For their final installment in Main Character Month, Bobby and Alex examine what has made up the DNA of a professional baseball owner over the sport’s long history, charting the evolution of the ownership class alongside distinct eras of the game and American history. All told, they choose five owners that are most emblematic of how the “median owner” has changed over the decades. In doing so, they ask what we can learn about baseball’s present and future for understanding the people who were in charge in the past.
If you can’t [redacted] them, you might as well understand them!
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Transcript
Tell us a little bit about what you saw and be able to relay that message to Cora when you watch Kimbrel pitch and kind of help out so he wasn’t tipping his pitches. So tipping pitches we hear about it all the time. People are home on the stand what tipping pitches all about? That’s amazing. That’s remarkable.
BOBBY: Alex, it brings me great sorrow and grief to have to start the podcast with the loss of another baseball legend. We lost the greatest of all time, Rickey Henderson, this past weekend.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And normally, how— where we would start this podcast in a jokey manner, our cold opens typically involve us talking nothing about baseball. In this circumstance, I think the man, the legend, demands that we talk about Rickey the player, Rickey the person, Rickey the legend, Rickey the relationship that we have to him, both as a podcast, he is literally our logo as you listen to this show right now. But you as a fan, as— as— as the player who came back to the Oakland Athletics, had his best moments with the Oakland Athletics and came back to the A’s four times over the course of his 25-year long career. We— we lost Rickey unexpectedly this past weekend.
ALEX: Yeah, not how I think we were anticipating starting this episode that has almost nothing to do with baseball players throughout history. But Rickey was the baseball player throughout history. His— he was such a force of nature, and I think, completely sort of redefined how we think about baseball, right? And, like, the numbers themselves are insane, right? The, you know, more than 1,400 stolen bases, the thousands of runs scored. You know, they’re— they’re all the kind of crazy stats that you see where he went 0-0 with, like, four runs scored or something like that. Like, you can pull all of these little threads from his career and— and find a really sort of fascinating and talented player. But— but I think that, like, his legend transcends all of this, right? He is known for his unique flair. His, I guess, unique vernacular, and his unapologetic persona. And he really sort of redefined, I think, what a baseball star looked like when he came into the league, that sort of brash, unapologetic, charisma that said, “Hey, this is who I am”— or rather, “This is who Rickey is.” And, you know, we were— we were all really blessed to be able to witness someone whose— whose body of work transcended what he did on the field.
BOBBY: Yeah, I think the reputation that Rickey holds is one of revolutionizing the style of how the game is played. But I think even before we say that, like— because I think it’s really easy to lose track of how good some of the best players of all time really were in their time. And, you know, you listed off some of the stats, and obviously, people know he holds the all-time— very few players hold the all-time record in anything. He holds the all-time record in steals and he holds a bunch of different records when it comes to steals. He holds many different power-hitting records for the leadoff spot, which is obviously something that he was well ahead of his time on. This is something that we see nowadays, so he was a trendsetter in that respect. But, like, just from a raw numbers perspective, 111.1 career War by Baseball Reference, that is 14th all-time, just two spots behind in Baseball Reference WAR, our beloved Alex Rodriguez. So we’re talking about one of the greatest baseball players who has ever walked to the face of the Earth. And yet, it’s almost like half as interesting to talk about him as a player as it is to talk about him as a performer and a person.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And as a— a model and a trailblazer in the honest respect and the honest meaning of that word for a lot of the style of players that we see nowadays. You know, I’ve been thinking about the phrase, “Form follows function” a lot recently, because I’ve been, you know— this is a very common phrase in art and in design and in movie making as well. So I’ve been thinking about that phrase a lot recently as I’ve been rewatching a lot of my favorite movies of the year, coming to the end of the year, talking about why these movies are my favorite movies. And Rickey is, like, kind of the singular form follows function player. Like he is so good, and also it looks so good, too. A baseball player of his natural talent and his natural athleticism and the skills that he developed over the course of his career should look and sound and perform and rise to the moment like Rickey does, like Rickey did. And obviously, the image of him running, him stealing a base is so iconic to the point that we made it our logo. But there’s just something— there’s so much— something so much deeper there to me, rather than just he ran fast, it’s that he looks like a baseball player ideally should look if you drew it up in your fantasy, not even in a lab, because he’s not drawn up in a lab. He’s—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —he’s sprung from fantastical thinking of how, like, the ultimate baseball fan should want a player to play, and yet he just did that in real life for 25 years. You know? He led the league in steals when he was almost 40. It’s just unprecedented levels of performance at a time when bodies were breaking down faster, conditions were not as good for— for athletes to— to elongate their careers, and he just did it, not only better than anyone else, but just leaps and bounds better than anyone else. While just shattering all kinds of stereotypes, using all of that clout that he— all of that political capital that he had gained by being such a phenomenal player to also say, “Yeah, and I can act how I want too as well.” And I think that— that advanced baseball maybe at the time even more than we know, because now we see that, and we’re like, “Yes, of course, this is how it should be.” He was kind of the person who was pushing that Overton window in real time by sheer force of will.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, he, I think kind of as good or better than anyone, got that— this is entertainment, and the point of this is to put on a show. And you might ruffle some feathers, and you might make some enemies and whatnot, but you’re gonna tune in, right? Everyone knows who Rickey Henderson is because of his larger than life personality, which he wasn’t afraid to let show. And I— I do think that’s something that, like, we have lost from the game, a lot of the things of— about— sort of what Rickey represented, right? Both the— the colorful, outsized personality. And also, frankly, a lot of the skills and prowess. I— I don’t want to say we’ve lost the skills and the prowess but, you know, the— the game doesn’t incentivize it like it may have, you know, 20 years ago, whatever, 30 years ago. And I mean, that’s why, like, his stolen base record is never going to be broken. Like I—
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: —just there is absolutely no way. It’s one of maybe two records that will never be broken, if you want to say that home runs are the other one.
BOBBY: I mean, he has almost 500 more steals than the guy in second.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: And the guy in second is Lou Brock, who’s one of the greatest players of all-time, and who basically, like, invented the idea of a modern base sealer with how he ran.
ALEX: Right. Yes. No one— no one in the modern era is coming— is sniffing these numbers.
BOBBY: All-time leader in stolen bases, caught stealing as well, still with a good percentage, so that just shows you how many he stole, and the all-time leader and run scored, which is just—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —over the course of baseball history, no one crossed home plate more times than him.
ALEX: Yeah. He was— he was an event. He was, like, literally, an event in and of himself, right? You tuned in because it’s, like, Rickey’s up to bat. What’s he gonna do? Oh, Rickey walked? Grab your popcorn. This should be fun. You know, like— and— and how many other players can you say that about throughout history? I mean, there are a lot of really incredible sluggers and guys that you— you know, Shohei Ohtani may be the closest thing we have today to, like, a sort of event-type viewing, but it’s— but it’s different, obviously. There’s something about the speed and the thrill of the stolen base, and we’ve talked about this before, right? That it’s just something that the game has deemphasized, but is so thrilling to watch. One of the most exciting plays, I think, in baseball, and obviously, he was the platonic ideal of what that looks like.
BOBBY: I saw somebody saying that Rickey was pimping home runs at a time when you would get immediately head hunted for doing that, except—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —pitchers couldn’t do that to him, because if you hit him with a pitch, he’d be on third in three pitches later.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And now, you— basically, you just gave up a run by choosing to hit him rather than just giving him first base.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And that is just so cool. I mean, we just don’t have guys that are this cool anymore. You know?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: It’s almost to the point where, like, when you— you think about how celebrities used to be, or when you think about how movie stars used to look and you got— you have that nostalgic feeling even for a time that you weren’t around for, or a time that you weren’t contemporary with. Because, you know, Rickey’s career ends in 2003. Of course, he has— he’s bouncing around to a lot of teams at this time of his career. He’s 44, so he’s not the same player that he was. So, you know, you and I— I mean, maybe you, because you are a fan of the A’s and he’s so linked to that franchise, have a closer relationship to him. But everything that— my relationship to him is completely in hindsight. And so I have this nostalgia for this type of player who, of course, I see as archetypal, but I never really saw the original. You know, I’m seeing copies of copies of copies, and even that is entertaining and— and tantalizing to me. So I think he just occupies such a special place in the— as we have talked about many, many times in this podcast, in the long interwoven history of baseball. And, you know, this episode that we’re going to do today, we’re going to talk about the evolution of the baseball owner. You know? I— I struggle to think about what showing Rickey Henderson would have done to the psyche of any of the guys that we are going to talk about, like, pre-1970 here. They would have just melted and be like, “But there’s going to be a guy like that?”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: “There’s going to be a guy who plays like that? Oh, my God. We got to do everything in our power to keep this sport going so that we can hand the baton off to this guy.”
ALEX: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he— you know, there— folks are sharing some really wonderful stories, really funny stories, right? He has a— he always wore his heart on his sleeve, and so it’s sort of easy to kind of laugh at his— not laugh at his legacy, but, you know, enjoy the levity of it, but I think it’s just as important to sort of admire how he ran counter to a lot of the culture that baseball cultivated, that we’re about to talk about in— in an era when conformity was like the thing. He stayed true to himself. And he— he believed, as much as anyone else, that he was the— the greatest ever do it. And I— frankly, he was right, so—
BOBBY: Yeah. And it should be noted, in the kind of last point here before we move on, that you know, Rickey is in the long, long, long and storied lineage of black baseball players playing the game in a way that interrogates the stage-ness, the whiteness, of baseball history. And a lot of the confrontation that we allude to was not just because he was doing these things. It was because he was doing these things and he’s black, you know?
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And when you hear people who preserve the tradition of Negro League Baseball talking about the— the methods that it was played in contrast to how Major League Baseball was being played at the time before the color barrier was broken. It’s impossible to deny the connections between how Rickey was playing in the game at his apex and how Major League Baseball, finally, at the time in the ’80s and 90s, black participation was— was on the rise and was peaking, and stolen baseball, and entertainment. And, like, you’re talking about this— this showmanship and— and caring, like I’m saying, form— form is fu— form follows function. Like, not only caring about, yes, we can preserve the sanctity of our box scores and our fundamentals and all these different things. But also at the end of the day, like you got to put some butts in seats. And that is, I think, something that Major League Baseball needs periodic reinjections of. And a player like Rickey is perfect— like primary evidence as to why. And, you know, I think we’re doing okay now in terms of eventizing certain players and allowing their personalities to come out. But I think if— if we talk about the kind of seven-year history of this podcast, and even the baseball that we kind of were, like, teenagers and growing up on, a lot of— like, when Rickey left, when Rickey retired, like, a lot of that stuff went away and some of that is coincidence, right? But a lot of it, it feels kind of narratively woven together, that he retires in the early 2000s and then we get, like, 15 years of pretty boring baseball, to be totally— to be totally honest. And I just think that should be remembered, because, like, these things don’t happen by accident, you know? Everything from— from the way that the game is exhibited nationally for people to observe, that stuff trickles down and it influences how young players perceive of themselves and decide whether or not they want to pursue baseball— baseball as a sport well into their adulthood, well to the point they would ever even actually make it to the majors. Like, he is iconoclastic, you know? He is truly the type of player that inspires future generations of players, and we have to make sure that we preserve that and— and value that in the dialog about the sport, but also just in sport itself, so that there even is, like, this exhibition of this type of play. So that people can emulate it. And I don’t know, I worry about the sport sometimes in that regard. But who knows? I mean, there won’t be another Rickey to come along, because he’s one of one in baseball history. But there could be someone who comes along, and I think Rickey would probably want this, who does it completely their own way.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, the opportunity is there, right? If the sport wants to encourage that, it can, so—
BOBBY: RIP to the greatest.
