It’s taken me a couple days to figure out what I want to say about Mark Walter, Guggenheim Baseball Management, and the ownership of the LA Dodgers. There’s plenty of people, including Jeff Passan, who have breakdowns of the facts and the allegations of the case. What we think we know is that Walter and Co., already enjoying an exemption in their TV deal following a bankruptcy judgement under previous ownership, further financialized themselves by taking loans from insurance companies also owned
by W&C, then used the interest on repaying those loans to write off even more of their revenue sharing obligations, which are based around local TV revenue minus certain expenses.
In short, it seems the Dodgers borrowed money from themselves to lower the amount of money they owed the subsidized teams around the sport. They are under federal investigation but not really for anything baseball related, rather more inquiries into specific classifications of the various businesses Guggenheim controls. There isn’t even anything the Dodgers did that specifically goes against the Collective Bargaining Agreement — they seemed to have hired an army of accountants to find every gap in the rulebook and slip another $20 bill through it. It’s the same playbook that’s led the Ford Motor Company to be a lending service more than a car manufacturer.
At best it seems Bob Nutting might have been shorted a couple million dollars a year, but the object lesson you should be taking out of this is one of solidarity. Bob Nutting doesn’t care if Mark Walter cost him a couple million a year, if it means that together they can lower all MLB payrolls by a couple hundred million dollars.
I actually don’t think this is something that George Steinbrenner would have done. Capitalism has changed — you always bought an MLB team to make money off it, of course. But it used to be that you had to put a good product on the field to sell tickets and in-stadium ad dollars, or be the St. Louis Cardinals and take advantage of the country’s most powerful radio transmitter to reach farmers in 1960s Nebraska, or take on all the foreign currency risk of the Blue Jays and weigh it against the payoff of being the only game in the entire country.
Now, you inherit a court-ordered exemption from paying your fair share, and further financialize every element of the off-field operations to continually lower every possible obligation you have to the rest of baseball, and because those efforts will help champion the case for a salary cap, the 29 other men in your cohort will go along with it. Maybe, in March or May or August 2027, the knives will come out for Walter, but until the billionaire class has exacted every ounce of control they can over a new CBA, they’ll stand beside each other. What’s a few million when there’s a billion on the line?
This needs to be an object lesson for the union. Already, ownership has tried to drive a wedge between the young players who haven’t yet received their big multi-year deals and the veterans who have. The exact definition of labor in a baseball context is kind of tricky — once you sign for seven or eight hundred million dollars, the increasingly financialized world people who earn that much live in can’t really be classified as purely labor. Still, we pay for tickets and MLB.tv subscriptions and Substacks because of the players. I’m one of the few weirdos that cares about what the owners do. The value we seek in baseball comes from what the players provide.
It’s always easiest for the wealthiest cohort to stick together. There are fewer of them, and their interests are reasonably closely aligned already. If we think of who’s the least wealthy of the least wealthy baseball player cohort, we’d probably look at Latin players who grew up without the supports of Nice White Families and well-staffed prep schools. The backgrounds are not aligned, and the short-term interests aren’t either. But here we have the union’s equivalent of a couple million when a billion’s on the line.
The long term interests of the players, ones with nine-figure contracts and ones riding a shuttle between MLB and Triple-A, are the same, and that is preventing an artificial cap on the players’ share of baseball revenue. Yes, it’s easier for 30 men to stick together than 1200, but if Bob Nutting can forgive a few million dollars, the players need to learn from that example.
