berth since they have a partial share in NESN) counts when the soft cap is calculated. It's easy to see why they'll be buyers in a market that will probably have lots of teams selling off valuable parts.