Phillies President & CEO David Montgomery sat for a Q&A with the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER's Matt Gelb and discussed the club's '12 payroll, its TV rights deal with Comcast and the possibility of adding seats to Citizens Bank Park. Below is an excerpt from the Q&A:
Q: Can the team's payroll, currently projected at approximately $180 million, keep increasing?
Montgomery: I wouldn't expect it to go up. Ideally, we'd like to sustain a position where we can be north of some of our brethren and give us more opportunities.
Q: Is paying some amount of luxury tax in 2012 avoidable?
Montgomery: I'm not sure. It's not so much a one-year thing. You just don't want to get in the habit of marginalizing your future opportunities because you've spent past a limit that hurts you.
Q: Your current TV-rights deal with Comcast expires in 2015, and all across baseball, teams have cashed in with massive agreements. Is that the next source of significant revenue?
Montgomery: We've already crossed that frontier. We were one of the early regional sports networks. We benefited in 1977 from having games on Prism. It's not like we've been lapped by the field. ... We will see. Right now, we're enjoying tremendous popularity. We would hope our friends at Comcast would see that as well. I'm sure they will.
Q: Has there ever been talk of adding seats to Citizens Bank Park?
Montgomery: We talk about it, but we talk about adding twos and fours and not thousands. We believe a lot of the appeal for the ballpark comes from the intimacy of the facility.
Q: Where do the new sources of revenue come from then?
Montgomery: Our growth has been literally on the backs of the popularity of this club. ... One of the things we place emphasis in is getting quality individuals. That has increased fan identification. We're fortunate right now. Our biggest challenge is to chug along and see if we can't prolong the current interest in the club (PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, 2/12).