ALEX: Yep.
BOBBY: All right. We’re gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we are gonna do the evolution of the baseball owner, our final installment in main character month. But before we do, I am Bobby Wagner.
ALEX: And Alex is the other co-host of Tipping Pitches.
BOBBY: You’re mixing it up on me?
ALEX: I’m doing the Rickey third person.
BOBBY: Oh, okay. And you are listening to Tipping Pitches, which Alex already just said. It’s throwing off the cadence of our intro but [15:08]
ALEX: That— that threw— that threw everything off. Scrap that. I— he’s the only one who can do that. I see what no one else does.
[theme]
BOBBY: All right, Alex. Are you ready to do this?
ALEX: I am ready. Let’s talk baseball ownership throughout the history.
BOBBY: So if you listen to last week’s episode, at the end, I spoke a little bit about how our intention for this episode was to talk about stadium workers. You know, in thinking about main characters of this show, of course, we did our episode about Alex Rodriguez. That was really what inspired the whole month worth of episodes. We wanted to do this Alex Rodriguez’s Rules To Life that you had been calling together for the last year, basically. Amazing episode. If you haven’t listened to it, I suggest you go back and listen to it. We’ve received wonderful feedback from everybody who was actually crazy enough to care this much about Alex Rodriguez. We, then, followed that with our episode about Robert Dean Manfred, Jr., the current commissioner of Major League Baseball, and I would say a frenemy of the podcast. Obviously, he operates within the world that we care about, the finances of baseball, the big business of baseball, baseball and labor. And so he has always been a main figure in this— in this show. Last week, we talked about Marvin Miller, the first executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Of course, Marvin Miller has come up many times on the show, but we’ve never really, truly done the deep dive like we did last week, that was a lot of fun, with David Hill. And then this week, we intended to talk about stadium workers, because stadium workers are the thing that makes the— the Major League Baseball ecosystem go around. You know, you don’t have Major League Baseball games without the people who are actually running concessions, who are seat attendants, who are doing the unseen labor that is keeping Walter O’Malley’s beloved Dodger Stadium running in perpetuity. And we intended to kind of focus it on the Oakland A’s stadium workers, because, you know, many questions arise when the team leaves the city, what happens to the people who work there? Do they get offered the chance to go to Sacramento with the team? How do they staff a new stadium? All these questions that we had, but the union that represents the stadium workers, this also represents hotel workers in California, and those hotel workers are currently on strike. And so in terms of logistics, it was very hard to organize any interviews with the— with the stadium workers that we intended to talk to. So we plan to try to do that at some point in this offseason, but it was clear that it was not going to come together over the two weeks of the holidays.
ALEX: And— and— and not worth doing without being able to talk to them. I just— I just want to say, so that’s why when we— when we do this—
BOBBY: Yeah. Like, I’m just kind of like trying to answer those questions.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And so we pivoted and we asked ourselves, who else takes up a lot of airspace on this podcast?
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And Alex, the answer to that question was the Major League Baseball ownership class, for better and for worse. Why did you want to do—
ALEX: For better and for worse.
BOBBY: —the baseball ownership evolution? What is interesting about this to you?
Ale”: Well, I mean, I think we take— we allude to a lot of the history of ownership. I think that, you know, because we are talking about the game as it— as it is today, we talk a lot about the owners that currently occupy that space, that currently hold that title. And we sort of allude to some of the history of ownership throughout baseball’s sort of unfolding labor history and whatnot, but we have never really taken a close look at some of the folks who really shaped the game and— and frankly, informed what the modern owner looks like. I mean, we, obviously— you know, we— we talked a lot about Marvin Miller last week. We talk a lot about sort of how baseball’s labor movement has unfolded, but I think to fully understand it, you really need to examine the other side of the picture, right? which is management, which is the folks who are in control. And there are some really interesting characters throughout baseball’s history, who— whose names you may have heard, who we may have even referenced from time to time on this podcast. But I think we are overdue for a sort of deep dive into— I— I guess what you could— what you could call this unified theory of ownership, right? A lineage that— that draws from decades of monopolistic control over the sport, and I think— I think it’s worth interrogating.
BOBBY: Yeah, I think it’s probably good practice to acknowledge up top here that I think the true unified history of Major League Baseball ownership is the book Lords of the Realm.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: By John Helyar, which we’ve acknowledged on this podcast many times, which we alluded to and pulled from— liberally, when we were talking about— when we were doing our coverage of the lockout, because Lords of the Realm tells the history of baseball ownership and commercialization of— of the sport of baseball, from the Dead Ball Era all the way up, basically, until the 1994 strike. And so, it— it also, in doing so, chronicles the entire history of labor relations of— of baseball. And that is really what ownership is. It’s like stewarding the game from a financial perspective. I think if you listen to the show, you probably understand that the owners are not capital S, Stewards of the game, really. They’re not stewards of what’s in the sport’s best interest. They’re not stewards of what’s in the fans’ best interest. They’re stewards of what’s in the best entrance— interest of their bottom line. And that is something that is true throughout Major League Baseball history. Now, there have, obviously, been exceptions that prove that rule, owners here and there, who say what maybe Steve Cohen might say where, “This is a— I think of this more as a community endeavor. I don’t think about how I’m going to make the most money from this team.” You could talk about whether that’s posturing. You could talk about whether it’s been posturing and whether it’s really been a marketing mechanism for owners throughout baseball history. But, of course, there is— has always been a plurality, if not a majority, of owners have always thought, “What is in my best financial interest? Just do that. We’ll figure it out later.” And I think that that is probably the subtext of, basically, all of these different owners as we run through here. So ba— what the exercise is going to be is we’ve sketched out five eras of baseball, as we see them. And of course, there are different ways to make these delineations. You could sketch out 10 eras, you could sketch out two eras. You could sketch out a hundred eras of Major League Baseball, year by year, who is the owner, who is like the capital T, capital O, The Owner. But in the interest of not making a 17-hour long podcast, and also in the interest of really not being qualified to do something like that, because we weren’t alive in 1910, we’ve— we’ve set them aside into these five categories. Those categories are kind of, like, the Gilded Age, and this is basically the turn of the 20th century, all the way up until, you know, like World War II era, when baseball kind of changes and becomes integrated. It becomes a little bit more commercial. It’s kind of this post-World War II pre-Marvin Miller Players Association era, which I— we didn’t really come up with a name for that one, but we’ll talk more when we get there. We have the— the labor era, which is the ’60s and ’70s. This is when a lot of the baseball conversation, as we see it, is dictated by the fact that the unionization effort has really advanced and is now— we’re now talking more about the long term health of the industry and the workers within it. We have the TV boom of the ’80s and ’90s. And then we have what we’re calling kind of like the modern era, which is the 2000s and beyond. Obviously, there are a lot of micro— micro shifts between all those periods, and I think we know the most about those micro shifts between the 2000s and beyond. So when I say something like the modern era is 2000 to now, we’re like, “Okay, well, there’s a hundred different things that have happened between then and now that make it different to own a baseball team in 2001 versus 2024.” But hopefully, you all will agree that the owner that we choose kind of bridges the different gaps of the different eras, the micro eras within the eras that we’ve chosen. So we’re gonna go through chronologically, and we’re just gonna talk about which owners we think best personify or are most interesting to talk about how they personify the eras as we see them. Does that make sense? Have I done a good job of explaining that?
ALEX: Yes, you’ve done a great job of explaining that. I think it’s— again, as you kind of mentioned, this is not meant to be comprehensive. You know, we’re sort of starting around the 1900s. We, obviously, have a few decades of organized baseball before that, that is sort of, you know, starting to consolidate into a business. But we’re— we’re really just sort of looking at, you know, the last 100 year— you know, 120 years or so. As you mentioned, read Lords of the Realm. It— it informed, I think, a lot of the research for this episode. Frankly, a lot of the research for most episodes. So if you want a deeper dive into some of these colorful characters, I encourage you to go check it out, because it’s a really comprehensive history.
BOBBY: Yo, real quick. Imagine spending what I presume are years writing a book about baseball ownership, and then it leads to, like, the single— the singular confrontation of the 20th century in sports, is the 1994 strike, where the owners—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —are trying to break the union and get a salary cap. And then you’re just like, “Damn, I have this book which explains exactly how we got here, line by line for the last 100 years, and I’ll add another forward with— about the ’94 strike and how that plays into this.”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Talk about serendipity. Imagine if we ever did something that was that well-timed in our career, we wouldn’t be us—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —if we did that. But imagine, just imagine that.
ALEX: All right, I worked on this book for— about how ownership exploits labor for years, and then they just tweeted it out, like—
BOBBY: But in a good way, you know?
ALEX: But in a good way, yeah.
BOBBY: Now, here’s the— here is this almanac of how this happened, basically.
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: It’s like when the— it’s like when the lockout happened and we were right there with the CPA ABCs.
ALEX: That’s— that’s exactly what it was like.
BOBBY: We’re on the pulse, you know?
ALEX: Someone’s gonna be citing us in 30 years.
BOBBY: You know what? They should those episodes were good. All right, let’s do it, Gilded Age.
ALEX: Let’s dive in.
BOBBY: I don’t— the Gilded Age probably means something else, but we’re calling it the Gilded Age.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BOBBY: It’s— it’s gilded. You know, it’s golden. We talk about it fondly in retrospect. It’s when baseball was becoming baseball. The owner that we have selected for this era, his name is Charles Comiskey. Are you familiar with this work?
ALEX: Heard of him. Yeah, heard of him briefly.
