Jerry Reinsdorf may have been christened “the Owner Who Thinks He Knows Everything,” but there are others who know zilch about baseball as well, from Anaheim to Queens. But all those billionaires are supposed to share an ability to figure out finances.
Fuggedaboudit.
There’s a really big chance coming up for the owners of Major League Baseball teams to make really, really stupid decisions about the one thing billionaires are supposed to be good at — making money. But in the meantime, they’re making a bunch
of other really dumb economic decisions, overwhelmingly because greed for instant returns holds sway over any planning of the future. That may be understandable for an 89-year-old who hates players and fans anyway and may not be around for the sound of the bursting balloon like Reinsdorf, but what about the rest of those guys?
Early this century, newspapers across the country somehow decided that the way to counter declining sales was to dumb everything down. Then, when that didn’t work, dumb everything down even more. That led the late, great syndicated columnist Molly Ivins to write that she could live with the industry she loved dying, but she hated to see it committing suicide, at which newspapers turned out to be very good.
The same sentiment could apply to the sport we all love — except baseball isn’t dying, it’s having a nice resurgence, thanks in no small part to some intelligent moves to speed up the game. The owners are just trying to kill it off.
Let’s start with the small stuff and work our way up
Last Sunday, the White Sox game was on pay streaming service Peacock TV. That game was not alone, just part of a deal MLB has with Peacock, the NBC-related service that only is subscribed to by about a third of TV households. The arrangement is part of NBC’s three-year deal with MLB, which costs them $200 million or less per year, but that includes much more valuable items such as Sunday Night Baseball on the network itself — as well as, most importantly, the wild-card playoffs.
Friday nights had already been sold off to Apple TV, which has even lower market penetration than Peacock. Apple pays $55 million per year plus promises to buy another $30 mil in advertising.
Whoopee! MLB is a more than $12 billion dollar business (and that’s just the parts the teams make publicly known, which they don’t have to do because all but the Braves and Blue Jays are privately owned, and those two are subsidiaries of big corporations where income can be hidden elsewhere). Gambling tie-in income, anyone?
Take the $55 mil from Apple and figure the Peacock share of the NBC contract is no more than that, and those broadcast rights come to less than 1% of the industry income — less than 1%! — in exchange for cutting off your product from millions of people and jeopardizing your future!
Nice work, MLB. But nothing compared to early last week.
Up to the next level of stupidity
Try to tune in the Home Run Derby, did you? Couldn’t find it? That’s because it was hidden.
Well, hidden from the third or more of American TV households that don’t subscribe to Netflix, which bought exclusive rights to the event. MLB’s suicidal urges again rush to the fore.
The Derby is a special phenomenon, an entry-level drug for people who don’t normally watch or have much of any interest in baseball — my non-fan wife even watches the Home Run Derby, and kids love it. So MLB allowed a very important outreach event, one that could have big negative impact on future interest in the game, to be buried.
The result? The lowest viewership since 2003.
And what did they get for it? Fifty million bucks, or well less that one-half of 1% of their income. Nice job, guys. How many hundreds of millions or billions will that cost you down the road?
And the biggest stupidity is yet to come
That, of course, will be in December, when the owners will plunge full-steam-ahead into locking out the players and endangering the 2027 season. Why? Because they — or most of them — want to put a lid on salaries, as the other major sports owners sort of enjoy, though the circumstances vary with the sport.
You can bet that the player-hating pseudo-owner who lives on a golf course in Highland Park will be leading the way in the battle, just as he did in 1994, when MLB almost killed itself off as a popular pastime. That time the idiot owners were only eventually saved four years later because Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa staged a home run derby of their own.
Thank goodness for steroids, right? Maybe MLB will decide not just to allow them again, but force them down players’ throats.
Of course, the owners will claim poverty forces them into a lockout — Reinsdorf leading the way, because the White Sox are only estimated to be worth 100 times what he and friends paid for the team in 1981. That’s a heck of a growth play, and there’s plenty of money being made on the annual side as well, especially given the insane tax boondoggle of how they can double-count player expense and make it look like they’re suffering while getting some nice paper losses to carry into their other businesses.
All told?
Stuff your pockets with what is petty cash to you today, jeopardize the future and its billions. Nice work, owners.
Lead the way, Jerry.
