Let me Pitch

Several days ago I wrote a birthday note. Upon reading it the recipient informed me that my writing clearly indicated that I have been spending far too much time doing LSAT prep. Given the fact that I must now rely on my writing skills to buff up the remaining parts of an otherwise lackluster application, I figured there was nowhere better to turn than my desultory substack.

Two weeks ago the Boston Red Sox fired World Series winning manager Alex Cora somewhat unexpectedly. Many lifelong baseball professionals including some very prominent ex-Red Sox publicly shared their dismay with the decision made by upper management.

Cora is a bit of a controversial figure in the baseball world. Traditionalists love him. He is constantly showered with appraisal by lifelong members of the media, former players, and big league executives for his “feel for the game” and ability to formulate a positive culture in the clubhouse.

On the other hand, many fans, including Sox fans, find him to have been an extremely overrated and underachieving manager. His lineup construction reflects a baseball philosophy more akin to that of the early 2000s, and he has often times shown the inability to manage a bullpen in late game situations.

The point of the piece however, is not to debate the effectiveness of the former Boston skipper, but rather take a deeper look a few levels up the chain of command, and identify the real issue in professional sports.

John Henry is the lead partner of the Fenway Sports Group, the multinational sports conglomerate that purchased the Red Sox in 2002. Since the group took over, the Sox have experienced their most successful 20 year stretch since the franchise’s inception in 1907, and arguably have been the most successful team in Major League Baseball.

When Henry and the other decision makers in the Boston front office decided to fire Cora this April, he decided not to talk to the media, a decision rather unusual given the circumstance. Over the past several seasons, Cora and the Sox have been far from successful, posting a pedestrian record of 418-392 since 2021, with only 2 playoff appearances and 2 last place finishes in the American League East. This is far from the level that one of baseball’s premier and most recognizable franchises is expected to perform at.

And myself, while in the camp of people who find Cora massively overrated, do find myself defending him.

The 2018 Red Sox, where Cora gets most of his valor from, were one of the best baseball teams since integration. The team was led by future hall of famer and the franchise’s best player since Ted Williams, Mookie Betts. The lineup also featured JD Martinez and Rafael Devers, two players who have also competed to win the league’s MVP award, as well as All-Stars Xander Bogaerts, Andrew Benintendi, and Jackie Bradley Jr., who was probably the league’s best defensive player at this point.

The pitching rotation consisted of three Cy Young winners in Chris Sale, David Price, and Rick Porcello, as well as Eduardo Rodriguez who finished 6th in Cy Young voting in 2019, and Nathan Eovaldi, a two time All Star. The closer Craig Kimbrel, although the end was near, was in the final year of an 8 year stretch that would rival any reliever in the history of the sport.

But most importantly, and maybe expectedly given the team’s ridiculous roster, the Red Sox finished the 2018 season number one in the league in payroll, spending roughly $235 million to field the team.

In 2026, Fangraphs projects the Red Sox opening day payroll to have come in around $196 million. Nearly $40 million less than the World Series winning team, eight years later. For reference, the Dodgers, whose payroll was estimated to be around $186 million in 2018, good enough for third in the league, are running an estimated payroll this year of $397 million. The Yankees, whose payroll was estimated to be 6th in the league in 2018 at around $168 million, opened the season at an estimated $308 million. So in an eight year stretch where the price of everything in this country has drastically increased, and the Red Sox direct competitors have increased their payrolls by roughly double, John Henry’s club has managed to shed $40 million in annual payroll.

In a quote that has aged similarly to Laura Loomer, Chuck Schumer once famously mentioned that “for every union Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up 2 moderate Republicans in the Philadelphia suburbs.” The quote itself, given our current circumstance, should have been enough for Schumer to lose all credibility and his leadership position, but the Democratic establishment really seems committed to let old Chuck cook for a bit longer.

Nevertheless, given the trend amongst white male voters in the 2024 election further to the right, the Democratic party has spent the last 18 months asking into the void on how they can win back rural working class voters. Fortunately for them, I have an angle that just might work.

