It was only 11 years ago that family became corporate in Los Angeles. The O’Malley family, who had long-stood as the owners of the Dodgers baseball organization, both in Brooklyn and in Los Angeles, had sold the team to Rupert Murdoch and the media moguls at Fox News Corp.
Family became corporate.
The attitude of doing it right was lost for doing it for dollars. And the first move Murdoch and Co. made while at the helm – trading Mike Piazza towards the end of his contract to the Florida Marlins, along with two other Dodgers, for, get this, broadcasting rights. Yes, Murdoch scored his company, Fox, broadcasting rights to the Florida Marlins.
And so began business as a corporation.
Gone are the days when Peter O’Malley took over for his father, Walter. Gone are the days when the O’Malleys would serve ice cream to the office staff at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, everyday that the Dodgers were in first place. In are ratings, merchandising, branding, and cash cow advertising machines.
I remember going to Dodger games and seeing a beautifully illustrated outfield fence, silhouetted with images of Dodger greats and team accomplishments. Today, I count thirty-six, yes, thirty-six individual ads on and around the outfield fence, not including two video screens that change every so often to add more companies into the mix. This was opening day 2008.
The team has returned to a family ownership, run by the McCourts, real estate gurus from the Boston area as I recall. But the game still has a business smell to it.
Players are demanding absurd contracts worth tens of millions of dollars. Their egos continue to rise. And it is all to play this great game of baseball – a game that many only dream of playing. And it is agents like Scott Boras – the scum of professional sports agency – that have fed these egos with above-market value contracts and salaries.
Scott Boras, of Scott Boras Corporation, runs his agency out of, of all places, Newport Beach, California. He has a client list of over 50 baseball players and has an ego himself just as big as his clientele combined. He is what the New Yorker has called an extortionist. He represents all that is wrong with baseball today. The business atmosphere. The cash-cow, money producing organizations that demand year-over-year increases in returns like a publicly-trading company would to appease its stockholders.
But there are no stock-holders in baseball. There are investors. And there are fans. Sadly, the investors have taken precedence over the fans, and what used to be an enjoyable event out to the ballpark with friends and family has become an advertisement with $10 beers, $5 hot dogs, $6 water bottles, and $20 parking. This, of course, is all after you buy your ever-rising costly tickets.
But what can I do, what can anybody do about it? Change has to come from the top – and currently, the top just got paid $17 million last year, even given the current weak economic times. The NFL Commissioner has taken a 20% pay cut. The NHL has instituted salary caps. The MLB – has done nothing. There are several players demanding pay over the $20 million mark per season. And Bud Selig, the Major League Baseball Commissioner seems fine with that.
Success is unfortunately defined by money, and lots of it, in todays game of baseball. The commissioner likes to see that he gets a substantial amount of monetary return from his work. Meanwhile, fans pay more year after year for tickets, concessions, and parking. Where does it all end?
Steve Jobs has an annual salary of $1. One dollar. And that is to stay on the payroll. That is how executives used to run businesses. If their company prospered, they succeeded. Today, that is far from the case. Executives at oil-giants like Exxon-Mobile, Shell, Chevron, to name a few, bring in over $50 million a year in pay, plus bonuses. The big three CEO’s in Detroit have recently taken pay-cuts in wake of stark criticism over corporate luxury while their auto manufacturing companies face filing for bankruptcy – one of them reducing their salary to $1.
Gone with the family, in with the corporate. This is baseball today, and unfortunately, there is no end in sight. With scum like Scott Boras demanding outrageous amounts of money to perform in a game that used to be a childhood dream is only the beginning of the problem.
Forget your financial advisers, and forget your lavish expenditures. Why can’t athletes return to a modest salary, bring the game back to the family atmosphere of the 80′s and before. If the game continues on its current path, it will suffer, and it will falter.
[photo by 7D7 Studio, Unsportsmanlike comment]
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