Things We All Love to Hate: Sports Team Owners

Owners are not the most enlightened bunch. Former Cincinnati Reds owner and insensitive racist Marge Schott was finally banned from baseball after comments endorsing Hitler. Former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling was forced to sell the team after his own racist comments were revealed. Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder spent several years defending the indefensible Redskins name with AstroTurf PR campaigns and other stunts.

Money can’t buy you happiness nor can it buy you acumen. The NBA instituted the Stepien Rule, which prevents teams from trading away first-round draft picks in consecutive years, to protect owners against themselves after former Cleveland Cavaliers owner Ted Stepien traded away five consecutive first-round draft picks in the 1980s. A former United States Football League owner named Donald Trump not only submarined his own franchise (the New Jersey Generals) but the entire league when he demanded it move its game schedule to the fall from the spring to compete with the NFL, which filed an antitrust lawsuit that eventually led to the USFL’s collapse.

Cities often give sports franchises taxpayer-funded incentives that end up benefiting the team’s owner more than its fans. For example, Raiders owner Al Davis agreed to move the NFL team back to Oakland from Los Angeles in 1994 after the city promised to renovate the Coliseum, an effort which has cost taxpayers an estimated $350 million. Meanwhile, over the past 20 years, the value of the Raiders franchise has soared from $421 million to $3.4 billion.

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The MLB lockout is just the latest in a long line of labor disputes between owners and players. More than a century ago, penny-pinching Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey made his players wash their own uniforms and when they won the 1917 pennant he gave them cheap champagne instead of promised bonuses — stinginess that some say contributed to the 1919 Black Sox scandal.

Players are not the only ones who have been mistreated. Legendary (for the wrong reasons) Toronto Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard was not only convicted of fraud in 1972 for using the team’s money to remodel his house, but was also known for turning off arena water fountains on hot days to sell more drinks. He even strong-armed the Beatles into performing two shows in Toronto in 1965 instead of the one they had booked.

Owners have a knack for seeking out greener pastures and leaving cities without their beloved teams. As the city of Baltimore slept on March 28, 1984, Colts owner Bob Irsay hired moving trucks to load up the team’s offices and move the franchise to Indianapolis overnight, leaving Colts fans shell-shocked the following morning.

The average cost for a family of four to attend an NFL game, including tickets, food and parking, reached $568 last season, up 95% in the past 30 years.

If you think professional coaching staffs lack diversity, take a look at the owners’ boxes, which remain overwhelmingly white. Baseball has the least racially diverse class of owners, with just one person of color with a majority stake in a team: Arte Moreno, who owns the Los Angeles Angels.

Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft CEO and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, is just the second wealthiest sports team owner with an estimated $68.7 billion U.S. dollars. Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries and owner of the Indian Premier League Mumbai Indians, is worth an estimated $84.5 billion.

Collective ownership is one way forward. The NFL’s Green Bay Packers are a nonprofit team, owned collectively by thousands of fans who never have to worry about them leaving their frigid small media market in Wisconsin. And a DAO or "decentralized autonomous organization” formed last year with the hopes of becoming the first virtual community of fans to pool enough funds to buy an NBA team.

There are ways for cities and their fans to fight back against relocation threats from owners. One is to use the legal threat of eminent domain to reclaim stadium land, and maybe the team itself, for the public good. Another check on ownership is to convince policymakers to regulate sports leagues as the virtual monopolies that they are: Threatening baseball's antitrust exemption is a favorite pastime of politicians across the spectrum, including recent overtures by Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley after MLB moved its All-Star Game out of Georgia.

“If owners want to keep their teams,” former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recently wrote in The Guardian, “they should keep their racist, misogynistic, homophobic and xenophobic views to themselves.” There is no easy way to police or punish owners for their views, but we can, as Abdul-Jabbar puts it, “call them out publicly and relentlessly, if not to change their minds, then to change their public behavior.”

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Before the New York Yankees returned to championship glory in the 1990s, bitter fans were all too eager to lament the franchise’s fallen state and bemoan the team’s outspoken owner, George Steinbrenner. In the mid 1980s, Saturday Night Live offered its own “continuing service to the New York Yankees fans” in the form of a “George Steinbrenner Health Watch ” with disappointing news reports about his continuing good health.

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