BOBBY: Probably most notably— most— most known at this point, 100 years later, for Comiskey Park, which, when it was built, I think, was the most forward-looking and beloved baseball stadium that had been built in that century. And then also for the Black Sox Scandal. So those are—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —two heavy-hitters that’s more—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —more than most owners ever have on their CV.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean— I mean this era, you know, as we mentioned, kind of comes out of, you know, the early days of baseball that is really just starting to organize itself into a business. You know, I think this era can largely be seen as a sort of consolidation of power, in a sense. And it’s also defined by a real sort of paternalism, honestly, towards the players.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: You see a lot of the sort of family-owned teams, right? Even folks like Charles Comiskey, right? It’s— are— are largely defined by this idea of like, “I know what’s best for the player. Look, I’m going to,” quote-unquote,” ‘take care’ of you in the way that I see best, but you really have no room to complain about that.” And Comiskey is, I think, frankly, the best representation of this, right? He is— he, frankly, backs a lot of his players into a corner, and is so— is incredibly frugal and sort of autocratic in the way that he runs his team.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: He’s very involved in the kind of day-to-day micro management of it. And as you mentioned, like it directly leads to the Black Sox Scandal. Marvin Miller famously was like, you know, everyone talks about how Shoeless Joe Jackson should be in the Hall of Fame. My question is, why is Charles Comiskey in the Hall of Fame, right? He should— rather than putting Shoeless Joe in, we should take Charlie— Charles Comiskey out, because he is, frankly, the reason that— hat scandal happens.
BOBBY: Yes. You can draw the line. Now, he’s not telling them to throw the games, but the frustration that was built up by how little Comiskey was paying his players. He was paying his players on the average, I think $3,000 in— in the early days, in the teens. $3,000 a year, which is like the modern day equivalent of, like, in the ’50s, I think, in the $50,000 range, which for a sport where you’re one of only 400 people and you have these set of skills, like it’s not very much money. And so that resentment towards him, I think a lot of people and a lot of reporting and research has confirmed over the years that that was part of the equation of why those players wanted to throw those games. Now, obviously, they— they took money in exchange for throwing those games. They didn’t just lose just to stick it to Comiskey. But— so, yeah. So you mentioned, I mean, some of the things that make him emblematic of this time period, but I think as we were talking about this time period and saying, “Okay, what are some of the factors that we’re looking for in an owner? Because what are the things that are long lasting from here?” This is around the turn to 1900, we’re talking about, “Okay, now the National League and the American League are really starting to be centralized as the leagues that matter, as the major leagues.” We’re— we’re leaving behind in the Dead Ball era. We’re leaving behind in the 19th century, some of these more far flung leagues, where they’re doing things a little bit weirder. They’re doing things a little bit more local. And we’re really trying to make up a behemoth out of this. And along with that comes Charles Comiskey and the type of owner who takes— so the White Sox come, they— they were the St. Paul Saints in Minnesota. They get moved to Chicago to be the second team in Chicago, obviously, a major metropolis, and they take on the White Stockings moniker, which used to be what the Cubs were called. So they’re really trying to glide off of the— the long, storied history of a team that’s already in this city and trying to develop new relationships with the city that already has a baseball team. There’s already a demonstrated interest for this. So we’re seeing like an advancement in commercialization of the sport, and owners trying to play their part in that. So he builds Comiskey Park, and of course, this is, I think, the kind of, like marquee baseball stadium example from this time period, which then— you know, they beat— they beat Fenway to the punch, they beat Wrigley to the punch, they beat old Yankee Stadium to the punch. And they built a stadium—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —in 1910 that lasts until 1990 and they have, I think, like just under 30,000 seats when it’s first launched, and 15 years later, they double the size of the stadium to— to— to be over 50,000 seats. And you see, as we— as we progress beyond the 193— 1920s and ’30s, you see more stadiums being built, kind of like in that 40,000 to 60,000 seat range and that becomes like the predominant way of building a stadium. Let’s sell as many tickets as possible. This is a truly commercial endeavor that we’re engaging in here. This is not a 10,000 seat local stadium that is just kind of small time baseball here. This is— this is the big leagues in more ways than one. And so I think that that is a huge part of his legacy. The person— Charles Comiskey, the person, is really interesting because he had a long, long playing career in the various—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —major leagues before he even became an owner. So he was a— he was a player and then he was a player-manager, kind of like an incredible managerial career. He won twice as many games as he lost. Like he won almost 1,000 games managing in professional baseball, and then he goes on to buy a team. And I think that’s so interesting, because, like, if we think from our perspective, 120 years in the future, it’s kind of— it’s— it’s impossible to imagine a player who, like, starts their career in the indie leagues or the minor leagues or whatever, has a decent career. He’s not— he’s no Rickey Henderson, he’s no Willie Mays, he’s no Alex Rodriguez, but he had a solid career. He has bonafides, then going on to buy a small town— small time team and then be the owner, you know? Like we actually saw A-Rod tried and he failed, you know?
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: So it’s real— it’s just— it’s really interesting, and I think emblematic of the fact that baseball has changed so much.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, he really does sort of represent the kind of industrial, I guess, entrepreneurship of that era, right? Players are laborers who are largely expendable, right? He charges them to do their own laundry. And again, it really like— like, forces a lot of them into a corner where they— there’s a deep mistrust between the players and the owners, so it obviously forces them to— to turn to gamblers to supplement their income. But he really— I mean, he is the sort of extreme example of—
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: —this era, right? Of sort of what happens when you push and push the sort of exploitation that hard. But broadly speaking, this is true of— of many other owners in this era. I mean, I suppose you could say that, you know, there’s sort of the other kind of— we start to see the sort of rise of, like, the family trust as well, right? You mentioned like the Wrigley’s, the [33:45] Clark— Clark Griffith, who owns the Senators, again, run things with a little bit more of like a civic mindedness. But even still, at the end of the day, these team owners are learning that baseball teams are a vehicle for profit. And I think that, you know, their actions reflect that sort of unchecked authority. You have the— the cementing of the— you know, you have the reserve clause in place. You have MLB’s antitrust exemption that comes into play. And so—
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: —this is really where you start to see baseball turn into, frankly, a business.
BOBBY: I don’t know where— where else to mention this, other than right here, right now. So I guess I’ll just— I guess I’ll just add this little, fun fact here.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Cominsky was a first baseman in his playing career, and he is credited as one of the first first basemen to have popularized playing the field away from the bag. So prior to this—
ALEX: Hmm.
BOBBY: —first baseman used to stand, like, right on the base, supposed to standing like a few feet in from the line. And he was—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —like, “I feel like I can field more ground balls this way.” And sure enough, 130 years later, he was right. I don’t know what they were thinking.
ALEX: Under no circumstances, you have to hand it to Charles Comiskey, I’m just saying.
BOBBY: All right. So as we go along, I mean, I’m kind of interested in— at the end of this conversation, I would love if we could kind of grab some traits from each of these guys in each of these eras and mold it all into one ball and say, “Okay, here are the evolutionary traits, evolutionary characteristics of the Major League Baseball owner.” So if— if forced to choose, what do you think would be the one thing from Comiskey that endures? Like, what is the one thing that owners after him internalized from him and him—his— him and his ilk, about what it takes to be a Major League Baseball— a successful Major League Baseball owner?
ALEX: I suppose— I mean, again, the— the sort of paternalism owner knows best really does come to mind, right? I mean, this is something that you see reflected in the decades and decades to come and— and as a core feature of some of the other— other owners that we will— we will talk about. Now, I think that, like, it’s probably less true today, just— I think most owners are sort of— are far more mask off. But I think that’s sort of just blatant disregard for players’ needs and— and fans’ needs. Basically saying, “I’m the purveyor of this baseball team. And if you want to watch, you’ll fall in line.” Like—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —I— that is something— I mean, we have— you know, we have just a few years ago, Phil? Phil Castellini?
BOBBY: Yeah. Yeah.
ALEX: I mean, where— where are you gonna go?
BOBBY: Right.
SPEAKER 3: He’s got carrots and lettuce and mushrooms, porcini. The vegetable king, Bob Castellini.
ALEX: And— and that feels— it feels largely reflective of the last century of baseball, right? And that monopoly that was created. Now, it’s not exactly what he meant, but I think it, unintentionally, was what he meant.
BOBBY: Yeah. I mean, if we’re talking about the things that have remained in the DNA from— from Comiskey to someone like Castellini, that does feel very resonant as an idea of like, “This is my team, I own it. I’ll do with it as I want.” I think we’re in an— maybe we can save this for the modern era, but we are sort of in an era where a lot of owners have to, at least, feign interest in what the community—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —and public think about what they’re doing. You know?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Even if they don’t actually feel that way authentically, and they’re just doing that because, like, consultants told them it’s better for the bottom line or whatever. But, yeah, that’s really interesting. I think that the paternalistic— but I think that, like— I mean, not to play Devil’s Advocate on behalf—
ALEX: Do it.
BOBBY: —Charles Comiskey, but Comiskey Park, one of the most beloved stadiums of the 20— 20th century, you know?
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: Like people actually—
ALEX: And— and— and built with his own money.
BOBBY: Yeah. I mean, that’s why he got to name it after him, right?
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: Didn’t have to name it like chewing— like a chew— after a chewing gum or whatever, like— or— when they rebuilt Comiskey’s— or when they— when the White Sox built a new stadium in 1991 and they left the original Comiskey Park, they called it the New Park. They carry the name over. They called it Comiskey Park as well, kind of like New Yankee Stadium. You know, it’s— it was new Comiskey Park. And then they pretty quickly sold— sold the naming rights after that. And now—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —now, they’re playing at Rate Field. They’re probably playing at Comiskey Park on Rate Field or something like that. That’s probably the phrasing that they use internally.
ALEX: Right. No, I mean— I mean, I think you’re right, right? It’s like that— it’s a sort of main character syndrome, honestly, right? That I’m not just the owner of the team, but I am the spokesperson for the team. I— you know, my name shall be linked to the team. We will— we will certainly see this in the decades to come, so— all right. Anything else on Comiskey or do you want to move on?
BOBBY: No, let’s move on. This next era, we don’t have a great— we don’t have a great name for it, or kind of call you like, the integration era, the post-war era.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: This— this— like, loosely from, like, the ’40s. You know, the early to mid-40s, up until the 19— the mid-1960s when— which the era after that is really kind of like the Marvin Miller era, basically, the labor era, but that— we’re sandwiched now between, like, the end of Comiskey— Comiskey being like the most— like— like a headliner type owner into the ’40s and the ’50s. And I think people could probably guess who— who we might choose as most emblematic for this era, particularly if you are a patron and you just read along the book Stealing Home with us, which is about the Dodgers moving from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and the stadium that they then built. So, Alex, in the post-war integration period, who is the owner that we have chosen in the baseball evolution— baseball ownership evolution?
ALEX: It is one Walter O’Malley.
BOBBY: Bill Veeck and [:40:04] dawg.
