The Marlins are REALLY cheap

When your highest base salary for a player is $5.5 million for a season, you know that your team is not exactly spending money. No one ever claimed the Marlin's were rolling in the dough, but if you think the Marlins' 2009 payroll of $36.8 million is ridiculously miniscule, look back a few years. According to Cot's Baseball Contracts, the Marlins 2006 base payroll was under $15 million. FIFTEEN MILLION. Ryan Howard has only been in league for four years and is already making more money than the entire team spent that year. Hell, Tim Lincecum might get paid more than $15 million next season and he hasn't even thrown 600 major league innings (a team that plays 162 games without any of its games going in to extra innings will have to pitch 1458 innings).

The 2006 Florida Marlins' revenue stream took in $122 million. Where is that money going and why is Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria forcing the state to subsidize the Marlin's new stadium?? I'm shocked that the citizens of Florida are not more outraged that the city is funding approximately 75% of the $645 million new stadium in Miami. If the team wants to cut costs and increase profits by moving the team to a better location, they should do it on their own dime; it's called a business investment.

The New York Times article (the last link above) frames the issue particularly well:

The economic benefits could also prove illusory, analysts say, because spending at new stadiums often replaces money spent at old ones or comes at the expense of spending at theaters, restaurants and other entertainment sites.

Eager to get the project rolling, Miami-Dade issued its bonds over the summer, when the municipal bond market was in flux. The county paid nearly a full percentage point more in interest to issue its bonds than if it had waited a few months. The Marlins agreed to buy the last $7 million of bonds that the county was unable to sell to the market.

As the recession has revealed, some conservative forecasts elsewhere proved too optimistic. In 1996, officials in Hamilton County, Ohio, expected their local sales tax revenue to grow 3 percent a year when they agreed to add a half-penny to pay for stadiums for the Cincinnati Reds and the Bengals. Instead, it has since grown 1.6 percent per year on average and fallen nearly 10 percent this year, forcing lawmakers to consider cutting the schools budget.

“Cincinnati is a smaller market, but it underscores that all these projects have risks, and Miami has to understand in the depths of this recession it may take longer to recover than people think,” said Mark Rosentraub, the author of “Major League Losers,” which examined stadium deals nationwide. Rosentraub called Miami’s agreement “reckless.”

And yet, the Democrats of this country want more government. Go figure.

This gallimaufry isn't just happening on the Eastern Seaboard. The Mariners pigeon-holed Seattle into building them a new stadium a decade ago and are now forcing the taxpayers to pay for essential repairs to the stadium. I guess the city is going to get the last laugh, however, as they recently approved building a strip club next door. Maybe they'll call it The Foul Pole (or Randy's Johnson).

(Check here to read the details of the Mariners contract with the city as cited in an except from King County v. Taxpayers of King County)