MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - 12.19.08 - OPINION - I was asked several times at the Baseball Winter Meetings what I thought about BIRCO, the Baseball Internet Rights Company, which I did a story about earlier this year for SZ ("Keep Your Ball on the I", SZ. 09.04.08).

Since MiLB announced that the deal to create BIRCO was done on Friday, and my shiny two aren't going to cast any undue influence on the proceedings, or give the President of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (the NA), Pat O'Conner, yet another reason to stick a pin in the voodoo doll of me that he keeps on his desk, I will tell all.

The House Wins

There are a lot of similarities between BIRCO and the Las Vegas casino business. The odds are heavily rigged in favor of the house.

To some owners, BIRCO is a strong umbrella that will build their business for "content," whatever that is, on the Internet, and increase their advertising  and ticket revenue.

To others, BIRCO is a poorly conceived boondoggle. The call for payment by straight tiering, where teams in the Triple-A get so much, teams in the Double-A a bit less, etc. was one of the many, many boo-boos in its design.

Triple-A clubs like Round Rock may draw a million hits in a day, but Salt Lake won't see a fraction of that traffic on their website. Meanwhile Corpus Christi or Montgomery might bring in far more than what Salt Lake brings in as well, but they are paid less because of the Double-A class of baseball in which they play.

Hopefully, with the hold-outs largely coming into BIRCO, this contractual oddity will be changed. To even propose it that way, though, just shows a complete lack of understanding of what the Internet is, how team websites work on it, and how teams should be fairly compensated for their traffic.

Since BAM, which, after a decade on the web, should clearly know better, was selling this deal, someone from that organization should have advised the BIRCO steering committee to get a lawyer with experience in electronic media to write the contracts up for the owners.

Then again, how much accuracy was desired? The contract handed to owners for review told them to see their compensation on a Schedule A attached to the document. Schedule A, which should have told them how they would be compensated for signing over their websites, was blank.

Keep your eye on the moving card, folks. Watch that Ace...

Curiouser and Curiouser.

There are a lot of curious aspects about the BIRCO deal and MiLB.com's upcoming roll-out. While they were paying the BAM strong-arm squad to travel around the country and "persuade" owners to sign up this summer, MiLB.com freelancers in the local markets, who had written a lot of the game coverage for MiLB.com's site, were getting the boot. We know, because many came to our door looking for work.

While we were at the Baseball Winter Meetings, a rumor was circulating that BAM had also let go of some IT people on the MiLB side of their operation, at a time when not only was Pat O'Conner promising that all of the sites would be active by April, but some clubs have been waiting a year to get their team sites transferred to BAM's system. I have not been able to get verification of this round of layoffs. The IT people don't call us looking for work, and BAM has a policy of saying nothing about its operations to the independent media. It may not be true, but it was definitely the buzz in Las Vegas.

What would it mean, hypothetically, for BAM to be dropping hands over at MiLB.com at a time when they are about to have to do a massive roll-out by April 1, 2009?

The Blind Mice of Baseball

There is a contingent of owners who are either exceptional optimists, or wholly delusional. They have told me, off the record, that BIRCO will figure out how things work under BAM, then, when they have this thing down, they will go their own way after the preliminary deal expires in 2012.

Sure.

How that will be possible with all of your information trapped in BAM's proprietary software, of which, by the way, the BIRCO agreement DOES NOT guarantee a copy? You would have to build a whole new system from scratch, and then spend a lot of money to migrate the older team content out of BAM's system into that brave new world.

That would also presume, of course, that MLB decides that they can go, BIRCO or no. Bud Selig may act like Pharaoh from time to time, but Pat O'Conner is not your 'speak to burning bushes' kind of guy.

Crushing the NA Virtually

The NA has become more of a gateway than an umbrella. It seems clear that it takes its marching orders from MLB on more than just rules, umpire issues, and player transfers.

If it represented its members as an independent organization, with the intent of establishing BIRCO as the umbrella that it claims to be, how could the NA's BIRCO committee have possibly come up with BAM as a vendor of the service, given their horrible track record and especially without even the competitive bidding of firms out there already doing the web work for baseball teams?

