Some tidbits for those readers who are interested in the business end of baseball.

Neil Best of Newsday’s Watchdog discussed how the economic woes will impact

Darrin Rovell of CNBC Did a Q&A with David Howard, the Mets executive vice president of business operations, on the Mets selling out their luxury box inventory.

I wanted to weigh in and give my two cents on this whole thing. To preface, I am not an economic guru by any stretch of the imagination. I do work for a Fortune 500 company and probably have a decent idea about what is going on with the financial crisis.

I don’t believe its just tough economic times that are causing companies to pull back on their sponsorships and create concern about luxury box inventory. The banking crisis doesn’t help, but we are in a far more competitive market that forces companies to cut into their bottom line in order to maintain or grow market share.

Let me use my company as an example. I won’t tell you who it is, but I will say its in the consumer goods industry. This company has a huge market share (50%) and needs to find a way to maintain and grow in a very consumer savvy industry. The way to accomplish this is through new products and competitive deals into the marketplace. Both of these cost money and force the company to “do more with less”. What is their solution? Cutting back on unnecessary expenses like lunches, entertainment, and meetings (you listening AIG?). They also need to evaluate how effective each marketing campaign is with connecting with the consumer. Again not every solution they use is about spending less money, but spending it wiser. We just spent 11 billion on purchasing another company that fits with an adjacency strategy. I think that is much wiser then putting our corporate name across a scoreboard.

That is where the whole Citi Field situation comes into play. Stadium sponsorships are great for awareness but, in my opinion, very hard to measure. How many people going to a ball game will switch to Citi for their banking? Will they have their mortgage or home equity with the bank? Not sure if you will ever know that answer. Sometimes I think having these naming rights is more about luxury and ego than to build business through marketing. I also believe many companies are probably assessing this situation in a very similar fashion.

The economy will turn around as soon as the big Wall Street investors have bottomed the stock market out to their liking. Remember, those are the guys that control stock prices. They will find any excuse to sell out, take profits, and then drive the market down to the cheapest level possible. It seems, based on the Q&A with David Howard, they still plan on watching the Mets in 2009.

I think this whole economic situation will not impact the Mets and Yankees very much. There is a much larger pool of people to draw from and not all of them are having financial hardship. The markets that may be most impacted are those like Pittsburgh, Kansas City, and Milwaukee. Inevitably it will be those towns that will have to make some decisions about what to do with disposable income.

It will be interesting to see if the above situation will impact free agency this winter. Oh, and if your interested, the above Company X that I work for will continue to have seats at Citi Field and Yankee Stadium just like they have for years.

Tags: Citi Field, Darren Rovell, Neil Best, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Watchdog, Yankee Stadium