ALEX: I know.
BOBBY: Okay. Tipping Pitches kowtowing to the Dodgers power again. Classic Tipping Pitches Dodgers pod.
ALEX: O’Malley is really interesting. I mean, I’m curious to hear what you have to say about him, because he—
BOBBY: He seems like a good guy. I like him a lot. He seems like a good guy.
ALEX: Because he seems like a good guy.
BOBBY: Yeah. Yeah.
ALEX: I agreed with basically everything that he did.
BOBBY: I mean, yeah.
ALEX: No. I mean, he is representative of the era and he’s not, right? I mean, he is really forward thinking in how he is approaching the game, right? He sees baseball as having potential for— for being a consumer product, right? A national consumer product. He’s one of the first people to really explore televised baseball. I mean, obviously, you know, it goes without saying that he moves the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, because he recognizes that, you know, this is a growing market. This is sort of where we start to get the idea of, like, baseball markets, honestly. And—
BOBBY: Yeah, before that, it used to just be like you were in a city because that was the only place that you would be able to build something of a— of a relevant enough engineering structure to be able to host baseball games like this.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And then he comes in and he’s like, “Yes, but beyond that, we will touch hundreds of miles from where the stadium is.”
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: “Think bigger, please.”
ALEX: Yeah. Yeah.
BOBBY: “Cars can drive to the stadium. Cars. I care a lot about cars.”
ALEX: Yeah, he— he’s— he’s a— a visionary, frankly. And he’s— and he’s ruthless about it, right? He knows exactly what he wants. He sees that, you know, a sort of— again, there’s this post-war sort of economic growth in the country. There’s more competition for different forms of entertainment. And he knows that baseball needs to keep up with that if it wants to remain relevant. I mean, famously— and we— and we— you know, it’s— it’s mentioned in Stealing Home, right? He goes to Disneyland for inspiration for Dodger Stadium because he— he knows that you need to have all the bells and whistles if you want people to— if you want to convince them to come over going to a movie or going to a theme park or— or this, you know, broadening array of— of things that you can do in this sort of consumer-oriented society. And so he really is pushing it forward.
BOBBY: Yeah, if you want to divorce them of their dollars.
ALEX: Right. Yes, exactly. He’s— he’s skilled at that.
BOBBY: I think the two competing interests for this one, like I mentioned, are— are O’Malley, who we ended up choosing, and Bill Veeck. And I think that Bill Veeck is— is a man out of time and Walter O’Malley is a man ahead of his time.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Like, I think— like Bill Veeck was a very— so Bill Veeck is— he— he owned several different teams over his career as a baseball owner, Cleveland, St. Louis Browns, the— the White Sox as well. He is the owner who— who ended up signing Larry Doby to Cleveland and integrating the American League in 1947. I think people look back really fondly on him as an owner, as, like, one of the best owners, like one of the least terrible owners that we’ve ever had in baseball history, because this is someone who genuinely had a love and affection for the game and the things that it could do for the community, and thought of baseball as— as a business. Like baseball— baseball itself, me owning the team and exhibiting these games as the business. Not trying to think about how can baseball legitimize my 360-degree view on what my business interests are, but rather, I’m here for baseball, because of baseball. He— he grew up kind of like— he grew up as a fan watching Negro Leagues games as well as Harlem Globetrotters basketball games. And so the idea of— of an entertainment product being kind of, like, authentically entertaining, rather than corporate, was something that was important to his ownership tenure. Now, O’Malley is really different and I think that what makes him a selection here is that he— like I said, he’s— he’s a man ahead of his time and he sets the blueprint or furthers the cause of what we now know to be the idea of baseball ownership. O’Malley did not come from a baseball background. I mean, he grew up as a baseball fan. He was a fan of the Giants. He grew up in the Bronx. But he comes from a political background. I mean, he had his law degree. He— he was an engineer with the New York City subway, and then went on to become an investor, and— and to invest in projects like the Long Island Railroad. And so this is somebody who is, like, really politically enmeshed in the wider American culture, rather than just in the baseball world. And so what he does is he kind of, like— he professionalizes the ranks, you know? He— I think most notably the thing that he did for the future of baseball, aside from Dodger Stadium and this concept of the— the super stadium with the big parking lot and can attract and sell this dream of being able to drive to the ballpark and all these different things that we talked about when we’re talking about Stealing Home. I mean, he hired Branch Rickey, and Branch Rickey changed player development, both from an advancement of how good players could become forever, but also from a financial perspective. The more good players you can develop, the more money you can make off of the backs of those players. And those, to me, are the reasons that Walter O’Malley, like aside— you set aside all the other stuff about how he was the power broker among the owners at this time, like they all looked to him for guidance. That stuff is all in Marvin Miller’s autobiography, which we talked about last week when we were doing the Miller episode. But just those two things alone, I think, make him kind of most emblematic of this era.
ALEX: Yeah. He really sees the team as a corporate tool, as like a branding vehicle, honestly. And he is not the only one to do that, famously. I mean, Gussie Busch, who owns the Cardinals at the time, is another owner who sort of— really sort of recognizes where the sport is headed. Ties the Cardinals identity to the— to the Anheuser-Busch Corporation, basically. And those sort of two symbols become synonymous with each other. But O’Malley is—
BOBBY: And they still are.
ALEX: And they— they still are, absolutely. But O’Malley is really sort of the one who’s going to push baseball into its, you know, national, ruthlessly, business-minded and efficient, you know, media innovator sport. And— and like you mentioned, he is— he is also incredibly influential in, like, the structure of the game, right? He is single-hand— like single-handedly organizing commissioners to be put in place. He will— you know, he will often advance his ideas through proxies. So he is really cunning in the way that he sort of advances his ideas, but really instrumental in, like, how he ultimately shapes the game and— and just the blueprint, I think, for a lot of owners going forward.
BOBBY: You know, it’s— I find it interesting how these kinds of circles operate, and I— I don’t know as much about how well O’Malley was liked by his peers, necessarily, but he was clearly deferred to by his peers.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Like he did something that nobody else would have been ballsy enough to try, to take a signature franchise from Brooklyn from a market where it had been proven successful and beloved, and had just like a factory of fans forever. The likes of which are still resonating today with someone like Bernie Sanders, who would like to go back in time and take Walter O’Malley off the face of the Earth, based on the way that he talks about it.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: But he took that franchise from there and he [48:00] He took it to— he took it to California, and he said, “We— we— we— we must not be afraid to dream a little bigger here. You know, that this— that baseball truly does span coast to coast. And to put my money where my mouth is, I’ll actually take my franchise and go coast to coast with it.” And that garnered a level of respect from the other owners that almost reminds me of the way that, like, people in Silicon Valley just— like we hate Mark Zuckerberg, but everybody who’s in Silicon Valley just, like, bends the knee to him because he invented Facebook in a dorm room and then it became the biggest company on the planet. You know? Like, I don’t care about that guy. He could go die for all I’m concerned, but like, everybody in Hollywood is just like— or, sorry, everybody in Silicon Valley is just like, “That’s the guy. Like, you don’t understand it. That’s the guy. If we could all be one guy, we would choose that guy.” And that’s kind of how O’Malley was at the time, to be honest.
ALEX: Yeah. Yeah. He has this really sharp wit, this humor. And, again, like he is seeing things that just other folks are not seeing. Most owners at the time think that TV is going to kill the sport, right?
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: They think people are going to stop coming to games, and O’Malley is like, “Not only we’re putting our home games on TV, we’re putting our road games on TV. Like we’re— we’re doing it all. People are going to want to do this, and it’s actually going to grow the sport rather than diminish it.” So—
BOBBY: A guy whose legacy spans from all the way back in Brooklyn with Ebbets Field, all the way through to hiring Branch Rickey and Tommy Lasorda, and being the organization that employs Vin Scully, who then calls games, whose voice is the chronicler of baseball games all the way until you and I are in college, you know? And he— his— his thumbprint is on— his fingerprint is on this game 100 years forever born. You know what I mean? So it’s like—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: It’s kind of undeniable at a certain point.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: All right.
ALEX: What is— is there a— a defining characteristic of O’Malley that you think captures not only this moment, but sort of where the game would— would head from an ownership perspective?
BOBBY: Power broking.
ALEX: Yeah. Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Like he comes from centralized democratic party politics in New York City, at a time when that stuff was like a machine, basically. They still had remnants of the old— the old political machines and how that stuff played out. And, you know, in our conversation about Stealing Home, we talked about how one of the things that pushed O’Malley and the Dodgers out of New York was that they couldn’t come to an agreement on how the new stadium for the Dodgers in Brooklyn would be funded, in part because Robert Moses was like, “We’re not paying for this. The city is not going to pay for this at all. This has to be your money that you put into it.” And obviously, he was able to get more public funds in California to entice the team to come out there. But using some of those tactics that a Robert Moses might use to get things built in New York City, corruption and all, to— to clear pathways for himself financially, I think, to me, is what sticks around for a guy like him. He is a man of honestly contradiction. You know? He looked at through different lenses, seem so different to me. Like when I hear the— the intimate details of that he cared so much about how Dodger stadium was built, and he conceived of it as this kind of like— like I always talk about it, baseball nirvana, the colors of the seats, the— the sight lines, the view out of— onto the city, the— the palm trees that they planted there. Like all of that attention to detail stuff, it almost makes it, like, a little harder for me to hate him as much as I think I should hate him on the page. But to me, I think the trait that we take from him is like, okay, a baseball owner should be a power broker. Yes, they should be—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —paternalistic towards the players. If we take that from Comiskey, yes, O’Malley isn’t playing all of that same stuff, too. But also at the same time, I should be a power broker in the wider city and state in order to advance my agenda.
ALEX: Yeah. Baseball as a consumer product.
BOBBY: All right, let’s move on. The labor era.
ALEX: The labor era.
BOBBY: So like I mentioned, I mean, Marvin Miller talks a lot about O’Malley and his dealings with O’Malley. He characterizes him as kind of, like, the guy in charge, and so that means all of the bad stuff, like all the stuff that they’re doing, he’s basically tacitly co-signing or ideating himself. But also he, in his— in his dealings with him, always acknowledged that he seemed like a pleasant person to talk to and also like a— a smart person. So he’s not like this caricature of a bumbling owner that we might conceive of at different times in the— in the 20th century, and even now. So with the acknowledgement that O’Malley’s shadow still looms, we move forward to the ’60s and 70s, and I think baseball ownership changes a lot in this time period. It starts to attract— because of these business advancements, it starts to attract weirder people, frankly, from different— different parts of the world— or different parts of the business world, that want to do different things with the sport. And that remains true, I think, for the— the twin interests of this period that we’ve identified, too.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, this is kind of— there are sort of two turning points in my mind of— of— sort of owner relations and kind of baseball is the business, and that’s, frankly, integration and free agency.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: Like these are things that just radically shift the course of the sport and change how owners are operating, change how they are thinking about the marketing of their sport, the construction of their teams. And so this— you know, we talk about the labor era, this is— again, when we see the advent of free agency, which really changes things a lot. And— and I— I will also note that, like, this is where the, like, lines between sort of eras get to start— start to get kind of fuzzy.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And I think there— there are quite a few owners from this era that you can sort of— sort of point to. But I think, correct me if I’m wrong, I think the guy we’re talking about is Charlie Finley.
