Great news, everyone! Turns out Major League Baseball’s owners and players do hold a commonality after all.
Both can illustrate tone deafness like Hall of Famers.
Herein lies the difference, however: When Blake Snell proclaims, “I gotta get my money,” we know how much money he wants to get. When Bill DeWitt declares, “The industry isn’t very profitable, to be quite honest”? We haven’t the foggiest idea what that means.
Hence the simplest challenge must be issued to owners: To borrow from everyone’s favorite Canadian band Rush, show me, don’t tell me. Either open your books to substantiate your assertions of financial pain, or stop whining about the privilege of owning a baseball team.
Because the more they talk, on top of their actions or lack thereof during this shutdown, the more the owners improve the public standing of the players as the two sides grapple over the details of this 2020 restart.
DeWitt, the Cardinals’ CEO, became the third owner in the past week-plus to go public (he spoke to St. Louis’ 590 The Fan) with the “We’re not making as much money as you think!” sales pitch. Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts preceded his National League Central rival when he told ESPN, “The league itself does not make a lot of cash,” and Diamondbacks managing general partner Ken Kendrick, via multiple interviews, has proven particularly garrulous, most recently contending to Doug & Wolf of Arizona Sports 98.7 FM that the notion of loaded owners is a “falsehood that continues to be perpetrated.”
If only there were a way to refute that falsehood …
Actually, one team does show its hand annually. Because the publicly owned company Liberty Media controls the Braves, we get some information. In 2019, the Braves, with a payroll of nearly $144 million (thanks, Spotrac) and an attendance of 2,655,100, received $438 million from ballpark operations, local broadcast rights and national pipelines like broadcast and licensing.
What this already favorable snapshot doesn’t include is the fact that, as per the Associated Press, Liberty serves as the landlord for most of the businesses around the ballpark in the impressive village known as The Battery Atlanta. It adds up to quite a lot of cake, and the Braves, unlike many of their competitors, don’t even run their own regional sports network.
Common sense tells us that people smart enough to make the kind of money it takes to buy a baseball team wouldn’t hold onto those investments if they bled money. History tells us that franchise values consistently soar; DeWitt purchased the Cardinals for $150 million in 1995, and his neighboring Kansas City Royals, a lesser asset by any conventional measure, just sold for $1 billion last November.
So what exactly do these owners think they’re accomplishing here by crying poverty during both a pandemic and a time of great social unrest? Throw in too many clubs making their customers wait and jump through hoops to obtain refunds for their unusable game tickets as well as releasing minor league players and slashing the pay of low-salaried employees, and this group hardly has distinguished itself. No wonder commissioner Rob Manfred keeps offering similar dollars, dressed in different packages, to players; his bosses clearly don’t feel generous.
If Snell didn’t express his feelings in the most elegant fashion last month, profound merit backs the notion that players, as the ones putting themselves in harm’s way, deserve their prorated pay (Snell’s daily salary is about $41,530), all the more so when you look at the COVID-19 numbers spiking in extremely important baseball states such as Arizona, California and Texas. Who among us wouldn’t feel better about subjecting ourselves to such risk at our full rate?
As I’ve stated all along, this debate should stay private as so many people endure hard times. Neither the players nor owners have heeded that counsel, though, compelling the rest of us to gear up as referees.
And in that job, it’s an easy call: Until the owners reveal their full hand like the players — which, to be clear, won’t ever happen — they don’t get the benefit of the doubt. To the contrary, the onus falls on them to take the bigger short-term hit, their alleged low profits be damned.