Pirates Release Financial Information

I have a degree in accounting, but didn’t pay attention enough to be helpful.

But just think of what that $5 million could have bought payroll-wise. Or the $20 million, we could have had both Jeff Suppan and Mike Cameron.

….when the young players they are now signing and those playing in Pittsburgh begin to become expensive, the team is likely to have an attendance spike that corresponds to the renewal of the team’s winning ways. Increasing attendance will be one source of the funds needed to pay these players. Another source: Some of the money now spent on the draft can be allocated to the ML payroll. A third source: Increasing secondary revenue (from parking fees, souvenirs, television rights, etc.). So, a quick selling of the good young talent need not happen.

A five to six year championship run starting in 2013 is both possible and desirable. This degree of excellence would be impossible for the Pirates if Nutting and Coonelly were following the McClatchifield methods of the past.

if you really wanted to hide money, you can. That being said, I appreciate them making an effort to disclose this information.

   Is bob nutting personal business expenses may come into ? , also a lot of borrowing from peter " pbc" to pay paul " nutting other businesses ’ seems to have the minority owners up in arms. The minority owners have to pay taxes on profits they never see and bob nutting treats the pbc like his own personal piggy bank. I smell a criminal indictment in the works.

nutting should call mark cuban and sell to him. enough of nickel and diming with this storied franchise. cuban may be willing to buy his hometown team after striking out with the cubs and texas! bucsthetrend

The profit for 2007 was $15,008,032
The profit for 2008 was $14,408,249
The profit for 2009 was $5,400,000 (close but not exact)

Three year profit $34,816,281

really…..

wow……

Link to the numbers

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10234/1081949-100.stm

I owe some people an apology, ownership is really a bunch of cheap sobs.

Wow.. this hurts. Not sure what to do or say.

Yes 15 million will buy one hell of a starting pitcher.

lets chat about rational

I smell another meme!

 spend some money so your mlb baseball club can go 82 – 80 and have someone in the accounting office release the record to the press.

the papers , will be the first time the pirates hit anything all year.

The Pirates are operated as a Limited Partnership which means that it must have at least on general partner responsible for its debts and can have as many limited partners who cannot lose more than their investments and who are prohibited from operating as management or risk losing their “limited liability” status. As such, a LP does not issue dividends as stated but rather makes distributions of cash whenever it’s managers decide. Often,profitable LPs distribute cash to allow its investors to have the necessary cash needed to pay their income taxes on the profits of the business. The key word is “profit”. What the article does not state is whether the profits were calculated using depreciation of players—a non-cash expenditure that is widely considered a “tax break” for oweners. In summary, the Pirates are an extremely profitable operation or they would not have issued this cash withdrawal to its investors on both a cash basis and an operational basis.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BBN_PIRATES_FINANCES?SITE=PAPIT&SECTION=SPORTS&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

it’s pretty obvious that they are putting a ton of money into improving the franchise.

It makes one helluva a lot more sense to invest in players and facilities that can help you win down the road than the one-year loser rentals DL was famous for.

I have my doubts that the Nuttings will ever spend the money at the big league level in a few years to help the team where necessary to contend, but at least some good is being done to get the talent in place to eventually get there.

Maybe the Nuttings will “sale” the team when that point is reached.

I’ve been following baseball since I moved to America in 1993, well not the entire season just the playoffs, but I have never heard of this Pittsburgh team. My friend tells me that the Pittsburgh team win 18 games in row recently so I search internet for them, and here I see website that might be able to give me informacion.
Is there team in Pittsburgh? Is team good?

What? It’s no less absurd than any other comment here. His economic policies clearly have created an environment for an American business to be profitable. All credit goes to him and the Democrats. The Republicans, not Dave Littlefield, created the mess we were in earlier this century. Tea party dipshits.

Please take the political discussions elsewhere.

I don’t know if that Coonely quote is particularly ominous. He’s saying “You can win without an $80 million payroll”, because you can even if it is fluky. More ominous would be if he’dve said “We can’t go up to $80 million even if we have to”.

but I don’t see much of a comparison between Bob Nutting and Pres. Obama.

