Now we find out the truth.
Recently as part of ongoing labor talks in baseball it has been revealed that these small market teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates (whose fans just built them a new ballpark to help them compete) and the Florida Marlins (who have won two world series in the last fifteen years then immediately sold off the entire team complaining of lack of money) have not only been making money year in year out, despite what they claimed was happening, but have been taking the money paid to them by the rich teams and pocketing it as a windfall instead of reinvesting it into their teams. This goes along with what I have been saying, that small teams could compete if they wanted to and all the bitching about losing money was overblown because there was no shortage of billionaires looking to get into the business of owning baseball teams.
Just in case you don't know, billionaires do not buy businesses so that they can lose fifty million dollars a year every year so they can win. That is why when owners cry about losing money because of how over paid the players are I always call "BS" with a bullhorn from the highest place I can find. And this proves it. As the Pirates have lost 90-100 games a year each of the last ten years (hot on the heels of falling a game short of the world series several years in a row), the ownership has said that salary structures had gotten so wildly out of control that they could no longer field a winning teams. In fact they complained that even an average teams would prevent them from making money. So the good people of Pittsburgh ponied up the money for a new ballpark which led to the old owners promptly selling for a huge profit because of increased value with the new stadium, and now we find out that all of those years, the Pirates were not losing money, were not breaking even, but pulling in massive profits and screwing the fans of the Pirates in the process. How much money did they make, 43,000,000 in the last three years while the teams finished dead last each year. Also during that time the team traded away many promising players claiming they could not pay them because they were losing money year in and year out. And unless I am much mistaken this is probably the first you have heard about this.
Why?
Because this sort of thing does not fit the narrative. The narrative says that rich teams win because they have all the money, not that winners become rich because they persistently try to win and therefore have more fans. So the guy who wrings his hands about the big bad Yankees on ESPN's morning show is a freaking Mets fan so of course he hates the Yankees and wants to paint them in a bad light. Why should he care if the Pirates took the Yankees' money and pocketed it? It costs him nothing.
There is the belief that the Yankees have more money because they have a huge TV deal, but the Braves, Cubs, Red Sox, Mets, Angels and Dodgers all have similar TV deals and yet those teams are not vilified. Why not? Because years of penis envy has not been formed against those teams by crybaby sports writers who watched through gritted teeth as the Yankees beat their favorite team when they were children.
The Yankees are on TV all the time because they have the most fans and so they get the best ratings and therefore the networks, who want the most number of people to see the commercials, put the Yankees on.
The Yankees have more fans because they have been consistent winners for years.
The Yankees have been consistent winners for years because they have ownership which is committed to winning.
Therefore it is winning which breeds large fan bases and and big TV deals and lots of fans.
But...
"Because they have this advantage the other teams can't compete," says the narrative. Far apart from the truly un-American idea that the only way to bring the bottom up is to tear the top down (I know we call that public school but that is broken too) this is also crap. Example #1, the Texas Rangers.
Tom Hicks bought the Texas Rangers after they had won their division two times in three years and they won it again the first year he owned the team. Unfortunately for the Rangers they happened to run into the Jeter, Rivera, Posada, Pettite Yankees in their young and up in coming years and lost the three playoff series by a combined 9 games to 1 (3-1, 3-0, 3-0). Far from realizing that the Yankees were just better, Hicks fired his general manager, traded the core of the team, bought a bunch of ill fitting high priced over the hill free agents, and gave Alex Rodriguez 252,000,000 when the next highest bidder was about sixty per cent of that. Predictably the team went into the tank, the fans stopped coming to watch them lose, and Hicks complained that he could not compete, not because he is an incompetent ass, but because the Yankees are rich. And since this complaint fit into the narrative, the media and Rangers fans licked that !@#$ right off the bottom of his boot and blamed A-Rod for the miserable failings of an incompetent management team.
A quick word about A-Rod.
