🍌 The Savannah Bananas Just Made $80M in One Day

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I love how Americans can support investments in infrastructure when it starts to affect their favorite sports team.

Invest in regional passenger rail because it’s a more efficient way of moving large numbers of people? What a waste!

Invest in regional passenger rail to get to the NFL Draft? Do it ASAP!

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: The Savannah Bananas Just Made $80M in One Day

📉 Biggest Loser: For the Padres, it’s World Series or Lose $100M+

🏆 Winner’s Circle: NFL Teams are Impacting Their Fans’ Paychecks

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🗞 The Big Story

The Savannah Bananas just made over $80M in one day, but they already have plan to double that total next year.

Bananas World Tour: The team just completed a nine-month, 26-city, 84-game season that saw it play in six different MLB stadiums and in front of more than one million fans.

For reference, those are better season-long attendance numbers than the Oakland A’s, but the team isn’t stopping there.

Because they just announced their 2025 World Tour, which will feature games at 18 MLB stadiums, with the team playing two games at each location as well as stops at three different football stadiums, including:

• Nissan Stadium (69,143 capacity)

• Bank of America Stadium (74,867 capacity)

• Memorial Stadium (86,000 capacity)

Sold Out: However, what surprised me most was how much money the team will make with this new schedule starting next year.

In fact, I compiled a list of the capacity and number of times the Bananas or one of their other two teams will be playing at a given stadium, and I found that in total, they’ll be able to accommodate at least 2.3 million fans next year — more than double their attendance figures this year.

But that’s not all.

Because if you assume they’ll sell out every stop (like they did this year) at their advertised price of $35 per ticket, then that means the team will make $80.87M in ticket revenue alone in 2025.

However, since their ticket waitlist is already 3 million people long, that means they’ve essentially already sold all those tickets.

Not to mention, the team’s owner has already said that they hope to expand their ‘Banana Ball League’ from three to six teams by 2026, meaning that the $80M figure could easily double again just one year later.

📉 Biggest Loser

The San Diego Padres are going to lose over $100M if they don’t make it to the World Series this year.

Background: Last year, San Diego had the third-highest payroll in Major League Baseball at $256M, behind just the Mets and the Yankees.

However, they also lost $116 million in 2023 after failing to reach the playoffs with a star-studded roster.

And even though they cut their payroll almost in half this year, the team is still at risk of losing more money than nearly every other MLB franchise. So what can they do?

Well, we just have to look at the Arizona Diamondbacks for an answer.

Business of Winning: It’s no secret that if a baseball team makes a deep playoff run, it increases the team’s:

• Ticket sales

• Sponsorship revenue

• TV revenue

This allows owners to (hopefully) re-invest that money into signing better players and making more postseason runs.

But the value of those deep playoff runs in ticket sales alone is actually staggering.

Bonus Revenue: Last year, the Diamondbacks’ miraculous World Series appearance resulted in 336,370 additional tickets sold.

MLB distributes around 60% of all playoff ticket revenue to each team depending on how far they advance, with last year’s total pot reaching a record $107.8 million.

This resulted in the Diamondbacks earning an estimated $30-$40 million last September and October alone, meaning the Padres could potentially cover most or all of an 8-figure loss on the regular season with a similar deep post-season run.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

You could start making less money if your favorite NFL team starts winning too many games…

Background: It’s no secret that the better a city’s NFL teams plays, the better it is for the local economy.

For example, here in Minneapolis, 40% of season ticket holders live outside the metropolitan area, meaning that eight to nine times per year, tens of thousands of people spend money in the city who might not otherwise come downtown.

And according to one study, this can result in around $6 million being pumped directly into the local economy during a given weekend.

But that’s not even the best part.

More Wins = Less Money: Another study out of Clemson tried to link an NFL team’s winning percentage with the per capita income of local fans, and they actually found a correlation — but it wasn’t always positive.

The study suggests that for every win a team has it increases the money its local fans make since their increased morale and self-esteem can lead to greater job productivity and performance.

It outlines that the first win for any team is worth about a $31 increase in per capita income, with the first five wins worth a total of $122.40.

But there’s a catch: each win has a diminishing return, meaning that after the 10th win, each win actually starts reducing per capita income.

So maybe all you Chiefs and Vikings fans need to start rooting against your team for the sake of your paycheck.

⏱ In Other News

• The (Untold) Story of Baseball’s Accidental Superstar

• My brother in Christ, look in the mirror.

• Imagine losing your entire paycheck for this.

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👋 Happy Friday!

Growing up in Green Bay (aka Titletown), I find it ironic that the one Minnesota sports team that actually wins championships is the one team fans have historically not cared about.

But times are changing because ratings have held firm even after Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever exited the WNBA playoffs in the first round after averaging 1.86M viewers per game.

WNBA Playoff Viewership Averages:

• Round 1: 1.10 million (+191% YoY)

• Semifinals 850,000 (+99% YoY)

And now we have the Minnesota Lynx versus the top-seeded New York Liberty in the Finals.

Expect more records to be broken and go Lynx.