One of the more interesting bits, however, is an ominous comment from Frank Coonelly that “you can win without an $80 million payroll,” as San Diego and Tampa Bay have. Well, sure, you can, but the Padres are a surprise team that has about 40 pitchers playing out of their minds, and the Rays’ payroll has risen to $72 million this year to pay for guys like Carlos Pena, Carl Crawford and Rafael Soriano. It’s possible to have a winning season with a $40 million payroll if you’re smart and very lucky, sure, but good luck sustaining the winning after that one season.

Teams that accumulate young and talented players can win when those players are comparatively cheap. The low-revenue teams will always have revenue-determined budget constraints that limit their ability to pay for the talent they acquire and develop. Their win-sell-rebuild cycle will always be shorter than those faced by the high-revenue teams. It’s unclear at this time the amount of money the Pirates could devote to the ML payroll when the team is winning, filling PNC with fans, selling merchandise, etc. I’d guess the amount exceeds $70M. But we’ll have a better sense of that when the time comes for Nutting to make good on his promise.

He must be looking for more incriminating pictures or commiserating with “sweetleb” on a joint post.

Small market team who has increasingly upped the payroll as they’ve competed. The best thing about the Twins (Very debatable) was their locking up of Joe Mauer. Mauer’s going to have to play his ass off and be very lucky health wise to live up to that contract, but it was still the right thing.

Mauer as a hometown kid, a legend in that St. Paul area for a decade, and an incredibly productive player at a tough position, he was a must sign. The Twins made a statement to the Yanks, Mets, Sox, and all the big market teams out there that there’s some guys that can’t be bought out.

Honestly, if Neil Walker produces steadily for the next two to three years I wouldn’t mind seeing us lock him up long term. Not to compare Walker to Mauer, because one is an unproven 2B and the other is a future 1st ballot HOF, but the principle remains the same.

The next five years, not the past 18, will be the greatest indicator of the direction of the team.

Today’s news does nothing for me but reaffirm my faith in the current front office. Bob Nutting is not an evil baseball profiteer. He and his staff are just smart enough not to make shallow investments in free agency that would make the big club two wins better while blocking young players and restricting draft spending.

I just get the impression that most of the idiots in this city would like to see the Pirates trade for Carlos Zambrano and Kosuke Fukudome. That way, we’d have such a legitimate team! Our payroll would be $65 million, and we’d have 42 wins instead of 41!

The scary thing is that I’m not kidding. People would rather finish 27th in the league with 60M than last with 35M. It’s true.

So maybe someone that is familiar with accounting for LP’s can answer a question. Is the annual net profit calculated before or after the cash distributions ($20M) are accounted for?? I’ve tried reading the articles a couple of times, and it’s not really clear to me which is the case.

If the 20M distribution was taken out before coming up with the 2008 net profit…one could say the Pirates would have had a $34.4M net profit had the distribution not been made. If it was taken out after the net profit was calculated, one could say the Pirates actually had a 5.6M deficit for 2008.

That’s a giant difference in appearance to the fans and to the MLBPA.

KDKA was indignant this morning that the Pirates dared make money. The text for the bumper saying the Pirates finance story was coming up said “Making a profit !?”. Yes complete with the exclamation point and question mark. You’d think that the Pirates had claimed they’ve been losing money. Oh no, wait that’s what people actually think

Then of course on DVE Prusuita opined “Boy if they’d spend some of that profit on the team they’d make even more money”. And then Krenn woke up for a second and backed him up then went back to sleep.

If the Nuttings won a World Series people would still resent them because they’d say he only did it to make more money.

The ownership group and some posters have implied that the owners have not benefited because they have not received dividends, ignoring the $20 million payment for taxes and related party loan repayment, from 2007 – 2009. However this is simply not true. It appears the ownership group is using cash flow for paying down debt and accordingly increasing the equity value of the PBC. It is like getting a $200,000 bonus but using it to pay down my mortgage and claiming that I did not benefit from the bonus because I did not put cash directly in my pocket.

I ran some numbers, but they got too long for a comment, so I put them in a new fanpost.

Is the leaker liable for criminal charges?