Maury Breaks Down The Forbes' Valuations

On Friday, I mentioned Forbes' valuation of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and noted that Forbes' payroll figures varied from that stated by the teams. Curious as to how Forbes comes up with its numbers? Curious as to how those valuations have changed over the years? Just curious? Then hop on over to The Biz of Baseball for Maury Brown's exhaustive six-year analysis of the Forbes' valuations:

The obvious finding in looking at the Forbes figures is that all the clubs are in a healthy state these days. Valuations continue to climb, and fewer and fewer clubs are operating under what Forbes sees as operating loss.

What the figures also show is that often times, the clubs that have cried poverty in
the past, or said that they would be unable to compete in the free agency market without considerable assistance by way of revenue-sharing, are, in fact, pulling in healthy profits.

And while one can shrug off that issue by saying all the clubs are making more money, there are signs that the most valuable are growing at a rate faster than their mid-to-low level counterparts. In other words, there is an increasing disparity in valuation . . .

. . . Finally, as mentioned at the outset, Forbes and MLB may come to different figures each year. However, it is clear that until MLB decides to open their books to the public, the Forbes valuations paint a clear picture in terms of trends in the industry. In 2008, when it comes to MLB, business is good.

That's just the conclusion section. There is much, much more there --including some pretty kickass graphics -- so please check out the whole post.

In other news, inasmuch as Maury writes more high-level content on this stuff than anyone, why hasn't anybody (i.e. ESPN, Fox, CBS, Yahoo!, etc.) hired him to be their full-time business of sports guy?