You're 100% right about the Yankess. I find it extremely hard to believe that with their cable contract (worth over $80 million) that they only made a profit of $8 million. When you factor in TV and radio contracts, ticket prices, parking, food, merchandising, luxury boxes, etc., it's even harder to believe that the Yankees made under $9 million in profits. Their merchandising alone is a multi-million dollar industry.
As for pinging, I will add you to my list, which consists of people whose names I remember from baseball threads!
Here's a question for Bud: If all these teams are losing money why are the franchise values keep on going higher and higher??? These numbers are bogus. For example, how much does the owner pay himself. When a media company owns the team like FOX owns the Dodgers FOX can arbitrarily decide how much money it pays for their own right to broadcast Dodger games. FOX can decide to pay the Dodgers $1 for the broadcast rights since they are just shuffling money from the right to left pocket.
I remember reading somewhere that the profits from sale of clothing, etc in not counted in these numbers.