BOBBY: Yeah. I mean, I wrote down, from when we were planning this pod earlier in the week, I wrote down Charlie Finley/George Steinbrenner.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. Yeah.
BOBBY: Because I think they’re almost like two sides of the same coin. Finley was always pulling all of these ridiculous shenanigans to not pay money for players. And George Steinbrenner, I think, became the signature figure of ownership just buying players. That’s the thing that you hear all the time about Steinbrenner’s Yankees. Steinbrenner buys the team in 1973, which is right smack in the middle of the push for free agency Curt Flood’s court case and him trying to abolish the reserve clause. And so I think that they are— I think mainly— to me, like they’re equal in my mind, as emblematic—
ALEX: Uh-hmm. Yeah.
BOBBY: —of this era, but for the same reasons, more or less.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, frankly, this is where you really start to see the divergence of small market teams and big market teams, and they are two sides of the same coin, but like free agency, starts to create different classes of owners, depending on how they are—
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: —approaching the game. And Finley is the consummate sort of, you know, quote-unquote— we— we— again, we say small market because that’s how they refer to themselves, right?
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: Obviously, the market is what you make of it. But Finley, who owns the Kansas City and then Oakland Athletics from 1960 to ’81, is known, again, for being incredibly frugal. He is constantly butting heads with not only players, but other owners as well. He is this really colorful, frankly, wacky character, who has a really sort of ironic legacy, because he is constantly trying to innovate. Like it’s impossible to capture, really, his nature, but he is introducing—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —all these sort of bizarre out there innovations. You know, he has the little rabbit that pops up from behind the home plate to serve umpires the baseball. You know, he introduces the— the Kelly Green uniforms and the Fort Knox Gold uniforms. He sees the fact that, like, there is marketing opportunity, like, the kind of promotional gimmick of baseball, he’s very foundational to that. And he also has all these innovations that will not get implemented until years later, because the owners—
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: —just hate his guts, right? Between, like, night game World Series and the DH. He was a proponent of these guys long before they were implemented and the other owners were like, “That’s a good idea, but you need to get the fuck out of here. Like, we just—”
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: “—we can’t with it.”
BOBBY: He is the— he’s like the carnival barker of— of baseball.
ALEX: Yeah, exactly.
BOBBY: He kind of invents that persona, which I think many guys have tried on over the years and few have fit as neatly into that pair of shoes as Charlie Finley did. Like, it—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —seems like it came as part of his nature, and that’s the reason that he pissed off so many other owners at the time. But he is obviously successful as an owner. I mean, the Kansas City A’s— the Kansas City A’s don’t win any titles while he owns them, but then he moves them to Oakland and they win the World Series in ’72, ’73, ’74 while he still—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —owns them. And so this vision of baseball ownership being market the hell out of the event, but I don’t put more money into the team than I need— than I absolutely need to, ends up, I mean, working. For whatever reason, it comes together in his vision and they— and they win those World Series without, you know, investing in— a lot of money in the actual players themselves. I mean, this is, I think, in part, because the reserve clause is not totally dead yet, as he’s building teams, and so he’s able to—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —hold on to these players a little bit tighter than he would had he tried to implement this strategy 10 or 15 years later. But he, I think, advances the idea that like, “Don’t just be frugal, take that money and put it somewhere else, if it’s not for the players, you know? Take that money and put it into—” like you’re talking about, all of these side show attractions to make the franchise itself feel like it has a personality. The franchise—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —is a player that people root for. You know what I mean? And, of course, people have always been a fan of the teams, like— but I think it becomes like sort of more of a cult of personality to be an A’s fan at this time, rather than just to say, “I’m an A’s fan because I like all of these players.” Like— it’s like, “I’m an A’s fan, because this is like an experience.” And Steinbrenner is Steinbrenner. I mean, everybody kind of knows Steinbrenner. You can take the— the— you can start pulling on the threads of, like, the— the different cliques of owners that we have nowadays, and you can pull them all the way back to Finley and Steinbrenner. They’re kind of diverting paths of ownership in terms of market size and financial might. And I think Steinbrenner mentality, I mean, I hate to say it, like it wins out, right? Like—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —I’m sure there is a huge class of owners nowadays who would— who would love if things still operated like Charlie Finley, even if they think that he’s a dickhead or whatever. But I think Steinbrenner has a longer lasting legacy on what it will take to be an owner in the future. Like just coming in and paying for players, and embracing free agency conceptually, not just financially. I think has a lot of rippling of— ripple effects on how owners operate nowadays. And also, you know, just like as people, I think both of these guys are really interesting inflection points for owners putting themselves in the center of the frame. I mean, I know we talked about—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —that a little bit with Comiskey, but obviously, Finley was actively involved in all of these sideshow attractions and carnival barker stuff. But Steinbrenner— I mean, Steinbrenner was like the main character of the Yankees the whole time he owned them right up into his death in 2010.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: He’s getting himself involved in FBI probes, and he’s vindictive, and he’s talking shit about other owners, and saying that he’ll buy any player that he wants to, and— and it’s actually working, and the Yankees are winning all of these titles and all of these different of these different things. Of course, stuff— some of that stuff takes a little while to take hold. After he buys the team in the ’70s, they’re not really great until the ’90s. But even still, I mean, he’s— he’s nicknamed the Boss for a reason, right?
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, few owners at this time really embrace the public persona like Steinbrenner does, right? I mean, many folks are— are happy to kind of be associated with their team, right? I mean, Ewing Kauffman, who owns the Royals at this time, is kind of, again, this sort of older guard of more civic-minded owners who— who are sort of inextricably linked to their team, but don’t necessarily want to be the defining figure of it. And Steinbrenner says, “Look, I am the guy, the buck stops with me.” And he really makes himself a part of the Yankee identity. He is media savvy, right? He understands the value of— of publicity. He really kind of embraces this idea of, like, “All news is good news,” right? “Hey, if they’re— if they’re— if they’re talking about the Yankees, no matter what they’re talking about, then— then they’re talking about us, right?”
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: “Good or bad, we’re in the headlines, and people know who we are.” And— and it’s—
BOBBY: It—
ALEX: —not dissimilar from— from Finley either as well.
BOBBY: It also just can’t be ignored that Steinbrenner is like the err example of buying a franchise at its lowest franchise value that you possibly could have gotten a premier franchise at and then— and then stewarding it at the time when franchise values go through the moon more than— through the roof more than any other time in baseball history. Like he is—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —his legacy and his ownership style is inextricable from the fact that he just bought the team for pennies based on what it became worth just 15 or 20 years later. And a lot of that has to do with what we’re about to talk about. And I think even like Steinbrenner, it would be kind of, I think, inauthentic to say that he represents the labor era and not also the TV era, too. You know what I mean?
ALEX: Right, yeah. Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: So it’s almost like— it’s almost hard to place him inside one box, because he owns the team all the way through the 2010s to— all the way to 2010 when he dies, and— and now his kid owns the team. And so, like— so much of his most important moments don’t even come during this time period, even though he buys the team and becomes a central figure at that time. So, yeah, I— what do you think about like a— a trait that endures from Finley or even from Steinberg in this era that we could roll into the DNA of the ownership evolution?
ALEX: I don’t— I mean— I mean, it’s hard because they— because they are two diverging characters. I think they both share the trait of the intimately involved micro manager of the owner. This is not exclusive to them or even to— to this era, but again, they inextricably link themselves with the team. If you think about the A’s, you think about Charlie Finley. If you think about the Yankees in that time, you think about George Steinbrenner. And—
BOBBY: They both meddle.
ALEX: They both— they are both meddlers.
BOBBY: I mean, Steinbrenner, obviously, famously fires Billy Martin, like, five different times over his career and—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —keeps bringing him back. And— and Finley is so intimately involved in the minute details of how the A’s are being sold and marketed, and all of these different ideas he’s coming up with them. So, yeah, I mean, I think that the notion that, like, everything is for sale, and I must have my hands on every single part of this operation, I think is— is unique to these guys.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, like, you know, Finley is releasing players during the World Series when they make an error, right? He’s trying to sell players, you know, in an era when I— free agency still exist, right? He’s trying to sell Vida Blue to, you know, recoup some of this game. And— and— yeah. And that sort of vindictiveness, honestly, is, I think, the other defining trait, right? Steinbrenner famously pays a gambler to dig up dirt on— on Dave Winfield, with whom he’s having a— a very public feud. And again, it— it comes against the backdrop of a deepening sort of labor— I don’t want to say labor strife, because, like, that strife is always there, right?
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: But a frankly, more empowered, you know, labor class who—
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: —are actually able to sort of stand their ground, and— and— and it will— will sort of lead to some of the divisions we, you know, continue to see today.
BOBBY: Yeah. And I think, honestly, at this time period, like a need— an almost like self-conscious, if we were to psychologize, it self-conscious need to insist upon themselves as the authority and to externalize that in all of their different actions like, “I’m the boss. I’m— the buck stops with me. I control this. I control that. Every element of this is mine,” which I think has reverberations like— even to now, there’s a lot of owners like— Bob Nutting is in the Charlie Finley mold.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Dick Monfort is in the Charlie Finley mold. Like, these guys—
ALEX: Absolutely.
BOBBY: You know, these— these guys are take— taking different pieces of this ownership style and applying them to the modern era, but even still, they’re— they’re Charlie Finley types. And that’s— again, like, maybe this doesn’t fit neatly into the matrix of our conversation here, but like, I think I should also just mention, like, Charlie Finley is not good— not a good owner. Like, you don’t want that guy owning your baseball team. You know, you don’t want Bob Nutting owning your baseball team, obviously. Like, you know, some of the results speak for themselves and those players were able to overcome and the A’s were obviously very good for stretches of Charlie Finley’s ownership. But overall, like, that’s kind of a bad experience, I think.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: And probably the players hated him more than anyone.
ALEX: Yeah, I agree. But hey, again, flags fly forever, you know?
BOBBY: Count the rings? Yeah.
ALEX: Count the rings.
