Chastened by the Lockout, MLB Owners are on Their Best Behavior…Just Kidding!
The past few weeks have been tough on MLB owners – some might go so far to say it’s been an embarrassing stretch for the group collectively. Of course, they likely do not know this as one of the requirements of being an MLB owner is to possess absolutely zero self-awareness, which renders embarrassment merely a vague concept that only the less fortunate of our species understands. Even still, they’ve really pushed the boundaries of their silliness recently.
It started a few weeks ago when Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner was responding to criticisms that perhaps winning a championship wasn’t his priority, given his reticence to fully deploy the considerable resources at his disposal. Hal, to the surprise of absolutely no one, pulled the pandemic card, noting that “a lot of the larger market clubs got hit the hardest” by COVID’s economic fallout. “We can talk about revenues, but we’ve got to talk about expenses too – it’s been a tough two years” he said, with a straight face. Noting that he’s on the hook for bond payments to New York City, Hal addressed the question all Yankee fans have for him: What is it exactly you do?
“That’s my job every year: To make sure we’re financially responsible.” (That my friends, is what the kids call saying the quiet part out loud.) But Hal wasn’t done, adding “I make the same commitment every year, which is to do everything we’re able to do to field a championship-caliber team and win a World Series.” He then moved on to passing on Carlos Correa and instead signed off on the acquisition of Isiah Kiner-Falefa to be the Yankees everyday shortstop, finalizing a total team payroll that’s less than it was nine years ago.
We’ll come back to Hal in a minute, but let’s move on to the Lerner family, who last week hired an investment bank to explore possibilities with regards to selling the Washington Nationals.
It seems a lifetime ago when Ted Lerner passed on the role of day to day operations to his son Mark, and Mark told us all, “We will never sell the Nationals. That’s what we’ve worked to get all those years. We think we do a pretty good job of it. There’s no intention of this family—certainly while I’m alive and my sisters and brothers-in-law are alive—nobody’s going to sell this team.” Actually, it wasn’t a lifetime ago, it was four years ago, when the Nats were good.
After being part of a less than honorable scheme that requires a Venn diagram to fully explain, the Lerner family purchased the franchise for $450 million in 2006, and the franchise is now worth $2 billion according to Forbes, making it the 12th most valuable baseball team.
If you’re wondering why one would part with such a good investment, Matt Weyrich of CBS Sports posited “…the coronavirus pandemic disrupted revenue streams for both the baseball team and the commercial real estate business that the family fortune comes from.” I, of course, can’t speak for you, but I am quite concerned for both the fortune of Ted Lerner- which is down to $4.5 billion- and the health of Weyrich’s low back, for having to carry that much water.
Yet there’s no fear to be had, Nats fans. Let the younger Lerner assure you: “The organization is as committed as ever to their employees, players, fans, sponsors and partners and to putting a competitive product on the field.” If you’re keeping score at home, the team hasn’t signed a player to a multi-year contract since they won the World Series in 2019, and famously parted ways with Max Scherzer, Trea Turner, and Kyle Schwarber (players who several other teams find quite valuable in their respective quests for a championship) among others. Their chances of winning the 2022 World Series currently stand at less than one in one thousand according to Baseball Reference.
You don’t have to go far from the Nationals, either in time or geographically, to find another example of a team causing us to wonder if their family of owners are in need of a tox screen.
Also last week, Oriole’s owner Peter Angelos asked his son John to swallow his self-consciousness and inform the Orioles’ fan base of some good news. The younger Angelos did so by saying “I am pleased to announce, the Maryland State legislature passed an historic initiative committing $1.2 billion in public funding from the State of Maryland for reinvestment in and reimagination of the Camden Yards Sports Complex. This marks the second-largest public commitment of funding to a Major League Baseball public-private sports partnership, second only to the 2009 construction of the new Yankee Stadium.”
Wow, there’s a lot to unpack there. Besides “reimagination” not being a word, and reminding us that owners receiving tax payer funded infrastructure and not having to show the public their books is not uncommon, Angelos didn’t mention that Camden Yards only cost $110 million to build. This leads to questions about how exactly will that much money be used, because we know it won’t be used on good MLB players.
He did however mention that the public funding is just a “portion” of the “more than ten billion dollars” the Orioles have generated for the area. Of course, no economist other than the ones the Orioles pay will tell you that’s true – read Neil deMause’s “Field of Schemes” for more information on that nonsense. It takes some serious chutzpah to take $1.2 billion in taxpayers’ money and tell them that they’re the ones who should be thanking the Orioles.
If like me you’re cringing at Angelos’ absurdity at this point, remarkably he wasn’t finished. In another attempt to seek gratitude from local taxpayers, the younger and apparently far more arrogant Angelos, reminded Os fans that “The Orioles were the winningest team in the American League from 2012-2016, a remarkable achievement under baseball’s unique system that challenges teams from small and middle markets in ways that no other sports league does.” If you’re wondering, no he didn’t add that they’ve lost more games than every team in MLB since then – in fact 26 more than the next most pathetic franchise.
Somewhere, after seeing the comments from Hal Steinbrenner, Mark Lerner and John Angelos, Phil Castellini, he of the Reds owning Castellini family, said “I can do worse.”
When asked about not so subtle requests from Reds fans to sell the team, Phil responded to the fans of his team by saying, among other departures from adult words, “Sell the team to who? What would you do with this team to have it more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exists? It would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else. Be careful what you ask for.”
Now, I admittedly have a tendency to let my emotions get the better of me and as a result I sometimes read into statements too much, so correct me if I’m wrong: It sure sounds like Phil is saying “We don’t make enough money and we’re open to suggestions on how you can do better for us. And if you can’t we just might take our little hobby worth $1.085 billion to another town and exploit those fans instead.” (To be fair, given that Phil and his father Bob Castellini both inherited their money, asking fans for advice on how to make money might not be a bad idea.) Additionally, Phil seems to think he’s the only guy with a rich dad who would be interested in owning an MLB team when he asks “Sell the team to who?” Heck, the Marlins (the Marlins!) recently sold for $1.2 billion.
Because I told you we’d come back to Hal Steinbrenner, another twist in his unintentionally comedic performance arose this past week. According to Sportico, the Yankees are now worth over $7 billion dollars – more than any sports franchise in the world, baseball or otherwise. You may have thought that the Dallas Cowboys or Manchester United might be worth more, but now we know that if Hal woke up tomorrow with Jerry Jones money, he’d have to be talked down off of a ledge. It certainly has been “a tough two years” for Hal being as “the largest markets got hit the hardest” for sure. Given that in the pre-pandemic season of 2019, the Yankees were valued at $4.6 billion the new $7 billion valuation certainly makes one wonder oh how will those poor bond holders ever get their money?
Other than pointing out the consistently condescending and disingenuous behavior of the aforementioned children of MLB team owners who now run teams themselves (and complaining about it) is there a take home message here? Maybe not, as Phil Castellini – tone deafness aside – is correct in the respect that we fans are going to keep watching in spite of the Silver Spoons owners. Perhaps we can simply take it as a reminder to know thine enemy. MLB owners have never stopped showing us that they are the enemy of the fans and of the game itself, the only difference is now they’re saying it out loud.
