[moe.ron]

Originally posted by KSig RC
Just to back this up . . . many teams run 'dummy' corporations to hide certain areas of profit, artificially lowering the books. Forbes magazine accounted for these in its infamous breakdown of baseball, and found that every team was making substantial dollars. Two of the more famous:

-The Cubs have a wholly-owned subsidiary, "Wrigley Premium", that deals exclusively in sales of premium seats to top games. Since the Cubs themselves can't charge more for certain games, they sell the tickets to the dummy company (at lower face value), then the dummy legally 'scalps' them to the consumer at mark-ups of between 100 and 1000%.

The cash goes directly to the Tribune Co., the owner of the Cubs, but does not have to be reported by MLB.

-The Angels, when they were crying poor, actually had three levels of dummy corporations to 'filter' out profits. Ticket sales, merchandizing, and players' salaries all went through three different companies. Since the reporting was done separately, the Angels could 'hide' everything except gate receipts. This allowed them to receive revenue-sharing dollars, even when they were in the 2nd-largest market.

This allowed baseball to pronounce that they wouldn't survive w/out those dollars, etc etc. Note that since Art Marrero has bought the team, the 'on the books' payroll has doubled with no crying about poverty.

Wow, that sounds like something the mafia would do.