It's impossible to escape references to the financial crisis that seems to be readying itself to swallow the whole world at the right moment. I was reminded of it reading a review of one of my favorite band's comeback shows, for crying out loud. Baseball writers have tried to read the tea leaves all winter and predict what may be in store for all of us. One of the latest gloomy warnings of possible impending doom comes from ESPN.com's Buster Olney (sorry, but it's another insider article). Here is the key part:

...The Tigers' season-ticket sales have dropped from 27,000 to 15,000, as Shawn Windsor and Jon Paul Morosi report.

So now we have a clearer understanding of the context in which the Tigers are making their final roster choices. Their ticket sales are awful, making it even more important that Detroit starts its season strongly. If the Tigers get off to a terrible start, as they did last season, fan interest in the team -- already impacted by the economy -- will take a body blow. (Privately, executives with other clubs say the same thing could be said for about 15 to 20 other teams in the big leagues.)

What does this have to do with the Brewers? Aren't their ticket sales record setting-ly strong? Sure, but they still have a long ways to go, as Don Walker points out in the JS:

But neither the team nor Attanasio is feeling complacent, especially as other clubs are feeling the pinch of an economy that has Commissioner Bud Selig fretting. If the Brewers aren't in the playoff hunt late in the summer, they know that fans might keep their money in their wallets.

And financially, their margin of error is thin. The Brewers drew just over 3 million fans last season, a franchise record, and a source knowledgeable about their finances says they'll have to attract somewhere between 2.8 million and 2.9 million this year just to break even.

So yeah, the Brewers have already sold 1.75 million tickets and that is well above their historical bests. However, not only do they have a long way to go to reach 2.8 million in tickets sold, but they also need to be reasonably competitive to ensure that all those people who have purchased tickets so far show up and pay for parking, beer and food to cover their investment.

Now, it's entirely possible that the Brewers will pull this off. A good start in the first few months of the season would go a long way towards ensuring that they'll be competitive through the summer and get the tickets sales up close to that number. If they make the playoffs, obviously they'll be just fine. If, however, they get off to a slow start and go into the summer looking up at .500 by a good margin, it may be to late to hit the break even mark regardless of how well they play toward the end of the summer. In that case, the team would probably be best off, from a fiscal standpoint, to dump payroll and try to get ready for another run in 2010.

The problem with selling off payroll mid-year, if it should come to that, is that they'll have to find a buyer with the ability to take on that salary. That brings us back to Olney's point that there are lots of teams on shaky ground financially and that many may not be able to take on payroll even if they are in contention and in a position to make a playoff push. With the amount they already have committed to payroll, the Brewers probably are in that group.

Surely there will be some teams in a position to take on salary when the time comes at mid-season, and obviously there are plenty of teams that would like to shed payroll right now, let alone in a few months when they're out of contention. There are also teams that would like to pick up talent to make a run mid-season that won't be able to take on salary to do so. Perhaps we could see an NBA-type situation where teams try to match-up contracts and then use prospects (in the place of draft picks in the NBA) to match value in trades. If the Brewers are in position to make a trade for talent mid-season, perhaps they could shed some payroll in a trade while giving up prospects to facilitate a deal. If a team really does have talent they want to move and cannot find someone willing to take on that payroll themselves, they may have to be willing to match-up salary to get the young talent they want.

As the new season draws near, there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding not just the ability of teams to compete, but their ability to stay financially afloat. The winter's free agent market showed that most teams have had to adjust to a new fiscal reality, so there weren't a lot of new bad commitments made this last offseason. There are, however, a lot of bad commitments on the books limiting possibilites, and how teams manage those negative assets is going to be a big story in baseball in 2009.