A-Rod is the whipping boy of embittered sport's fan everywhere. He is supposed to represent everything wrong with the greedy over paid athlete. The problem is that A-Rod is nether greedy nor is he over paid. First off the reason why Alex Rodriguez makes as much money as he does is that for a long time he hit the baseball better than anyone else on planet earth. He was not only scarce, he was unique. And anytime a commodity is scarce it goes up in value. The reason why Kobe makes millions to play basketball and you do not is Kobe can hit a fifteen footer over Ray Allen and dunk on Kevin Garnett and you can't do either one of those things. If Kevin Garnett was in wheel chair you could not dunk him, and neither could I, so stop complaining about what these guys make. Also when A-Rod was given that contract, no one put a gun to Tom Hicks head to make him offer it. Hicks not only out bid everyone else, he bid against himself and paid a price which no one else was willing to pay or even get near. A-Rod averaged hitting .300 with 50HR's and 140RBI's while he was with Texas and was booed every time he struck out by bitter Ranger fans pissed off that he made more money than they did.
And how did he get rewarded? Tom Hicks told the media that A-Rod was greedy and a bad team guy and the media and Rangers' fans licked that !@#$ off his boots too. But was A-Rod greedy?A-Rod agreed to take less money, to cut his own contract, so he could be traded to Boston and the union and MLB said no. Then A-Rod agreed to go to New York after a contentious winter and the Rangers made a terrible trade for him just to get him out of town. Then the media complained that A-Rod just wanted to go play for the Yankees, never mind that he wanted to take a pay cut to go to the Red Sox and the Red Sox were too cheap to pay full price, but somehow this became A-Rod's fault. Then we find out that the reason why A-Rod wanted out of Texas was that Tom Hicks had stiffed him 24.9 million dollars, and what do crybaby sports' fans say? "Well he's got enough money what does an extra 20 million matter?" Well... twenty million. I don't work for free and I dare say you don't either.
Oh but what abut the steroids?
Can we please stop crying about steroids? Did anybody not know Canseco, MacGwire and Bonds were juicing? These guys each put on like fifty pounds of muscle in one off season, and no one cared because they started hitting moonshot home runs. The more they hit the more people came. Other players saw that they could make more money if they took steroids, so they juiced up and more people came to the park. In fact baseball had a renaissance after the strike year as record after record fell on the field and at the turn stile as people poured in to watch guys who had never hit better than .260 with 23HR's hit .320 with 54HR's. Baseball gave you what you wanted. You wanted home runs and you got them. Don't stand there now with your local freaking congressman crying for the children..... OH THE CHILDREN... when you tuned in each night to see if Sosa or Big Mac would be the first to break Maris' record. Screw you and your indignation. You asked for steroids. You demanded steroids. You got steroids! Now lie in your bed and shut up.
So after the bonanza of insanity that baseball became came crashing down and the economy went in the toilet and the gates fell and so did the numbers, now we find out that the whole time the poor innocent small market teams were stealing from their fans the whole time and blaming the Yankees.
But it was always crap.
Exhibit #1 The Texas Rangers.
After Tom Hicks had bankrupted himself and the Rangers and guaranteed that any new owner would have to take on 200,000,000 in debt which he borrowed against the Rangers (not to run the team but to keep his other failing businesses afloat) as well as having to pay out 75,000,000 in unpaid salary to players past and present, not one, not two, not three or even four millionaire/billionaires stepped up to try to buy the biggest joke in Baseball, but not less than six very wealthy men tried to buy the Rangers. Even with all of the debt. Nolan Ryan, Chuck Greenburg and two nameless billionaire partners bought the Rangers for 590,000,000 dollars out bidding billionaires Mark Cuban and Jim Crane for the team. But the Rangers are supposed to be a team that can't compete and will lose money why would these very successful men try to buy them? Because it is all a big freaking lie. They will no more lose money on the Rangers than the man in the moon, and they know it. And now thanks to Pittsburgh everyone else does too.
But no one is talking about it. Because it doesn't fit the narrative.
And speaking of the narrative.
When Cliff Lee was traded to Rangers, who were bankrupt and couldn't take on any more salary, he told the whole world that he had earned the right to decide where he wanted to play and, being friends with C C Sabbathia he wanted to play in New York. Meanwhile Nolan Ryan, Chuck Greenburg and Co have decided that next year they will be capped on their salary at about 90,000,000 dollars which does not leave enough money to sign Cliff Lee.
Understand.... they have already determined how much they will spend to guarantee profit. Not to win but to make profit while they cry about the debt they took on voluntarily.
And also, true to to the narrative, the Ranger fan is getting out his salt and pepper to eat yet one more !@#$ sandwich off the owners' boots the whole while saying, "Yeah screw the Yankees its all their fault!"
Why do I bother to be surprised?
Just Thinking
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