BOBBY: Okay. I’m so excited to hear what you have to say about the next owner. We are moving on to the TV boom era, the— loosely, the ’80s and ’90s, but you kind of all know what we mean when we say TV boom, right? You take—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —a massively growing product, a still ascendant Major League Baseball littered with all-time player stars in the ’70s and early 80s. Big personalities starting to arise. The mass media hysteria that is sweeping across America now that everybody truly has a TV and we are being marketed to all the time. And you combine that with Major League Baseball, and you combine that with the financial advancements that Major League Baseball is making at the time in terms of national TV deals, even in local markets, that’s— that’s growing. The World Series is now— much to Charlie Finley’s appreciation, even though I’m sure it’s bittersweet because he’s not an owner anymore. Like it’s being showed at night on prime time, and selling a lot of money— like selling a lot of ads. And— and— and what do you get? Well, the answer is, you get Ted Turner. Ted Turner is so clearly the most emblematic of this era of Major League Baseball, and yet also still so singular. He is so weird. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say about him and what you learned in your— in your deeper dives into Mr. Ted Turner.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, he is this sort of maverick media mogul, right? He buys the team in— in 1976 and it really does represent this sort of new era of sports ownership that’s driven by media innovation and unorthodox promotional strategies, sort of larger than life personality. He really is drawing from both the lineage, honestly. I mean, you know, his ownership overlaps very heavily, almost entirely with Steinbrenner. But he sort of feels like— like at once, like, diet Steinbrenner and also an evolution of— of Steinbrenner. Like he is drawing from, I think, a lot of the things that made Steinbrenner successful, and applying them in this sort of weird Charlie Finley-esque manner, you know? He turns Atlanta into America’s team, right? We talked about the TV era. He broadcast these games nationwide on WTBS, which is his, you know, at the time, his Atlanta-based superstation that, obviously, would eventually turn into a cable empire. But Atlanta is central to that.
BOBBY: They are similar in a lot of ways, like Stein— Steinbrenner and Turner in terms of the bombastic nature of their ownership styles and the central— the centralization of themselves and the narrative. I think is definitely true of both of them. What’s so different to me about Turner and Steinbrenner is that Steinbrenner inherited a franchise that was already at the top of the heap, and Ted Turner—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —basically turned the Braves into a premier franchise by himself—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —by— by— by nature of his occupation prior to baseball. I mean, Turner, he— he has this unbelievably circuitous personal story about how he came to be kind of a media mogul in his own right. He had this tortured relationship with his father. His father was in the advertising business, and Turner— Turner’s father ends up, like, selling his advertising company and then immediately committing suicide. And as Ted is kind of dealing with the trauma of the fallout of that, he’s trying to re-acquire ownership of his dad’s ad agency and then pivot from advertising, like billboard advertising, Arte Moreno style, pivot from that old world kind of legacy business into a much more modern version, where he’s buying up local radio stations and then eventually local TV channels, trying to tie them together in this interconnected way to be sort of a web of influence. You know, that the— the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts, because all of these TV stations are all in the red. They’re all losing money. But then when he— he sees the chessboard in this way where he’s like, “If I put them all together, this will have a boosting effect as TV continues to grow in popularity and nationalism. Everybody’s kind of— and when I— once I merge sports into that, okay, now everything is kind of rowing in the same direction.” And he turns the Braves into this national brand. Timed really well, because the team is really good and interesting and fun—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —in the early ’90s and throughout the ’90s, really. But to the point where if— if you are a market that doesn’t have a team, the Braves are your team. You know? And I think a lot of owners try to do stuff like that now, or would try to do stuff like that now, but nobody tried that before Ted Turner. Nobody was willing to try to utilize their own personal business and having the access to blow them up in the way that he did. And, yeah, I mean to me, he’s like the TV guy. He’s the TV guy.
ALEX: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he, after Andy Messerschmitt, is one of two players to basically contest the reserve clause with the Dodgers, go to arbitration, and ultimately bring about free agency. Turner is the— is the first guy to sign Messerschmitt after this. And— and proposes— Messerschmitt is wearing 17. Turner wants to put the nickname “Channel” on the back of his jersey as a way to promote WTBS Channel 17. Now, Major League Baseball is not— does not go for this, unsurprisingly, but it’s an indication. And again, this is— we’re talking like the mid-70s. Shortly after he purchases the team, and he is already thinking about, “How can I merge this new asset that I have with my sort of burgeoning empire? How can these actually feed into each other and really make the brand?” Not just grow the brand, but, like, turn it into a brand in and of itself. And he’s successful at that. I mean, he carries a lot of the traits that we, again, talk about with a lot of these other owners, a micromanaging, a meddling. He institutes himself as a manager for a game, which eventually draws— draws rebuke from the commissioner and he gets suspended for that. But he is thinking bigger than baseball, right? Steinbrenner said, “My name is synonymous with the Yankees.”
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: “And I’m going to do whatever I can to do that.” And Turner says, “I— my name is synonymous with TV, and my baseball team is the way I’m going to make that happen.”
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And he’s successful at it.
BOBBY: I am curious what you think about this, but I think Turner is the first— or at least the most famous hobby owner. This is a hobby for him. Baseball is a hobby for him.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. Yeah.
BOBBY: It wasn’t his central business pursuit, and even though he’s like kind of intimately involved in the character and the personality of the team, he could just as easily have done this with any other sport or any other hobby of his. He just had money to burn, and so he bought the Braves. And it just so happened that that had this boosting network effect, because he could put them on all of these different channels. But he like— this is a hobby for him. I mean, we see this with a lot of guys now. It’s just like— this is— this is the third interest of them. This is— you know, for Steve Ballmer, it’s a hobby that he owns the Clippers. He likes sports. But Turner is like this eclectic guy who has interests all across culture. You know? He’s famously a very politically controversial person in— in I think, good and bad ways, you know? Like he’s speaking out in favor of abortion rights and in favor of Palestinian people. And, you know, he’s married to Jane Fonda, who famously is pushed out of different circles of Hollywood for her political views. And so, again, I— I love the way that you call him a maverick, and to me, like part of that is that he’s just kind of— you know that he doesn’t need baseball.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: But kind of at the time, like, baseball needed him, you know?
ALEX: Yeah. Yeah. I— I think the other owner from this time who— who stands out, frankly, is Bud Selig. And he is—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —he is sort of the, again, in the— in the Steinbrenner-Finley comparison, right? He is sort of the— the Finley of that model, right? The small market owner who obviously is far less brash and— and out there than Finley, but is really sort of interested in the sort of civic-mindedness. He is, I mean, far more interesting in consensus building than— than Finley was, right? Which would ultimately lead to his commissionership. But Selig is the evolution of the small market owner—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —and— and his ownership has sort of equal but opposite waves, I think, moving forward as— as Turner’s does.
BOBBY: Yeah. I mean, he consolidates the small market owners in a way that nobody had ever done before, in terms of aligning all of their interests. But I think Selig’s legacy, to me, is less in inspiring copycat owners or— or permanently altering the DNA of the ownership evolution and more so firmly linking the commissioner’s office with this cohort—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —of owners, and making sure that the commissioner isn’t just some kind of relatively random figurehead who’s kind of doing managerial shit on the side, and each— each team is on their own to develop their own business interest. But rather, Selig is the person who solidifies the fact that the commissioner is here to basically do ownership side socialism. We’re getting everybody all on board, and we are splitting these profits among these owners so that we could keep them from the players. Like that’s Selig’s legacy to me.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Which is, like, slightly different than, I think, the exercise that we’re doing here, which is trying to understand, like, the type of person that is a baseball owner.
ALEX: Absolutely.
BOBBY: The legacies that they’ve left. And so that’s why I think that, like, Turner being the hobby owner, Turner being the TV owner who made it not only like desirable, but essential to be on national television and to market yourself to this wide— wider audience, I think, is the thing that he leaves. I always find it, like, narratively so interesting that the Yankees and Braves played each other in the World Series in the’ 90s.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Because it’s— it’s sort of like— I know this is not— this doesn’t totally fit into this, because Steinbrenner is not really old money, but it’s kind of like the old money versus the new money of Major League Baseball at the time.
ALEX: Right. I mean, Steinbrenner makes his fortune in, like, shipping.
BOBBY: Right, yeah. He’s like a self-made guy, so I don’t think I would consider him like old money in the traditional, like he didn’t come over on the Mayflower with a— a million dollars. But, like, in terms of the franchise personas, like the Yankees are old money, and the Braves kind of like—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —you know, they had moved multiple times. They’d been in Boston, they’d been in Milwaukee, then they finally landed in Atlanta. And now, it seems like this feels like one of the marquee franchises in Major League Baseball, and they feel so tied to the Atlanta area, even though the— the white flight and everything is a more recent development. But now, they feel like, honestly, one of the top five most important and valuable franchises in baseball, and I think that is in large part because of the influx of media savviness that Ted Turner brought to the franchise.
ALEX: Yeah. Agreed.
BOBBY: All right. We’re in the modern era. You know him. You love him. You might buy soybean futures at his behest. His name is John Henry.
ALEX: Baseball team as a purely financial asset.
BOBBY: Yeah, yeah.
ALEX: Investment vehicles, we love it.
BOBBY: I mean, is that it? Like, should we just end the conversation there? Because that’s like the whole— to me, to me, that’s like the whole thing, right? Like—
ALEX: Yes. Yeah.
BOBBY: Henry clearly have some personal interest in sports, because he owns a bunch of sports teams, but I think what John Henry does is he makes his money totally elsewhere, and then he says, “This is a really great place to reallocate my money as part of my portfolio.” So, yeah, baseball team is a financial asset. Baseball team is part of a portfolio. This— this is the guy, and because he has so much money and he has such a manager— didactic managerial theory, we then know him as the guy who embraces the Theo Epstein Harvard type, putting— empowering your front office to follow Moneyball principles, all of these different things. But yes, it is part of a portfolio in which he is more so like a— an investment company acquiring other companies than he really is, like, seeking to be a Ted Turner type or an owner type.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, I think, frankly, he lays the groundwork for the— the Guggenheims of the world to sort of come in, right? The— the baseball team as, yeah, a portfolio product where there’s maybe not a single investor anymore, right? But your baseball team is sort of owned by a consortium of folks who have varied interests in the team. Now, obviously, you know, like I— that is slow—
BOBBY: Is that a good trend? Do you think that’s a good thing?
[laughter]
ALEX: I think it’s good. I think we should have more voices at the table. You know? Rather than—
BOBBY: Oh, yeah.
ALEX: —just leaving it to— to one billionaire. I must—
BOBBY: Two things sort of [1:21:34]
ALEX: —sort of, like, think of 10 billionaires.
BOBBY: Like ownership class DEI.
ALEX: Right. Affirmative action for owners. He forms Fenway Sports Group in 2001, buys the Red Sox, really focuses on—
BOBBY: Hang on.
