It’s laughable when owners claim poverty in baseball. They hide behind unpublished annual operating budget figures to justify keeping player payroll down and fielding an inferior product, but they are making hundreds of millions of dollars.

Take the Royals, David Glass bought them for $96M in 2000, and sold them for $1B in 2020 for a profit of $904M, which averages out to about $45M annually. Meanwhile, payroll was rarely above the ten lowest in the league and the team wasn’ competitive for most of his tenure.

Or the Marlins. Jeff Loria bought them in 2002 for only $30M after some shady dealings by MLB. He then sold them for a cool $1.3B in 2017. Nice $1.27B profit there for all his hard work keeping player payroll the lowest in the league for most of those years.

My favorite is the Dodgers. Frank McCourt picked them up in 2004 for a whopping $430M of money he didn’t have but financed with debt and more shady real estate deals. Then he ran the team so poorly over the next decade that the franchise entered Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. But...

...old Franky and MLB got together and brokered up a sweet deal that netted him $2B for the supposedly bankrupt organization in 2012. Net profit of $1.57B for 8 years of really hard, like SOOOOO hard, work. Yeah. Right. But hey, at least his teams were competitive mostly.

Then there’s the bonus babies like Hal Steinbrenner and Chris Illitch who have mastered the advanced skill sets of being born rich and inheriting daddy’s empire. Just think, if and when they ever sell their teams, every red cent will be profit. Those poor, impoverished men.

Baseball players ARE baseball. Baseball owners are profiteers who mean pretty much nothing to the game. They aren’t losing money. Ever. Any dispute over money is owner greed. Period.