Neil deMause

Ten years after the idea of “contracting” baseball teams died a merciful death, it’s back in the news. Who’s trying to get what out of whom this time?

This time, it seems, it started with Ken Rosenthal. Two days after Hank Steinbrenner let fly with an attack on baseball’s revenue-sharing plan that concluded, “if you don’t want to worry about teams in minor markets, don’t put teams in minor markets, or don’t leave teams in minor markets if they’re truly minor,” Rosenthal penned a Fox Sports Exclusive that significantly upped the ante: “Don’t be surprised if the “C” word—contraction—returns to the baseball lexicon soon,” he wrote, noting that he’d been “hearing rumblings” that “certain big-market teams” wanted to whack the Rays and A’s. In one scenario, wrote Rosenthal, Rays owner Stuart Sternberg would end up buying the Mets from the troubled Wilpons, while A’s owner Lew Wolff did the same with the McCourt-wracked Dodgers, before watching their old teams go poof… [read more]

The New York Post has revealed what it claims are the front-runners to buy a share of the New York Mets, but doesn’t tell us anything interesting about them. Armed with Google, I set out to rectify this:

This morning’s New York Post made it a lot easier to set up your office “Who’s going to end up owning the Mets once the Wilpons have to repay their Madoff money?” pool, by running a helpful list of rich guys who, it claims, are in the running to buy at least a share of the Amazin’s. Less helpfully, they’re all a bunch of upper-mid-level Wall Street guys you’ve probably never heard of unless you go in for Goldman/Citi slash fic.

So, in the interest of informed gossip, Runnin’ Scared herewith provides your crib sheet to the guys who may or may not be sharing the Citi Field owners’ box in coming seasons… [read more]

This week at Baseball Prospectus, I take a look at Bud Selig’s plans to add extra wild-card teams, and whether this will make baseball’s postseason any fairer, and its regular season any more meaningful:

Somewhere among the piles of spiral-bound notebooks stacked in my closet lies a short-lived diary titled “The Last Pennant Race.” It recounts the day-by-day events of the last two months of the 1993 Yankees season, of which pretty much all I can remember is, first, that the Yankees managed to tie the eventual champion Blue Jays for first place roughly three dozen times, but never managed to take the lead on their own, and second, that in one late-season game, Don Mattingly, presaging the Jeffrey Maier incident by three years, got credit for a key home run despite it being caught by a fan leaning so far into the field of play that he could have shaken hands with the second baseman… [read more]

Trying to make sense of what the Mets owners’ money woes could mean for the finances behind their new stadium:

If the last ten days in the life of Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon were a baseball game, they would have been shut out, made 17 errors, and hit into a game-ending unassisted triple play. (That last feeling, admittedly, is one that they’re already familiar with.)

First, Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee for Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme victims, announced he was suing the Wilpons for as much as $1 billion in ill-gotten gains. Since then, it seemed like not a day has passed without a Wilpon-related bombshell… [read more]

For the latest installment of my Baseball Prospectus column “Payoff Pitch” (free to non-subscribers this week!), a brief history of baseball revenue sharing, and why it’s neither evil socialism nor, um, good socialism:

A little over a week ago, Yankees president and designated apoplectic pit bull Randy Levine decided to divert attention from his team’s pitching woes by going after a new target: Rangers owner Chuck Greenberg. Five days earlier, the Texas honcho had asserted that it was his team’s efforts to sign Cliff Lee that had stalled the Yankees long enough for the Phillies to enter the picture with their ultimately winning bid. Levine, hearing these as fighting words, lashed out by calling Greenberg a welfare case… [read more]

My first biweekly (semiweekly? I can never remember which is which) column for Baseball Prospectus is up. The column is titled “Payoff Pitch,” and will cover all things baseball and economic; today’s is about the never-ending saga of the Oakland A’s attempts to move to San Jose, and why it may never end:

It has been almost a year since I last checked in here on the Oakland A’s long-running game of footsie with San Jose, where owner Lew Wolff has been dreaming of moving the franchise seemingly ever since he bought it in 2005. At the time, a three-man task force appointed by Bud Selig to decide the team’s future was entering its 12th month of deliberations. Selig promised that their report “will be coming in the near future.”

