Team values shoot up an average of 16%

Forbes has released its annual franchise valuation package. In short: it’s good to own a ballclub:

The average Major League Baseball team rose 16% in value during the past year, to an all-time high of $605 million. In 2011, revenue (net of payments to cover stadium debt) for the league’s 30 teams climbed to an average of $212 million, a 3.4% gain over the previous season.

Obviously some teams do better than others, but that’s pretty healthy growth. And where is all of that value and dough coming from? Local TV:

Rights fees paid by cable television channels are behind the growth in team values. Aggregate cable television revenue for baseball’s 30 teams has increased to $923 million from $328 million over the past 10 years.

And that’s only going to increase -- to as high as $1.5 billion by 2015, Forbes estimates -- as new deals for the Angels, Rangers, Astros, Padres and Dodgers kick in.

Driving all of this is your DVR, which has devalued advertising for most programming, but which largely doesn’t impact live sports because people really like to watch live sports live. That has sent rights fees skyrocketing as Fox, Comcast and others have been willing to pony up big to show content with commercials people will actually watch. This is almost an almost exclusively local phenomenon too, as national rights have not been up for bid for a while and won’t be until next year.

Which, by the way, is another reason why anyone slamming baseball this fall over its abysmal national ratings and claiming that the sport is in trouble compared to the NFL has no idea what they’re talking about.