Giants Claim Poverty but Something Smells Fishy

The Giants are claiming poverty as the reason that they won't be active in the free agent market this off season. They are claiming that they need to save up for lean times that may be coming in the future.

I am calling baloney.

I did a bit of reverse engineering of the Forbes Revenue estimate over the last few years and based on what I can determine the Giants are doing pretty darn well.

The latest Forbes estimates are for last season and they pegged the Giants as the 7th highest revenue team with estimated revenues of about $230 million. With last year being a banner year for the team in merchandising and selling tickets my reverse engineering would guesstimate they had revenues of around $250-265 million last season which would put them on par with the Cubs and just behind the Red Sox.

If we take 2004 as an example of some of the World Series after glow rubbing off and assume that this season we see a bit of a drop in attendance and the strong ratings take a bit of a hit overall revenue should be roughly flat from this season with the increased prices canceling out the lower attendance.

So how is it that these teams with lower revenues can afford to have larger payrolls and the Giants for some reason can't?

There is no reason other than the owners of this team are taking the extra cash for themselves instead of using it to put a better product on the field.

Remember that when the Giants fail to resign Carlos Beltran.

Remember that when the Giants don't sign a "big name free agent" this off season to improve the historically bad offense.

Remember that when Tim Lincecum/Matt Cain are leaving in free agency in a couple of seasons.

It is the team's owners prerogative to keep all the money they want but when they go about claiming that they need to have a strict budget and therefore can't afford so and so I have no problem calling it what it is.

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