A’s fans will be forgiven for wondering if Selig meant a near future in geologic time… [read more]

If you can’t be bothered to read Atlantic Yards Report’s crazy-long FAQ on its even crazier-long series on Bruce Ratner’s still crazier green-cards-for-financing schemes, you can now read my Cliff Notes version instead. (Not nearly so crazy, but with more Jackie Chan jokes.)

The ever-epic Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report today closes out his epic series on Bruce Ratner’s bizarre green-cards-for-financing scheme with a (wait for it) epic FAQ on exactly how the New Jersey Nets Brooklyn New Yorkers co-owner plans to take advantage of an obscure federal job-promotion program to save himself a jabillion dollars… [read more]

I’ve been mostly on vacation this month, but tonight at 8:25 pm Eastern I return to the media fray with an appearance on Brian Kenny’s ESPN Radio show to talk about sports ticket prices. You can listen in, hm, looks like here, or tune in your local ESPN Radio station on that thing with the funny knobs.

More on George Steinbrenner, the Great Philanthropist:

Poor dead George Steinbrenner doesn’t even have a grave to spin in yet, and already he’s being raked over the coals for his past sins.

First came Jim Dwyer’s recounting of The Boss’s legacy of egotism and abuse in today’s Times, which recalls how Steinbrenner shook hands with Ed Koch on a lease extension at the old Yankee Stadium, only to back out when he decided he’d rather keep all his cable boodle for himself.

Then at noon today, a group of South Bronx residents held a press conference at the new Yankee Stadium that Steinbrenner and his kids got $1.2 billion in taxpayer money for, demanding that the Yankees cough up proof that they’ve lived up to the community benefits agreement that team execs announced with great fanfare just before the city council vote on the new stadium plan in 2006… [read more]

I don’t plan on reading the coverage of the passing of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, most of which I expect will hew to the “he was blustery, but he built champions” line. My defining memory of The Boss — aside from the three decades he spent whining about being forced to play in a renovated Yankee Stadium, ultimately leading to the $2 billion Catastrophe by the Concourse — will forever be the night in the late ’80s when my friend Emi helped hand out placards to fans in the right-field bleachers that, when held aloft mid-game, spelled out “F-I-R-E G-E-O-R-G-E.” (The Daily News ran the photo on its back page.)

When, not long after that, Steinbrenner was suspended by Fay Vincent for hiring a gambler to dig up dirt on one of his own players (Dave Winfield, who was suing Steinbrenner for reneging on contractually promised payments to Winfield’s charitable foundation), it was announced on the Diamondvision at Yankee Stadium, and the crowd let out a huge cheer.

The days of a Steinbrenner-free Bronx were limited — he was reinstated in 1993 — but it’s worth noting that those were extremely productive years for Yankees management, as with the impatient Boss sidelined the team was able to nurture Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, and others who formed the core of the team that won four World Series between 1996 and 2000. Steinbrenner will no doubt be remembered as the man who restored the Yankee dynasty, but to a large degree it was the rush of renewed consumer spending (and explosive growth of cable) in the 1980s and ’90s that made the revived dynasty possible. Steinbrenner did at least, unlike some other owners, pour these revenues into his own product, but it was GMs Gene Michael and Brian Cashman who, more in spite of The Boss than thanks to him, turned those riches into championships.

Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, though, especially when the dead man’s relatives continue to control a powerful local business and political force. So we have Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. issuing this statement today:

“Today I join 1.4 million Bronxites, and Yankee fans across the world, in mourning the passing of a great man, ‘The Boss,’ George Steinbrenner. … While other baseball fans were jealous of this success, Yankee fans, like myself, loved him for it. Both the Bronx and New York City have lost a giant today—in baseball and in charity.”

Given that Steinbrenner’s foundation had a long history of stiffing Bronx community groups, even before his role as the Thief of Parkland, that may sound a bit much. But it’s accurate in one way: Like most giants, his approach to charity was that nobody was going to get their dirty paws on his golden-egg-laying goose.