Take Infinity Pro Sports, perhaps the largest player in major and minor league websites in many sports, as an example. Their user satisfaction, from our straw polls, has been many-fold higher than the "customer" experience over at BAM.  Their sites have been designed to allow teams the same or greater level of convenience with far more flexibility to customize their website to meet the tastes and needs of a local market.

They were never considered as the primary service contractor, nor were the other BAM competitors, or even any potential outside vendors who do these kind of sites in other businesses. Why?

I think it comes back to major league control: BAM means money for MLBAM and MLB owners who hold the interest in that company. BAM means money for the MLB owners' ticketing business as well.

Over the last decade of MiLB.com:

• BAM has been terrible at selling advertising space on its existing system. They run in-house space more than 90% of the time in a world where, even if they went to a third-party ad-company, given MiLB.com hit counts, they could have made a lot of revenue;
• BAM has been a poor operator of team websites.  Most clubs that we have surveyed have experienced varying degrees of problems getting things up on their team websites. Many have complained about everything from simple operational problems to major style issues of how their website looks, or the content that it provides to their fans. This criticism has largely fallen on deaf ears, we are told;
• BAM has shifted the focus of every minor league team's site away from the home market and what makes that club unique in it, and has applied a major-league centric prospects-of-interest system that helps MLB far more than it helps the club or league in question;
• BAM's layoff of the freelancers and their obsession with the stats system, which will be a large revenue generator in a stat-driven game, continue to suggest few game stories, less local video, and less of what fans have been enjoying on the better independent websites, because it does not make money for MLB;
• BAM is driven by a leaden bureaucracy heavily influenced by the limited communication skills of its computer geeks, not by real publishers who are trained communicators first, who harness the technology to work for them and the reader;
• MiLB web pages are classic web publishing from ten years ago,  not where the modern web, which will look far more like upscale paper and older video, is heading. Their work does not serve their clients well;
• It would appear that MLB has levied a much greater ticket tax, by ways of its fees from its ticketing network on internet sales in the new BIRCO system, than the current 6% ticket tax that they get under  their current collective bargaining agreement with the NA.

The BIRCO deal has had the appearance of an MLB squeeze play to take control of the minors by way of its mission-critical websites from the start.

The Velvet Slavery

Bud Light and the owners crushed the independent Commissioner's Office, ignored the outrage in the media, and went about their business. They have now crushed the NA, and since the independent media at this level is largely us, there will be little comment, other than what you read here, and  a puff piece in Baseball America, about it.

Unwittingly, MiLB owners have signed themselves into a velvet slavery out of which it will be very, very hard to extract their clubs.

Taking over team websites on the Internet is a big deal. It is part of the struggle between major and minor league baseball over the growing audience of minor league fans. It is about controlling a game that is rapidly decentralizing away from most of the major league cities, save New York and Boston, where MLB plays.

Major League Baseball sees MiLB.com is a conduit to developing television viewers for its new Baseball Channel project rolling out in 2009. It wants to keep minor league fans focused on the major league parent clubs, not the local market teams.

Yet even Stan Brand, VP of the NA, pointed out at this year's opening address of the MiLB Baseball Winter Meetings that the Great Depression did not kill minor league baseball. Television did.

"The advent of television caused massive contraction in the 1940s and 1950s," he said.

MLB is reintroducing television in a big way to win back market share. The Internet, and this BIRCO deal, are the gateway to that push. 

If MLB can go all 1970s on baseball and bring viewers back to their tubes, and away from ballparks, will this  bode well for the minors?

Family confab: 'Do we spend $169.00 for the MLB TV package, or six nights at the ballpark this summer in an economy where money is tight? Hmmm... '

The "closing" of this deal reminds me of Walt Disney's Pinocchio. In the film, Pinocchio gets caught up in the rush of boys to Pleasure Island, a place where they can indulge in every vice. Suddenly the boys are magically turned into jackasses, to be sold off for a life of hard labor.

The whole image is wrapped up in a wonderful irony that the NA sealed the BIRCO deal in, of all places, Las Vegas.

Hee haw, minor league owners. Hee haw.