The Futility Infielder

Reader Rob McMillan sent me a couple of emails pertaining to Frank McCourt's pursuit of the Dodgers and called my attention to a handy timeline he's put together, with links to relevant articles about the deal. In his first email, Rob was pleasanttly pessimistic about the deal going through:

The "increasing support" for the McCourt bid mentioned in the Times article shouldn't suprise anyone. Baseball has to cover its collective ass, and McCourt is a litigious sumbitch. So they go through the motions and let the clock tick, all the while spouting positive platitudes to the press. If Bud really wanted to ram this through -- or thought he could -- it would have been done by now. As it stands, McCourt has missed three vote opportunities. Game over, McCheap.

Less than 24 hours later, Rob's whistling a different tune:

The Los Angeles Times today reports on the final nail in the Dodgers' coffin: the first meaningful restructuring of the McCourt deal. News Corp will retain a miniscule amount of equity in the team, but just enough to tip the scales in favor of McCourt. It is frankly a fig leaf; McCourt should have been laughed out of this purchase by baseball, but thanks to Fox ownership, this bad deal is now likely to go through.

For what it's worth, I have a timeline of events of this catastrophe. I don't get why Peter Gammons or any of the other east coast -- er, did I say that? I meant "national" -- sports press isn't picking up on this and condemning it the strongest possible terms. Or is it that bad ownership is a cliché?

From the sound of the aforementioned article by Ross Newhan, the corner on the deal has been turned:

The sale of the Dodgers to Boston real estate developer Frank McCourt moved closer to completion Wednesday when News Corp. agreed to retain a minority ownership position, putting McCourt closer to compliance with the industry's debt service rule by reducing the amount of money he is borrowing in his highly leveraged, $430-million proposal.

The restructured arrangement — which requires that McCourt find a Los Angeles-area investor to buy out News Corp.'s equity share within a period of 12 to 24 months — moved closer to being finalized during another long meeting between McCourt and his wife, Jamie, and representatives of News Corp. and Major League Baseball in New York.

Multiple sources said they expected Commissioner Bud Selig to schedule a conference call vote of major league owners for early next week, which would be ahead of the Jan. 31 deadline in the initial contract between McCourt and News Corp.

As to Rob's query about the sports press, I'm surprised the Boston-linked Gammons hasn't piped up about Boston real estate developer McCourt, who isn't exactly loved around those parts. But not everybody in Boston's been quiet. Boston Globe business columnist Steve Bailey offered some harsh satire last week:

The McCourt Appeal is designed to help our parking lot attendant realize his dream of owning a major league team -- only not here. We've seen enough; it's someone else's turn. Can't L.A., the land of the car, use some parking lots? Send those donations to the Frank McCourt Appeal, c/o The Downtown Column, The Boston Globe, Boston, MA 02107. Give till it hurts.

Few in this town have talked the talk more and walked the walk less. McCourt is strong on vision. Doing is his problem. Cooperative is not a word often associated with the man. For years he has presented countless slide shows with his vision of the New Boston on the other side of the Fort Point Channel. No other plan was ever grand enough for McCourt. He was going to buy the Red Sox. He was going to build a new Fenway on the waterfront. Instead, 25 years after McCourt bought his South Boston land from a bankrupt Penn Central, what we have down there is acres of parking lots.

Well, those gloves are off. But for whatever it's worth, my assumption is that major sportswriters such as Gammons are afraid to bite the hand that feeds. Criticism of a potential ownership bid might threaten the inside access they're so dependent upon. Gammo, for one, is not a journalist, he's a gossip columnist. A good one, to be sure, but he gave up hard news reporting a looooong time ago, and his hyperventilating run-on sentences should not be confused with journalism.

• • •

Avkash Patel of The Raindrops won himself a Futility Infielder coffee mug from my CafePress store for providing a link to a published article which mentioned the amount of revenue sharing money the Milwaukee Brewers received in 2003. From a November 22 article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Revenue sharing from Major League Baseball has increased. In 1999, the team received $8.1 million in revenue from baseball. By 2002, the team got $9.1 million. The Brewers received $15 million in revenue sharing this past season, a direct result of the game's new collective-bargaining agreement with its players. According to the Brewers' own forecasts, the team expects to receive $20.7 million in 2004 and $22.5 million in 2005, although the final figures will be dependent on the revenue other clubs produce.

I'll say it again: it's amazing how buried this information is relative to the widely-reported news about the Yankees' revenue sharing payment, and it's yet one more data point illustrating Bud Selig's impartial (cough, cough, hack, yack) position as commissioner.

Speaking of Bud on the Milwaukee front, Pinstriped Bible-thumper Steven Goldman had this gem in his latest column:

The more important point to be made about new ownership for the Brewers is that it's about time. Perpetually failing franchises are always a combination of transient and constant factors. The general managers, managers and players are transient. Ownership is permanent. The Brewers may be handicapped by the smallest media market this side of Bob the Luddite's TV-Free Freehold of Monticello, Mississippi, but we have seen other teams, such as the Oakland A's and the Minnesota Twins, succeed at being small-market without being small-minded.

Not so with the Brewers. No one forced Jeffrey Hammonds on the Seligs at gunpoint. There was no popular campaign for Eric Young, no contract on anyone's life that forced the franchise to pretend Alex Sanchez was a good player. The same goes for Marquis Grissom, Charlie Hayes, Henry Blanco, and onwards. A team can win, at least on a one-year-at-a-time basis, on a strict budget as long as it understands it has no margin for foolish errors. Signing a player, playing a player, without asking, "What will this guy DO to help us win?" invites disaster.

The Selig organization again and again failed to get good answers for that question.

Some well-deserved blows, but it's worth noting that these days, ownership is not quite as permanent as Selig's 34-year stranglehold of the Brewers wouid have you believe. And the reason for that is the very same rug-wearing rapscallion. As I've written before, there's a tax law called the five-year depreciation which explains a lot of ownership turnover:

The five-year rule allows half of a franchise's purchase price to be allocated to player contracts and depreciated over that span, creating an artificial loss which reduces the owner's tax liability. So if I buy the Dodgers from Fox for $400 million, I can write off $200 million of that, which is $40 mil a year. When five years are up, I, just like other owners, particularly the corporate ones, bail on the Dodgers and find a new tax shelter. See: Disney's Anaheim Angels, anything Jeffrey Loria has touched, and the entire history of the Florida Marlins (Huizenga to Henry to Loria, Oh Shit!).

Incidentally, the guy who came up with this grand scheme is the same guy wearing the ugly toupée. From a CNN/SI piece last spring:

This legal rule was actually generated by a major tax law victory won by Bud Selig in his former baseball role, as a new owner when Selig bought the Seattle Pilots for $11 million in 1969 and moved them to his hometown of Milwaukee,'' says [Harvard law professor Paul] Weiler, author of Leveling the Playing Field. "It was a terrible legal verdict that was won by a guy 30 years ago in a different world.

I'm dizzy from quoting myself quoting an article which quotes a professor, but it's worth noting that the five-year rule is one reason Bud is so revered among owners, especially new-breed ones, and it will stand as one of his lasting legacies to the game. Hey, those IRS guys like their box seats just fine.