Phillies 5th-Most Valuable Team in Baseball


Valuable, of course, is a relative team. On one hand, The Phillies are worth $893,000,000, good for fifth-best in baseball, and tops in the National League East! On the other hand, they’re getting way less bank for their buck than they should be. Below is a graph detailing the team’s win-to-player cost ratio, which weighs regular season and playoff victories (worth more) against annual payroll, which stands at $184 million.

Forbes uses a complicated metric to calculate its ratio, but the gist of it is this: The league average is about 100, and the higher your number, the better. That 59 is the team’s lowest ratio in a decade, and a precipitous decline from the 2009 heyday of 108. (The Nats, by contrast, clock in at 127.) It’s unclear that bad results affect the Phillies bottom line, however.

The team’s average rating on CSN Philadelphia dropped, 39%, to 5.6, the sharpest drop in baseball, according to Nielsen. Prior to 2012, the Phillies television ratings had increased for nine consecutive seasons.

And yet as Forbes notes, the team may soon sign a new TV deal that could be worth twice the current one. Plus, the team’s merchandise sales are second only to the Yankees’. Who, fresh off trademarking their Evil Empire moniker, are of course the MLB’s most valuable franchise. [Forbes]