I guess my question is, with everything we have going for us, how do we grow revenue streams to be on par with the Sox/Yankees? How do we become the Yankees, minus ARod, of course.

Obviously baseball is a business. Why do the owners make the decisions they make? Why are they telling us all that they cannot spend enough to put this current team over the top? What could they do to maximize their profit, and grow the value of the franchise? How could they bridge the gap to make us more popular than the Sox?

In my opinion it is consistently winning. But you definitely make good points as to some of the history that may have them wanting to just pocket the excess cash from our WS victory. I really think that is short sighted, and wasting a valuable opportunity that we have, here and now, to make Giants fever explode nationwide, and for the franchise to set new levels of histeria, tapping into revenue streams that we have only dreamed of. Let's be bigger than the Yankees. Everybody hates the Yankees, really. We've got Timmy and Buster to lead us. They've got Alex Rodriguez. I really think we could be on the cusp of something at that level with our team/ballpark/Bay Area. I think we are in the middle of a perfect storm of factors that could lead to a plateau jumping franchise defining moment in our century plus history.

We need our Giants nation to expect to be consistently on par with the best franchises in baseball, and to do this our owners need to always be in a position to put a gold standard team on the field that is going to compete for a championship from the first day of spring, year in and year out.

Sure, we'll get lucky every 50 years or so and have a long stretch of exceptional draft picks that all pan out extremely quickly and become competitive before the highest quality portion of the team is available for free agency, but I think history has shown that to be the exception, and not the norm. And it's the years in between that make average fans question their overall interest in Giants baseball.

To build a good franchise I would think you pretty much have to look at the Red Sox and their ability to combine the concepts of moneyball with a large payroll from top to bottom in the org.

Sure, the yearly profit/loss of a company is important, and when revenue doesn't equal cost, the cost of capital to cover your losses goes up if you don't have enough excess cash. But the value of any organization is in the market cap. And the owners are doing whatever they can, from a cashflow perspective, to grow the market cap of their business because that's how they seriously earn their billions. I know market cap isn't the technical term for a privately owned company, but its essentially the same thing as the overall value of the franchise. And that's where their money, and return on investment, really sit.

So how do they increase the value of the franchise? How do they increase revenue, or net income? Yeah, we have privately financed the ballpark, but you can argue its the highest quality ballpark in the history of the game. Its a tremendous asset to us, and not having to share a portion of the revenue it generates is enormous in terms of what that should allow us to do. That's one of the steps that has got us to the doorstep of becoming on par with the Yankees/Red Sox. That and a fair bit of luck having Tim, Matt, Buster, and the Panda walk in our door. But you can also see, success breeds success. Brian Wilson IS the Brian Wilson we know today because of the 2010 playoffs. He wouldn't be "the beard" without the trophy. That's the type of exponential success, and related revenue streams, winning breeds. Players aren't stupid. If they see a guy turn his whole life around playing here, their gonna want a piece of that. And all we need is to get them to consistently want to sign our contracts.

In my opinion, to continue to go further, you foster the culture of growing within, making an average player into a household name, paying the players within your system who do perform (ie Cain, Lincecum, Bumgarner etc all knowing they'll get top $ within the organization if they do live up to full potential) and taking appropriate risks in free agency whenever a real star, such as Pujols, becomes available.

When you make mistakes in Free Agency, they are extremely costly, so that the highest risk area to compete in, but it also is the place you have the most history to help lower those risks and ensure you have a competitive product on the field.

I just don't see, when you look at the overall operating expenses of the franchise, how you could be so close to continuing to exponentially grown the current buzz of our organization and turn it all down to save a few million per year in payroll. With our ballpark and current team I think we are in uncharted territory, and the team right now is positioned to take over the baseball world. If we had signed Pujols, and either Rollins or Reyes, we'd have the nation licking our balls. We'd be telling the rest of baseball "come here to SF, put on your long sleeves and try to get on base against Timmy, Matt or Madison. And then when you go down 1-2-3 and you're out there shivering, start to sweat because Jose Reyes is stepping up to the plate, and Albert is sitting in the hole, with Buster and the Panda in the dugout drooling. And after we've got you down 3-0 by the end of the third, you might as well start thinking of what you're gonna have for dinner when you go back to the hotel because BWilson and Romo are staring you down from the pen, and the faithful is delivering one-liners that make you wanna hide your wives and children."

The baseball world would be going nuts with Giants fever.

We would provide the consistent message to Giant nation, and the rest of the country, that we are willing to do whatever it takes to win every season. Because in baseball there is no salary cap, and we are the Giants and we can just do that. Go ahead Magic, buy the Dodgers, we'll be happy to squash your dreams for decades to come.

As you mention, a $130M payroll is above average, but what I'm wondering is, what do we have to do to take that next step and consistently not have to lose out on free agents, keep our guys, and not have to discuss budget caps?

We are on the cusp of baseball dominance. Yet we're gonna put all that on Brandon Crawford and Angel Pagan?

For the love of making money how can our owners do this to us? I still just don't see how they are making the decisions they are making.

Bring back Neukom!