ALEX: Okay.
BOBBY: Forms Fenway Sports Group, partners with Tom Werner, and none other than the New York Times Company to form Fenway Sports Group.
ALEX: Bro, New York Times owning the Boston Red Sox? Come on. I was [1:22:09] the podcast, then.
BOBBY: Not just owning the Boston Red Sox, bro, but being the ownership group that comes together to buy the team right before the previous ownership group was going to tear down Fenway Park. So the—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —New York Times saved Fenway Park.
ALEX: Saved Fenway. Good God.
BOBBY: Yeah. Just another example of Boston being little brother.
ALEX: I think I want to change my most influential owner of this era now, the great lady, baby.
BOBBY: What’s the name of the— the Sulzbergers?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Most influential owner of the 2000s, the— A. G. Sulzberger.
ALEX: No, I mean, he really— you know, Henry is instrumental in turning the Red Sox into a more global brand. Now, it’s obviously helped by the fact that he wins a World Series. But he is—
BOBBY: Four. He wins four World Series.
ALEX: Well, yes. Good God. Has it really been four? That’s—
BOBBY: Yeah, bro.
ALEX: We have to do something about that.
BOBBY: It sure has been four, right? Yeah. ’04, ’07, ’13 and ’18.
ALEX: I mean, I believe you. I just— when you say it like that.
BOBBY: The one that people forget is always ’13, I think.
ALEX: Yes, yeah.
BOBBY: Because I was in their, like, worst to first to worst to first era.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And they just snuck a World Series in there. God, can you imagine— can you imagine not having to care about the fact that your team is the worst team in the division because they just won the World Series the year before?
ALEX: I can’t imagine that.
BOBBY: Me, either. Thanks a lot, Charlie Finley.
ALEX: No. I mean, I think— I think Henry really does set the stage for a lot of what ownership would become at a time when that’s not really what baseball ownership looked like. It looked, frankly, far more like Arte Moreno, right?
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: Again, like the sort of independent billionaire who wants to buy the team in part as a sort of vanity project, right?
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: And is willing to put money into the team but is not particularly savvy about it.
BOBBY: And it— I mean, that guy is a [1:24:17] also.
ALEX: Right, right. Exactly. Again, they are financial instruments, but in a kind of different way.
BOBBY: ‘Cause— ’cause Henry’s ownership feels as much about like the soft power that he gains from it, as much as the financial power that he gains from it.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Like he— its diversification as a business principle, which I think in the 21st century, is, like, the singular advancement of big business, is like, “We must diversify. We must take our legumes money and we must put it in F1.” You know, like it’s— then that way we can— we become too big to fail because our tentacles are spread all over the globe, literally, in the case of the fact that he owns the Red Sox, and Liverpool, and all of these different international securities firms and all of these things. So he also, I think, is a good face for what we talk about a lot in modern baseball ownership, which is the cold calculating, almost Wall Street-esque propensity to make the hard decision about the team.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: To not let emotions in your heart guide it. You know, if you— if you look at Henry alongside someone like Bill Veeck, or even Walter O’Malley or certainly Charlie Finley, or Steinbrenner, or whatever. He looks like a robot in comparison to these guys. He’s the guy who traded Mookie Betts because he didn’t want to go over the luxury tax. He’s the guy who was the steward of the franchise as they’re doing such things as tweeting, if you know, you know about resetting the luxury tax. Like that is the logical conclusion of the portfolio ownership style. And I think he’s inspired so many copycats. He is, like, so beloved—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —around sports ownership circles for what he was able to do and all of the different ways he was able to buy the team right at the perfect time, have success with them, and also, you know, pivot that into owning a bunch of different premium assets in a bunch of different premium places.
ALEX: Yeah. Yeah. He’s the financial engineering owner, right? You’re not relying on this as your day-to-day income. You are leveraging them for broader financial gains, right? And you are incorporating real estate developments, right? You’re incorporating international partnerships, and— and you’re courting outside investors to say, “Hey, do you want a slice of this pie?” It— it really does lead us to— to where we are today. You know, we kicked around the idea of, do we— you know, do we use this opportunity to talk about Steve Cohen? I think we decided against it, because he’s not really a representative of this type of owner, right? If— if anything, he is far more in the mold of, frankly, like a— a Steinbrenner, right?
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: Someone who is— now, he doesn’t necessarily have the same sort of brash personality tics, but he still is— has made himself central to the Mets narrative, right? And he’s willing to go out and make the big splash, kind of, you know—
BOBBY: Just wait, hold on, real quick.
ALEX: Okay, yes.
BOBBY: When you say he’s willing to go out and make the big splash, you’re referring to what? What— how— what was the most recent splash that you’re referring to?
ALEX: They haven’t really done— have they done much this offseason?
BOBBY: I’m just trying to remember if they’ve added any players to the roster. Steve Cohen’s [1:27:51]
ALEX: They let Severino walk.
BOBBY: Oh, yeah. Charlie Finley’s ghost is going to be looking for Luis. I just want you—
ALEX: Yeah, I mean—
BOBBY: I want to hear you say it. I want to hear you say it. I want to hear you say it that Juan Soto is on the Mets.
ALEX: Juan Soto, Juan Soto. Juan Soto is a goddamn Met.
BOBBY: Let’s go. You can’t sell enough lagoons to change that, John Henry.
ALEX: Yeah, he’s— he’s reclaiming the— the sort of New York baseball owner title from George Steinbrenner.
BOBBY: Yeah, yeah. I think that Cohen is like such an aberration and, you know, you can say things like honestly, the Wilpons are pretty indicative of how a lot of stuff has happened in the—
ALEX: Yeah, yeah.
BOBBY: —21st century in terms of Major League Baseball ownership is like being duped and not actually having enough money to own a team. Like not being that good of a businessman, I think, is an interesting offshoot of this conversation. This would be true of the Castellinis. This would be true of Monfort. Like these guys actually aren’t really rich enough to do all that much outside of baseball, you know? And that happened to the Wilpons too, because of Bernie Madoff. But, like, I think that those are kind of more in older molds, or in Cohen’s case, in aberration, he’s just so much wealthier and he just doesn’t give a fuck. But Henry feels like— even though he did it better than anyone else, the most imitated style of ownership for the 21st century.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Of everybody just being like, “Yeah, we’re gonna— you know, we’re gonna embrace analytics and we’re gonna do the cold, calculated ownership style, and we’re gonna empower our front office to use these analytics to benefit us and save every penny that we possibly can.” Like these types of things— you know, while also acknowledging the fact that the Red Sox are in a big market, and so they’ve spent, you know, up near the top of the league from time to time. But they are certainly not just like— to borrow a phrase from— from Hal Steinbrenner, Brian Cashman, they’re not just spending like drunken sailors year in and year out. There clearly is a much more longitudinal financial strategy that I think has frustrated both Red Sox fans, but also fans of so many teams that have then employed this strategy, is we’re thinking longitudinally, you know— you know what seems not— you know what seems cool? Thinking about fucking now and winning.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: You know? And unfortunately, for Henry and for a lot of the other copycat style ownerships and their fan bases, it really, really, really, really worked for them, you know?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: They’ve won so often. And whether or not you credit Henry for that specifically or you say it’s a concoction of things, and it’s Theo Epstein, who then went on to kind of employ some of these tactics in the Cubs in slightly different ways. Like I think the Wrigleys would have been— or, sorry, I think the— the Ricketts would have been an interesting sort of foil for the style of ownership.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Like owning a marquee team and also sucking at owning them, like sucking at management is— tells an— a valid story of 21st century baseball ownership. But—
ALEX: Frankly— frankly, that actually falls in line with most of the family-owned baseball teams in the past who—
BOBBY: Well, yes, exactly.
ALEX: —who were like, “I’m doing my best. I just happen to not be very good at it.”
BOBBY: You know? And every once in a while you just kind of luck into a Theo Epstein, you luck into a World Series that—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —had very little to do with the Ricketts and their hands on ownership. You know?
ALEX: Yeah, absolutely.
BOBBY: I think— I mean, I think Monfort has a case for being the most powerful modern owner in terms of shaping opinion of the other owners. Like, he clearly has taken on the sort of Bud Selig role of shepherding small market ownership and protecting their rights and stuff like that. And then, you know, Seidler, I think, has always been interesting to us, Guggenheim. But again, that— that’s not really like an ownership persona. That is kind of like an advancement of the obvious John Henry agenda, which is—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —this is a portfolio. Guggenheim has the assets to be able to handle that. Fenway Sports Group has the assets to be able to handle this in a macro-economic sense. So, yeah, that’s why we chose John Henry. So just to recap the five eras, the Gilded Age, Charles Comiskey, post-World War II, Integration Era, Walter O’Malley, with a friendly nod to Bill Veeck. ’60s and ’70s, the labor era, Charlie Finley, with the obvious foil being George Steinbrenner, who then has his fingerprints all over the next few generations. Those generations being the TV boom of the ’80s and ’90s, where we have chosen Ted Turner and then the modern baseball era. Modern baseball. You familiar with their— you’re familiar with their work?
ALEX: I am.
BOBBY: That’s 2000 to the present, it is John Henry. Do you think that we’ve built the traits that are essential to the evolution of the baseball owner, paternalistic ownership, power broking, commercialization of the sport? Everything is for sale, the micromanager, the hobby owner, the expansionist, the nationalistic mindset owner, Ted Turner. And finally, the finance— the baseball team has a financial portfolio that John Henry brought to the soup. Do you think we’re missing anything?
ALEX: I mean, I— I’m— I’m sure we are, but it does feel like a distillation of kind of the evolution of the baseball owner, and— and many of the owners today are drawing from this lineage, whether it’s Castellini, you know, daring fans to go somewhere else, whether it’s— whether it’s Arte Moreno, you know, creatively, shall we say, releasing players, you know? They are— they are drawing from a lineage of, you know, sort of shrewd meddling nature.
BOBBY: Yes. Shrewd is a word that we probably should have used more often throughout this.
ALEX: Yes. Yeah.
BOBBY: You know, we used frugal. We were trying to dance around the fact that they’re cheap. They’re cheap.
ALEX: Right. Right.
