No surprise the two New York City teams are the most valuable in Major League Baseball. What is surprising: fully a third of the teams in baseball declined in value this past year.No surprise the two New York City teams are the most valuable in Major League Baseball. What is surprising: fully a third of the teams in baseball declined in value this past year.
Folks in MLB don’t necessarily take the Forbes ranking very seriously; we never hear much talk about it, and in the real world there’s always a split between what Forbes says and what the market says. (For example: the Cubs, Wrigley Field and a stake in a cable networking is selling for around $900 million. Forbes says the trio is worth $700 million.) And in the end what the market says is all that counts.
But there’s one valuable metric provided by the Forbes rankings: the relative worths within MLB compared year to year and between teams. Under the Forbes metrics, 10 teams lost value between 2008 and 2009 — a third of all MLB teams. The Washington Nationals, for instance, declined in value by some 12 percent, while the Atlanta Braves declined by 10 percent. The Tampa Bay Rays appreciated by some 10 percent.
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