There aren’t many different types of owners in Major League Baseball. There are corporate entities like the investment group that owns the Los Angeles Dodgers, but mostly baseball teams are owned by rich people, and if there are different types of rich, they aren’t that many. Or, perhaps more precisely, the commonality they all have, that they are wealthy enough to own MLB franchises, makes them similar enough to be understood as a block, or clique, or collection of various hassles and self-interest boosts.
There are many, much harder ways to make money than owning a major league franchise, even by the uncompressed passive income standards that is America’s true aspiration. But it’s not that simple, because there are all of these Other people who care about the team, notice what the team is doing and get upset about it, and there’s even a media section dedicated to covering all of that. It can get a little stressful, especially if you’re sensitive to even the hint of responsibility as the super rich tend to be. If you think MLB owners occupy the higher end of the long American continuum of inflated, self-realized owner types, it’s pretty easy to see why and how those who love baseball end up getting so wild too.
Being so rich and so beyond any kind of meaningful responsibility is always a nuisance. the people around you treat you differently, but they are also less and less around you. This absence of people who can tell you “no” is useless and affirms itself in the worst way. As the rest of humanity burns out or tunes in and moves away from them, baseball owners have become, like their peers, progressively saltier, inflexible, and resentful – the lords of millions of renters, who pay on time. but The faces have slipped out here and time out of focus. Dr. Manhattan is in absolute seclusion on Mars, except he’s wearing one of those zippered fleeces that investment bankers like. The return on investment is good, and that’s mostly what interests members of this category, but the rest, things like the appeal of owning your own baseball team, which certainly had something to do with buying a baseball team. team first, it just becomes more abstract.
I guess a lot, of course, but the only really important thing to know about Washington Nationals owner Ted Lerner and his family is that they are preparing to sell their team. Lerner himself is 96 years old and bought the team when he was 80. His he son Mark has been the team’s main owner since 2018. When Mark took on this role, he told the Washington Post that the family “will never sell the Gentiles. This is what we have been working for all these years ”. Since then, the team have won a World Series and have let various players walk away as free agents or send them away on exchanges. There are a number of baseball-related excuses available for all of these decisions, but while some are more compelling than others, none ring as true or explain as much as ownership simply doesn’t want to pay these players anymore.
No owner really wants to pay their players a salary like what they would get on the market – this is a start, or at least the belief that this group is valuable – but owners who want to win a World Series will sooner or later find they have no other choice. . A smart enough team can do a lot by doing the myriad of smaller and cheaper things right, but big spending teams like the Dodgers do all those little things. e spend money on players. The way many major league owners have approached this challenge is to simply not try. The sports owners’ financial system has more or less created guarantees that good profits can be made from managing a team that runs lean and cynical by losing much more often than it wins. To their credit, while the Lerners were cheap in times of crisis, they mostly didn’t run the Nationals that way. As this very wealthy family prepares to cash in – the team Lerner paid $ 450 million for in 2006 is now valued at more than $ 2 billion – they are signaling that they expect the next team owner to take a different approach.
In the grand scheme of things, there is no justification in baseball to trade a player like Juan Soto, which the Nationals have been trying to do for nearly two weeks now. This is because Soto is so good and good enough to keep improving given his profile (full-spectrum superstar) and his age (23), that there is practically no commercial advantage that would help the team any more than his absence would hurt her. not just in the short term, but over the next decade or so. The mechanism built by the owners of the MLB to suppress the salaries of players like Juan Soto works as expected, but it is so good that he is still paying a lot of money.
Soto’s salary this season is $ 17.1 million, which is well below what he would get on the open market, but also well below the record for a Super Two sophomore player in the arbitration process. salary of the MLB. Soto also has two more rounds of arbitration ahead of him before reaching free will after the 2024 season. An owner interested in winning would be fine for that. For such an owner, Soto is a quintessential asset: highly productive, somehow still improving, and still available at a cost well below the prevailing market rate. For an owner whose interests lie elsewhere – an owner who didn’t want to spend his money on baseball players and who was more interested in the passive returns on investment offered by team ownership – he’s just a big figure on the payroll; a charge that drags behind it an inconvenient and inefficient number of zeros. The Lerners will ultimately decide what kind of owner the team will receive next, but the team’s apparent willingness to trade Soto – and its willingness to attach the dive contracts of damaged pitchers like Patrick Corbin or Stephen Strasburg to any deal – suggests that the Lerner expect to sell the team to an owner who would see Juan Soto’s presence on the payroll as something other than an asset.
Obviously that’s not what a Nationals fan would want, although fans are good at finding a way to care even when it’s some kind of a challenge to their self-respect. Even lousy baseball organizations continue to develop and produce young players, and while the odds are strong that any of these players are as good as Juan Soto, they will at least provide something to think about as the big league team drops so low that it’s allowed to sink. . More generally though, there are some heartbreaking things that are barely hinted at in this one. An owner who doesn’t want to pay Juan Soto, even for the remaining two and a half seasons where he’ll be paid less than he’s worth, doesn’t look like an owner who really wanted to build a winning baseball team. why else would they give up the chance to hold on to the one thing every winning baseball team needs most? Why rely on anything else if you can build around the best young player in the sport?
Perhaps this future owner is cynical at the behest of Bob Nutting of Pittsburgh, who has learned that making money on a losing team is less tiring than a winning one. Perhaps owner TK will come as overrated as the investment group that took over the Marlins and immediately (and unsuccessfully) remade the team with a degree of calm usually associated with retrieving saltwater from a lifeboat. In a league that was more concerned with the overall quality of its product and its long-term viability as something people could care about (and spend money on), both would be equally exclusive. Instead, they are considered the default. Either way, both are just different ways of describing the same failure.
The thing is, anyone who wants to have a baseball team but doesn’t want Juan Soto shouldn’t have a baseball team. Knowing this, we already know that what they want from team ownership is, at the very least, not aligned with responsible management. Just because all of this is so obvious – that an owner who doesn’t appreciate the most valuable asset a team could have obviously doesn’t have the right values - doesn’t mean any of this will mean anything. This is not democracy, this is business. But an enterprise conducted in this way, to the exclusion of any other purpose, will sooner or later suffer. Of all the sordid threads of shame and horror that run through this story, none are stranger than seeing how little the most important things are worth to the boss.
