I want you to imagine this: You are a billionaire. You sold your Internet start-up for $6 billion and now you are sitting on, after tax, $3.2 billion. Nice one! Now that we know you’re super-rich, what else do we know about you? You’re reading this article, which makes you a baseball fan. More specifically, […]
Author: Jon Shell
Dear Joe Natale: It’s Time to Sell the Blue Jays
Dear Joe, Congratulations on recently becoming Rogers CEO! I know you’re busy improving customer service, so I don’t want to take too much of your time. And as a Rogers customer, thanks for that in advance, by the way. Big job. I wanted to talk to you about the Toronto Blue Jays. It’s time to […]
What Ticket Sale Data can Tell us About Future Blue Jays Attendance
In an article last month arguing that the Blue Jays shouldn’t trade Josh Donaldson, Jonah Keri leaned heavily on a financial argument: “Losing games would be one thing. Losing games and trading Donaldson could signal to fans that a full teardown is underway, and that the next several years of Blue Jays baseball might be […]
Death to 2018: Future Payroll Implications of a Nightmare Start to the Year
In November I wrote a piece about how important winning in 2017 was to the sustainability of the Blue Jays fan interest and attendance. To summarize: The massive increase in Blue Jays attendance from 2014 to 2016 was matched by only 20 teams in the last 40 years. In each case, the teams involved had experienced recent […]
Big Data, Beer, and Influencing Rogers
Since his arrival, Mark Shapiro has been pushing the Jays forward on multiple fronts. His baseball decisions have been much debated, but we know there has been a heavy investment in building analytical capability in the baseball operations department. Arden Zwelling wrote a great piece about Toronto’s new, highly publicized high performance department, but the Jays are […]