The business of making money in baseball today is not they way it was 25 years ago. For the first 130 years of professional baseball a good chunk of the way Major League Baseball teams made a majority of their money was by selling tickets. Getting fans through the gate and into the seats well outpaced advertising at the ballpark, or radio contracts, or from about 1990 on – television contracts.
All of that started to change at the turn of the century. While the mid-90’s started to see things change when, at least in Cincinnati, Sports Channel started showing 50+ games a year on cable, it was a handful of years later that really changed the game.