BOBBY: Many owners throughout baseball history are cheap. They don’t want to invest now to reap benefits later. They want to cut corners now to reap benefits now and later, you know?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And use all of their institutional levers of power to win now and win in the future. Financially, I think that— I— like one element that I found hard to capture with who we chose for each individual era is the fact that it’s kind of shocking throughout baseball history, how many owners just seem to not like baseball.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Like all of the guys that we’ve chosen, for— for better or for worse, you can say that they were invested in baseball. Like they cared about baseball.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: They cared about the game. Maybe with the exception of Henry, but even still, like he clearly has some sort of love for sports, otherwise he would not have chosen this arena to acquire several teams and whatnot. And— and Henry himself, allegedly, I don’t know the guy personally, but he grew up as a Cardinals fan and was a really big [1:34:49] mutual fan and that kind of inspired his love for the sport, and that’s why he wanted to get into baseball ownership around the turn of the 21st century. So I— I found it hard to, like, pick one guy throughout any of these eras that would add that spice to the soup. You know what I mean? But, like, why do so many owners not like the sport? It seems like, you know? Like they don’t think it’s cool to have good players and have fun— have a fun time at the ballpark.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Maybe not that they don’t think that it’s cool to do that, but that they’re not willing to pay for it.
ALEX: No, they’re not. Well, I— you know, I— I mentioned this to you earlier, right? But in— in preparation for this, and just out of my own morbid curiosity, I— I tried reading Jeffrey Loria’s memoir, right? This is the former Miami Marlins— former— sorry, former Florida to be named Miami Marlins.
BOBBY: Well, famously, former Expos and then Marlins.
ALEX: Well, that’s true. Yes, yeah. I just want to say—
BOBBY: We need to do a pod on Jeffrey Loria, bro.
ALEX: We really should. The book is fascinating and not really worth reading because it’s mostly self-congratulatory bullshit. Are we surprised? But— but he does sort of lay out that the modern owners thinking, right? He says, from a fan standpoint—
BOBBY: Oh, my God. Bazeley is pulling—
ALEX: Oh, yeah. Oh.
BOBBY: Bazeley is pulling source quotes on us—
ALEX: I’m [1:36:19]
BOBBY: —here at— nearly two hours into the pod? Goddamn.
ALEX: He says the financial well-being of— of fans favorite team is wholly irrelevant. They care about wins, losses, and championships. They believe owners should only care about those things as well. This misconception is promulgated by the media, right? So— so—
BOBBY: It’s the media’s fault.
ALEX: It’s— it’s the media’s fault. Right? But it’s this idea of the owner who’s like, “Look, this is a business enterprise. Yes, the wins and losses matter, but frankly, it would be a dereliction of my duty to only—”
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: “—think about the wins and losses.” And that is, I think—
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: —how most owners approach it. It’s— wins and losses, frankly, are secondary to whether or not you end in the red or the black, or what you’re operating income is. Like all these other things—
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: —take priority, frankly.
BOBBY: This, like, post-1980s, post big money, post Wall Street boom, post Modern Wall Street boom in mass media, but also just in how these now consolidated in late capitalism businesses operate, which is the CEO mentality that my— my number one, my first and last and only responsibility, is a fiduciary duty to the people who have invested in this product. And— and that is not fans, actually. Like they’re not investing in that product. They are consumers. They’re not part of this equation. And I think Loria’s quote right there delineates that perfectly. I mean, I— and I think that that’s why John Henry is a really good example of what the modern baseball owner is. It’s like this is a— this is a question of fiscal responsibility, not a question of community engagement or even sport at— you know, which is what makes, honestly, the antitrust exemption like such a fucking sham at this point now.
ALEX: It’s [1:38:08]
BOBBY: Like that— that the reason that it was— it was a— it was— the behavior of crooks at the time to say that it was, “Sport, not trade.” But now, it’s like, dude, take one look at the people running this— this— these enterprises and say, like, “How do they view the game? Do they view it as sport, not trade?”
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Do they? Are they coming out to—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —games and being like, “Yes, this is sport. And I love to exhibit sport.”? No, bro, they’re fucking literally trading the Atlanta Braves stock. We’re trading stocks
ALEX: Yeah, they are— they literally coming out and saying, “Sorry, this isn’t a game. This is interstate commerce.” And you’re like, “Well, okay.”
BOBBY: It’s maybe a game.
ALEX: Can we interrogate that a little bit?
BOBBY: Yeah, I just— it doesn’t— it doesn’t pretend well. I mean, as we’ve told the story of the progression of the baseball owner and the ownership structure and the philosophy of— of baseball owners, I think we also tell the story of the progression of— of capitalism and the incentive structure of it.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: You know what I mean? Like as these macroeconomic forces changes, the owners just fall in line. You know, they’re not— you know, plenty of them act outside the bounds of what is to be expected of them at various times. And, you know, there are certain owners on this list that— you know, the Ted Turner’s, who are maybe doing things more interestingly or out of the box. And there’s Steve Cohens, who are exceptions that prove different rules. But for the most part, they’re operating within the bounds of what is to be expected based on how capital is being invested in their era, you know? It’d be cool to— it’d be cool to get out of that cycle, I think. You know? Maybe [1:39:51] nationalizing baseball, has that idea occurred to you ever?
ALEX: Well, I thought about it once or twice, but, you know, if we can’t break that cycle right now, the least we can do is trying to understand it. And so we hope that—
BOBBY: Cooked.
ALEX: We hope that this— this history sort of captured how we arrived at this moment today, right? It’s all— it’s all connected. John Henry is drawing on Charles Comiskey’s legacy as much as Ted Turner’s, you know? It may be in different ways, but I don’t— I don’t know, man. Do you— do you think, now that we’ve have done this sort of discussion, that you could embody these traits and— and be a successful owner?
BOBBY: Yeah, I would really go for the Turner style. You know, where I’m just—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —saying wild shit all the time on—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —my nationally broadcast television products. He owned, like, 19 ranches, three of which were in Argentina. Sorry, I gotta dump all this— this—
ALEX: I know, I know. You—
BOBBY: —research somewhere. You know, like he’s doing— he was founding and funding, you know, the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Which is like to get people a nonprofit that was to get people to help understand the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Like, it’s just—
ALEX: For sure, for sure.
BOBBY: I don’t know, man. I don’t know.
ALEX: Wow. [1:41:21] kind of based.
BOBBY: There’s a legit bad doc on HBO, which is created by CNN, which Turner founded, that is about his life. It’s five parts that are all an hour or more, except for the first one, which is like 40 minutes. And I only made it through the first one, and I got a lot of information, and then I was like, “I feel like so much is being thrown at me.” Like, I didn’t even get to the part where he buys the Braves yet, you know?
ALEX: Right. Yeah.
BOBBY: Anyway, I think that does it for this week’s episode of Tipping Pitches. Well, actually, one— I have one more question for you. Which one of these guys is like your muse? You know, which one do you see, “And he sings the siren song,” to you?
ALEX: I mean, I— my heart really does go out to Finley.
BOBBY: Let’s go.
ALEX: I— not only— not only because I’m an A’s fan, right? But, like, the way that he cracked down on labor, I was like, “They don’t make him like this anymore, man.”
BOBBY: Yeah. He wasn’t trying to pretend to be anyone’s friend. At least you knew what you were doing.
ALEX: No. Right, yeah. Exactly. Also, like all the other owners hated him, and I don’t know, the enemy of my enemy—
BOBBY: Of my enemy is my friend.
ALEX: It’s like— it’s like also kind of still my enemy in this case, but like, I’ll allow it.
BOBBY: The enemy— how about this? I got— I got it. I got it. I got it. The enemy of my enemy is a tool with which I can use to defeat all my enemies.
ALEX: There you go.
BOBBY: Like how Steve Cohen is gonna absolutely knock the bottom out from baseball ownership if he keeps doing this.
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: Like they are going to unravel in the next decade—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —if he just keeps paying $800 million for good players.
ALEX: Yeah. I guess— I guess— I guess it’s—
BOBBY: They’re gonna put a hit out on him.
ALEX: The— a better way of putting it is, I guess, you know, the devil you know, right?
BOBBY: Right. Exactly. Good point. We know Steve. We knew Charlie. Many Charlies over the years in baseball ownership. Many Bills, you know? Many Edwards. Anyway, okay, that does it for this week’s episode of Tipping Pitches. Later this week? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Later this week, on the Patreon feed, we’re going to be doing a Watch-along podcast, which is where we watch a movie, and we talk during the movie, and you too, at home, can watch the movie, and you can press play on your podcast episode at the exact same time that we press play on— on the movie. So we’re all watching the movie at the same time and it’s like a commentary track. I probably did a bad job explaining this, because we’ve been talking about the deep details of Major League Baseball ownership 10 years for the last two hours.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: But you’ll understand it if you go and you check that out on Patreon, patreon.com/tippingpitches. If you want to just see what this is like, you know, if you want to just check out the Watch-along, there’s also an option to buy the collection of Watch-along episodes that we have done over the last two years for a flat fee, rather than just paying for the Patreon subscription. The top tier gets you access to the entire back catalog of all of our bonus episodes. So there’s plenty of different ways to get those. We’ll put the link in the description, like we always do. Do you want to—
ALEX: That’s why I— do— do you want to let the people know what it is?
BOBBY: Oh, yes, Angels in the Outfield, chronicling the Arte Moreno ownership tenure.
ALEX: It’s all [1:44:34]
BOBBY: Angels in the Outfield.
ALEX: I— I’ve long said that, like, I— I love this film and I’ve seen it so many times. You started— you started—
BOBBY: You once said it’s your favorite baseball movie.
ALEX: I know. And then you started rattling off actors who were in this of the day— this the other day, and my mind was straight up blown. So—
BOBBY: Well—
ALEX: —I’m so looking forward to this.
BOBBY: We’ll all have that discovery together—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —on the Tipping Pitches Patreon feed. That’ll be coming out on Wednesday. Again, if you want to just kind of check out what it’s like a week from now, because it’ll be the week between Christmas and New Year’s. We’re going to put out a preview of that episode here on this public feed, just the first 30 minutes or so. And if you’re really liking it, of course, you can go and get the full thing over on Patreon. So that’s the plan for the next couple weeks, and then we’ll be back with a standard episode that first week of January. I’m really looking forward to a lot of stuff that we have planned in January. One final note of housekeeping, we, of course, will be doing the state of labor in baseball, but this year, we’re going to be doing it at the end of January, instead of at the beginning of January. Hopefully, I have more information for you all on why that is when the episode rolls around. But have no fear, Michael Baumann will be back, and he will be sharing a consumer rant, and he will also be sharing various intelligent and long-winded thoughts about the state of labor in Major League Baseball. That’s all I got for you. I hope everybody has a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful next couple weeks, holidays, whatever you may celebrate, if you celebrate anything at all. And if you don’t, just have a great couple weeks anyway. It’s really cold here in New York City.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: I almost froze to death yesterday walking to see my films. You know? It’s tough out here to get to these theaters to see these films. You almost die. You almost freeze to death. So stay warm. Have a wonderful holiday season, and we’ll talk to you soon.
ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Hello, everybody. I’m Alex Rodriguez. Tipping Pitches. Tipping Pitches. This is the one that I love the most. Tipping Pitches. So, we’ll see you next week. See ya!
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