In an attempt to do my best impression of a Bill Simmons podcast, one day in 2025 I compiled a list of Americans most detrimental to society. I concluded that Dave Portnoy was probably a top 10 pick if you held a fantasy draft in this criteria. In April, he fired off a tweet stating “I have a proposal. If you own multiple teams across sports, you should have to be put to a vote in each city every couple of years if you are allowed to keep owning the team.” Portnoy is a Boston sports fan, and the tweet was a direct shot at John Henry and Fenway Sports Group.

While I will not endorse nor condemn Portnoy’s wish for professional sports teams to give collective voting rights to citizens of their respective municipalities, Portnoy is the bro of all bro’s, and I do think his frustration can provide valuable insight into a growing disdain across that demographic towards ownership groups in American sports.

Now here is where I will defend Cora. Following 2019, the Sox traded away the aforementioned Mookie Betts to the Los Angeles Dodgers for a middling return of Alex Verdugo and Jeter Downs, essentially a bag of potato chips. They allowed Xander Bogaerts, who at the time was probably a top 3 shortstop in the American League, to walk to San Diego in free agency rather than pay him what he was worth. They initially decided to pay the lone remaining All Star from the 2018 World Series team, Rafael Devers, $31.3 million over the course of 10 years, yet got cold feet a year after the fact and traded him to San Francisco last June in a move that could not be explained as anything less than a salary dump. Alex Bregman, an All Star who shared the same position as Devers and was cited as a reason that Devers became expendable, hit the open free agent market following last season, where the Sox got outbid by the Chicago Cubs.

During these years, as beloved Red Sox players left town and the team’s performance became reflective of the dwindling payroll, the fans in Boston still showed up. Fenway Park is the most iconic and recognizable stadium in all of American sports, and it sells out night after night despite the team being measurably worse and ballpark prices measurably more expensive than they were eight years ago. Action Network did an actually rather coherent study of the cost to attend an MLB game for all 30 teams, and the Red Sox came in as 3rd most expensive for a family of four, with the average ticket price cited at $90.

In 2018, the face value ticket price for a Loge Box seat was $115. In 2026 the face value price for the same sections is around $140. During the same period the team managed to cut payroll by $40 million, they simultaneously increased their Loge Box ticket prices by more than 20%, for a team that will likely win 30 games less than the 108 win team from 2018.

Anyone who has been to a sporting event in the last several years knows the price to get in is not where the robbery ends. The price of concessions has also skyrocketed. Yet no one from the Democratic establishment, or any candidate in general, has an interest in making this pitch to the American public.

To be fair, this is not an entirely unexplored conversation. Channels like More Perfect Union and politicians like Graham Platner have done some work shining a light on the extractive behavior of sports ownership groups, particularly in Boston. But the framing has largely stayed in the register of labor politics, rich owner bad, doesn’t want to spend, screws the players. What has been missing is the math that makes it personal. Not the math that makes a member down at the IBEW nod along, but the math that makes the guy in the grandstands put down his $19 beer and do the arithmetic on what he is actually getting for his money compared to what his father got for his.

I so desperately need someone please walk into an American Legion adjacent establishment in Erie County, Pennsylvania and say “You’re making roughly the same amount of money you were earning 5 years ago, yet the price of tickets and beer at the stadium down the street is up 20%. At the same time, the team is losing 15 more games than they were 5 years prior, and the scumbag owner who is making all the money off those increased ticket and beer prices has the gall to cut the team’s payroll by $30 million a year. Then he has the nerve to get in front of the cameras, not to defend his organizational moves, but to complain about the need for a salary cap to maintain competitive balance in the league.”

