Good morning. Rogers Communications executives are no doubt thrilled about the Toronto Blue Jays’ playoff push (I may or may not account for three Nathan Lukes jerseys alone) but what if true success can’t be measured in merch? Haha, just kidding. It can, and it’s profitable – just not as profitable as you might think. That’s in focus today, along with key events on our radar this week.

Telecom: BCE Inc.’s Bell Canada is expanding its internet offerings into Western Canada for the first time, using the government’s mandated fibre-sharing framework to offer service bundles to millions of new potential customers over rival Telus Corp.’s network.

Economics: Canadian Peter Howitt is among the Nobel Prize winners in economics for work explaining and quantifying "creative destruction."

AI: Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. has agreed to invest up to US$5-billion to deploy fuel cells built by Silicon Valley-based Bloom Energy as a way to power data centres geared toward artificial-intelligence technologies.

Climate: Ottawa is preparing to lay out a new “climate competitiveness” plan that will deprioritize Canada’s commitments to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions.

The Toronto Blue Jays celebrate winning the ALDS after beating the New York Yankees on Oct. 8. Al Bello/Getty Images

For a company Canada loves to hate, the biggest win of the Blue Jays’ playoff push might be a little goodwill.

Rogers Communications – owner of the team, the network that airs games and now most of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment – will take the money, of course. But it’s not exactly game-changing.

Back-of-the-(hotdog)-napkin math

Starting with the obvious: More games means more tickets to sell. If we estimate face-value seats averaging out to around $500 – resale brings in more, but the Jays’ cut is limited to a share of Ticketmaster’s service fees – and a stadium capacity of roughly 40,000, every home game could generate about $20-million in ticket sales.

But a lot of that money doesn’t stay in Toronto. About 60 per cent of playoff gate receipts go to Major League Baseball and a players’ pool, leaving the team with $8-million per game. Add food, drinks and merchandise – which bring in a few million more but are split with concession partners and suppliers – and a four-game home stand might reach $40-million to $50-million.

Even if that feels conservative, double it and you end up in a similar place. For Rogers – a company that earns several billion a year, most of it from wireless and cable – it’s like finding a $50 bill in your jacket from last winter. Real money, but not money you’d quit your job over. (Or your oligopolistic market position.)

The big picture

In its latest quarter, Rogers said media revenue rose 10 per cent year-over-year, helped by “higher sports-related income.” That growth is meaningful within its media segment, which now includes MLSE, but modest in the company as a whole, which brought in about $5-billion in revenue during its most recent quarter and more than $20-billion last year.

Even inside the media unit, higher sports income was partly offset by team costs, including player payroll and the day-to-day expense of keeping the stadium lights on. The company doesn’t break out profit by team, but the media division’s bottom line rose about $5-million last quarter – a humble sum compared with its double-digit jump in revenue.

The even bigger picture

Every minute of those games delivers a captive audience numbering in the millions for Sportsnet, the company’s own network, and for every Rogers Wifi or Rogers 5G ad that runs between innings. (Hi, Keanu: Please stop mashing those buttons so aggressively. You’ll never win at Fall Guys that way.)

That’s part of the logic behind taking full control of MLSE this year. Live sports keep viewers and subscribers from drifting away in a fragmented media world – and ideally bundled up with more Rogers products. At a higher price, naturally. Barring undiscovered winter-jacket money, I still haven’t decided what to do about that Sportsnet+ hike next year.

That’s the kind of thinking goodwill can buy you. And if the Leafs break the curse, maybe Rogers could earn an eternity of it. But we won’t count on that.

Bank of Canada deputy governor Carolyn Rogers addresses the B.C. Business Summit. In a speech last week, Rogers urged measures to encourage competition and innovation in the financial sector to help offset U.S. tariffs.

“Higher productivity won’t make Canada immune to U.S. trade policy, but it would help buffer the effects,” she said.

Six financial institutions in Canada’s highly concentrated banking sector account for 93 per cent of all banking assets.

In the U.S., the six largest banks – including Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, which report earnings today – control about 43 per cent of all banking assets, according to data from the Federal Reserve.