Fixing Baseball: The Owners

Hi and welcome to the column in which I make sure I’m never employed by a baseball team, which was actually on my very short list of Future Career Possibilities.

Just in case you don’t know, big league baseball is currently freaked out because each year fewer fans are buying tickets and watching games. That’s because analytics and a Moneyball-style of play have made baseball way more boring and some people never found it that electrifying in the first place. (I’ll explain the effects of analytics in a future column.)

MLB is now trying to come up with rule changes to make games more exciting, which is a Very Big Deal because the people in charge are now admitting what players and coaches have been saying for years: there are problems with analytics and the brand of baseball they produce.

MLB finally admitting there’s a problem is a bit like the Emperor finally admitting he doesn’t actually have New Clothes and his ass is kind of cold. That being the case, I plan on writing a series of articles about “Fixing Baseball” and even if you’re not a baseball fan I urge you to read them because you just might become one…also, I’ll make a lot of jokes.

And we’ll start with Team Owners.

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…Clint Hurdle – former big league player, coach and manager – gave me a book (which I just now realize I never gave back) called Lords of the Realm which I read and the main impression the book left on me is that the Owners of Baseball Teams include some astounding dumbbells.

(And yes, I plan on randomly capitalizing certain words whenever it Strikes My Fancy.)

The general feeling among Team Owners seemed to be that if they were smart enough to run a (fill-in-the-blank) company, there were certainly smart enough to run a baseball team.

Which is kind of like assuming that if you can drive a car, you must be able to fly an airplane; other than all that up and down stuff, how different could it be?  

As I recall, these self-appointed baseball geniuses were against pretty much every improvement in the history of baseball: putting games on radio, putting games on TV, the addition of field lights and someone from the Yankee’s organization (can't remember if it was the owner, but somebody pretty high up) asking why he would want every kid in New York running around wearing a Yankees cap.

Because the kid’s going to pay you for it, you dimwit.

Also, when the players went out and got Marvin Miller to run the Players Association, he pretty much ran circles around the Owners and if memory serves – and right now I have no idea where I left my reading glasses – when the Reserve Clause was replaced by free agency, Miller was afraid the owners would declare all the players free agents which would flood the market with available players and drive down salaries.

Which is pretty much Economics 101: the Law of Supply and Demand.

But the Smart-Enough-To-Fly-An-Airplane Team Owners agreed to limit free agency to players who had completed six years of big league service, which in turn meant there would be a limited supply of free agents and that drove salaries up.

Which reminds me of an acquaintance who wanted to sell his motorcycle for $500, so he put an ad in the paper – “$500 or best offer” – and some guy offered him $600 because he wanted to be sure he had the “best offer.”

And that man went on to buy Oakland A’s.

A baseball fact I just made up, but sounds like the kind of thing a Team Owner might do and here’s a Lords of the Realm story I didn’t make up, which makes the same point.

Some team was negotiating with some player who wanted more money and the Owner decided to get involved – after all, he made business deals all the time – and invited the player to his hotel suite and got the player to sign a contract and then told the Front-Office Guy who had been working on the negotiations: See? That’s how you get deals done, at which point the Front-Office Guy informed the Owner he had just signed the player for a salary higher than the player had been demanding.

Maybe the Owner just wanted to make sure he had the best offer; apparently it’s what all smart negotiators do.

Also…you can’t trust ‘em

The Owners – who theoretically believe in the free market which made them rich in the first place – have been caught colluding on several occasions (secretly agreeing to act together when they’re supposed to be competing) and accused of colluding on several other occasions and the fact that they tend to cry poverty, but won’t let anyone look at their books, adds to their image as a Bunch of Slippery Dudes you can’t trust as far as you can throw them, even if they let you use a catapult.

According to the New York Times, former Kansas City Royals owner (and former everything else because he’s now dead) David Glass bought the Royals for $96 million in 2000 and for a couple decades claimed he just wanted to break even and then sold the team in 2019 for $1 billion with a “B” which is a pretty good increase in value for a business that just breaks even.

If they don’t make money, how come teams get more expensive every time they’re sold?

A personal theory about ownership

When I watched David Glass celebrate the Royals 2015 World Series win I thought: “Jesus, what could be more fun than this?”

But maybe rich guys get just as big a stiffy from making some business deal in which they buy a company and fire half its employees which temporarily drives the company stock up so the rich guy can sell it for a profit and then go down into his wine cellar and drink a $5,000 bottle of Chateau De Something while drowning a sack full of kittens to celebrate.

Don’t know, never been rich.

I do believe there are Team Owners who are also actual fans and follow sports before they buy a team, but I also think there are Team Owners who buy a sports team because it’s a ticket to instant celebrity. What’s the point in being rich enough to use $100 bills for toilet paper if nobody knows who the hell you are?

Ask yourself how many autographs George Steinbrenner signed before he bought the New York Yankees.

After I got fired by the San Diego Union I went out and got drunk with the editor who hired me and asked him why the newspaper’s owner wanted to own a newspaper because she clearly didn’t give the South End of a Northbound Rat about journalism, and the editor said if she sells the paper she’s just a rich, old lady that nobody cares about, but if she owns the paper, she’s Somebody.

Haven’t forgotten that lesson and now that you’ve heard it, neither should you.

And now the owners are going to fix baseball

I once heard a player (and he was a really, really smart player) say he thought Owners liked analytics because owners were used to numbers and spreadsheets and calculators and guys who looked like they were auditioning for Revenge of the Nerds, Part V, but generally speaking, Owners didn’t know jackshit about baseball.

And if you don’t understand what you’re seeing, it helps immensely if someone can stick a number on it, which is what analytics advocates do 24/7.

We want Player A because he has a higher WAR than Player B and it’s right there in black and white because 6.3 is definitely more than 3.5, even though Player A and his 6.3 WAR is a clubhouse cancer who will put up good numbers while making three of his teammates worse.

And if you’re not a huge baseball fan and you mainly own a team so people will recognize you in the street or give you better tables in restaurants, the fact that analytics have made games longer and more boring (more on that in the near future) you probably don’t really care.

But…

When fans stop buying tickets (and attendance has dropped every year since 2012) and stop watching the World Series (there have been spikes, but the trend is definitely downhill and it’s a steep hill) and the five least-viewed World Series have come since the analytics revolution, it gets Owners’ attention.

Cost them money and Owners want something done even though the proposed rule changes will make baseball worse. (More on that in the near future as well).

For years, players and coaches have complained about analytics and what they’ve done to baseball, but they mainly complained off the record because they wanted to keep their jobs with analytically-oriented baseball teams which right now includes pretty much all of them. (And anytime you hear a manager talk about how terrific his analytics department is, there’s more than a slight chance that manager is doing a bit of job-ensuring ass kissing.)

As Deep Throat said (and I mean Hal Holbrook, not Linda Lovelace): “Follow the money.”

If games were five hours long with the winner decided by a staring contest and fans would pay to see that, I believe most (or at least some) Team Owners would have no problem with that.

But cost them money and Baseball needs fixing.

More on that in the very near future.