ST. PETERSBURG — Come this afternoon, Tropicana Field's parking lots will be jammed. All 36,000 seats will be sold. Beer will flow. And flow.
But none of that guarantees a big payday for the Tampa Bay Rays.
While postseason play is a bonanza for the players, umpires and even the commissioner of baseball, the franchise itself is at the whim of schedule and success on the field.
There is money to be made. But it might not be the Rays who make it. Not this year, anyway.
"The real value we don't think is going to be felt this year," said Rays senior vice president Michael Kalt. "We hope it will be felt in the offseason in building a season ticket base. Those are the revenue numbers we're going to pay a lot more attention to."
In fact, capacity crowds that might translate into millions of dollars for the Rays in the regular season can return only a fraction come playoff time.
So how much could the Rays make?
It depends not on victories but on the number of games the team plays.
Splitting up the dollar
In 2001, the only year Major League Baseball released such figures, postseason revenue ranged from $519,000 to $16-million.
The spread relates to the size of the market (the New York Yankees made $16-million in 2001), the number of home games the team played (the Houston Astros played only one home game and collected $519,000) and how far a team advances (a seven-game World Series translated into $13-million for Arizona, an exit in the first round turned into $2.7-million for the Oakland A's).
The difference seems logical: The more games the Rays play at home — they are guaranteed at least two — the more money they make from concessions and parking and merchandise sales.
But it's far from the only factor.
For the first three games of the best-of-five division series, 60 percent of the ticket revenues is set aside for players. Another 1.6 percent goes to umpires. That leaves 38.4 percent to split between the teams.
Put another way, of the roughly 36,000 people at today's game, the Rays get the money paid by fewer than 7,000 fans.
The percentage payouts change slightly if the Rays advance. In the best-of-seven game American League Championship Series and World Series, players receive 60 percent of ticket sales for the first four games of each series. And for the World Series, the commissioner's office takes a 15 percent cut.
The city also gets a cut — 64 cents for every ticket sold. Overall, a run to the World Series could mean $269,000 to $280,000 for St. Petersburg.
So as tough as a drawn-out series is on fans, it's great for the team's bank account. Players don't get a cut of latter games of each series.
So while the White Sox swept two of three playoff series during the team's 2005 World Series season, the extra revenue didn't offset the team's extra expenses, Bloomberg news reported.
Rays subsidy to fall
The Rays will also have extra expenses this year, and a smaller Major League subsidy next year.
Besides paying to build an auxiliary press box, among other things, the team paid for a party at Straub Park on Monday featuring the band Survivor.
And because of MLB revenue-sharing rules, the team also stands to lose about 31 cents of every additional $1 it makes this year from postseason sales. That money will be deducted from the subsidy the team receives from Major League Baseball in 2009.
But it's not all bad news. The payback, as Rays officials suggested, could come next year.
After the White Sox won the World Series in 2005, season ticket sales more than doubled to 21,500. Season ticket sales for the Colorado Rockies, which made it to the World Series last year, increased 20 percent. The Rays' ticket sales are believed to be the lowest in baseball.
Vince Gennaro, a consultant to MLB teams and author of Diamond Dollars — The Economics of Winning in Baseball, estimated that the Rockies stand to earn an additional $30-million over the next five years because of their postseason run. Had the Rockies won the World Series, their take might have risen an additional $10-million to $20-million, according to Gennaro.
Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College, said the Rays could expect to earn about $1-million per home game.
"Basically what happens, the further you go, the more season ticket sales you have next year, the more sponsorships you sell, the more club suites and luxury boxes you fill," Zimbalist said. "If they play their cards right, then whatever it is this year depending on how far they go — $2-million or $10-million — it can play into much more than that going forward."
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