A salary cap, for those unfamiliar, is an arrangement where owners are assigned a certain percentage of revenue that they cannot spend beyond on player payroll. It is extremely pro owner, but marketed to the fans as a way of protecting parity in the league (“This way the big market teams can’t just out spend the franchises in Cleveland or Portland”). MLB is the only major American sport without one, and the owners who spend the least on their teams and complain the loudest about competitive balance are often some of the wealthiest people in the sport. John Fisher, the owner of the Athletics, is the league’s 8th wealthiest owner. He just sold out the city of Oakland, a franchise with over 50 years of history, to relocate to Las Vegas in pursuit of higher revenue projections, and he consistently fields one of the lowest payrolls in baseball. The teams that spend the most are more often than not among the league’s most successful. The owners who spend the least tend to be the ones lobbying hardest for a cap. Make of that what you will.

The New York Yankees are estimated to have generated roughly $730-800 million in revenue in 2025, while their payroll for the season was estimated to come in at around $296 million. That is revenue of around 2.56x their payroll. For reference, in 2005 their payroll was estimated to be around $205 million while their estimated revenue was $277 million, only 1.35x the payroll. For even the teams whose payroll has increased, the multiple of revenue generated compared to payroll has grown at an even more rapid rate.

The squeeze does not end inside the ballpark either. Those extra dollars alone are not enough for these people. If you are a Yankees fan who would like to actually watch the team play, you also have to pay for that. The team has sold off their television rights to a wide variety of streaming services. While most games can still be found on YES or the Gotham App, their opening day games this year were only on Netflix. Most Wednesday games can solely be streamed on Amazon Prime Video. Four games throughout the year can be found exclusively on Peacock. The May 15th Subway Series game against the Mets will be shown only on Apple TV+, and so on. Morningstar released a piece in March of this year claiming that if you want to watch every Yankee game this year, the total annual subscription cost of all the streaming services you would need totals north of $1,200.

Yet given the increased cost to attend and watch these games, attendance at Fenway Park is not down, viewership of the sport is not down, and the whole while American real wages have been stagnant since 2021. Americans are getting squeezed on all ends of the sports fandom, being asked to contribute a bigger chunk of their paycheck to support teams that in cases like the Red Sox are much worse than they were just a few years ago. All so the already exuberantly wealthy John Henry and others like him can make a few extra bucks per person.

It is a pretty clear math problem that you can lay out to the average American voter. Would you rather pay more money to watch a worse baseball team so John Henry can make an extra $30 million a year, or pay less money to watch a better ballclub and John Henry has to settle for maybe $600 million in revenue rather than $630?

While the legislation to actually enforce a law requiring John Henry to lower ticket prices may not be practical, the verbiage and rhetoric will be undeniably effective. And it transcends sports entirely.

American businessmen will gleefully exclaim that their responsibility is to maximize returns to their shareholders. These MLB owners are showing that. They are also showing that the most effective way to do that is not by giving their consumers the best possible product, but by manipulating other factors to maximize margins and squeeze every last dollar out of a captive fanbase.

One of my favorite ways of framing this to people is by looking at the purchasing power of an American minimum wage worker. In 2026 the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. In Philadelphia, where the Pennsylvania minimum wage is indeed still $7.25, the average ticket price to see the Phillies is $68. The minimum wage Pennsylvanian would have to work nearly two full days to cover the average ticket price. In 1980, the Pennsylvania minimum wage was $3.10. The average ticket price for a Phillies game was $4.50. Less than two hours of work.

For the clown out there who thinks they are so bright and wants to counter with the fact that using average ticket price is not a fair comparison, riddle me this. In 1976 the Pennsylvania minimum wage was $2.20 an hour. Here is a photo of an NLCS playoff ticket from the same year showing the face value price of $6 for an upper level seat. My math, which I am better at than this hypothetical joker, shows that this is less than three hours of labor for admission to a playoff game.

In 2025, the NLCS listed ticket price for Phillies season ticket holders was $135 for terrace level. Nearly 19 hours of labor. So I ask the general public, has your labor become that much less valuable? Has the viewing experience become that much more valuable?

Run these numbers across different sectors of the economy and you will find the same results. We now need to find the candidates who will lay this out plainly to the electorate. Once that occurs, the liberal consulting class in DC and NYC can stop worrying about trying to find their own version of Joe Rogan.