Being lucky made all the difference for George Steinbrenner
Wednesday, 14 July 2010 08:03
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/being-lucky-made-all-the-difference-for-george-steinbrenner
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
THE POLITICS OF SPORTS BUSINESS
There is a lot of revisionist history that is being tossed around following the death of George Steinbrenner in terms of his building the Yankees into a global brand name. There was hard work, no doubt, and a lot of good people pitched in but George Steinbrenner never did want to buy the Yankees. He was from Cleveland and wanted the hometown Indians. The New York Yankees baseball team was his consolation prize when he and his group bought the team from CBS in 1973.
Steinbrenner had owned the American Basketball League's Cleveland Pipers in 1961. His team won the ABL title. Steinbrenner once tried to trade his whole team for Pittsburgh Rens star and future Hall of Famer Connie Hawkins. He wanted to move the Pipers into the National Basketball Association with his major signee Jerry Lucas in 1962 but had two problems. He didn't have the money on hand and his father would not advance him the cash needed to join the NBA and the American Basketball League claimed Steinbrenner had a deal with their league. Steinbrenner dropped out of the ABL and the ABL folded on New Year's Eve 1962. He nearly bought the Indians in 1972 but at the last moment Indians owner Vernon Stouffer backed out of the agreement.
The Steinbrenner Years have been well documented. But there is a question that should be asked. Was George Steinbrenner a good baseball owner/businessman or was he just very lucky? The answer is that he was very lucky.
He got baseball's most famous, but weakened, franchise for about $250,000 as part of a group who put up about $10 million for the New York Yankees. He was at the right place at the right time to cash in on cable TV and the Yankees brand name became bigger than baseball, which allowed him to make more marketing dollars.
Steinbrenner, by virtue of being in New York, had more money available to him except for the Los Angeles Dodgers in terms of how baseball revenue was raised in the period after 1973. His first big free agent singing was Catfish Hunter on New Year's Eve 1975 after Oakland A's owner Charles Finley made a mistake in sending out Hunter's 1975 contract. Steinbrenner missed out on the first class of free agents which consisted of two pitchers, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally. He did sign Reggie Jackson in 1977 but the first championship teams were built the old fashion way through trades and players from the farm system.
Steinbrenner became bigger than the team over time. He was a lunatic who was compulsively driven to win. The guy from Cleveland became a symbol of New York which is odd because he didn't live in New York and was not part of the city's business community. He was in the middle of Tampa's business community. New York George was a commercial pitchman, a baseball owner, a Saturday Night Live host, the punch line of many jokes, a buffoonish character in Seinfeld, a twice suspended owner and finally an elder statesman.
He owned the Yankees, the New Jersey Nets (two years with him in ownership, the Nets played in the NBA Finals) and the Devils. He also put up money to make sure the Tampa Bay Lightning survived and became an NHL franchise. He was a big wheel in the Olympics movement. But the shipbuilder from Cleveland was a reluctant Yankee at first.
Steinbrenner spent a lot of money in the 1980s and had virtually nothing to show for it. The 1980s was the first decade since the 1910s that the New York Yankees did not win a World Series. The transformation of the Yankees into a dominant brand started in 1988 and this is where Steinbrenner got very lucky. Gulf and Western owned the Madison Square Garden Network, a cable TV station that had a lot of sports programming between October and May with New York Rangers hockey games and New York Knicks basketball but the channel virtually ran the soundtrack of crickets in the summer.
There was some talk in the cable TV industry that the MSG Network could be swallowed by Charles Dolan SportsChannel, an entity that had the cable rights to Mets and Yankees baseball along with New York Islanders and New Jersey Devils hockey and New Jersey Nets basketball. Gulf and Western made a strategic decision to save the network.
Go after Yankees baseball and go for broke with the biggest TV contract ever offered to an individual team in North American history.
The ploy worked. MSG got the Yankees and had sports programming 12 months a year and with the Yankees on board, multiple systems cable operators away from New York City and the suburbs added MSG. Also, New York City was finally wired for cable.
Martin Davis and Gulf and Western never get credit for beginning the transformation of Steinbrenner's Yankees into a behemoth. The Yankees-Gulf and Western 12-year-agreement for about a half a billion dollars shook up the economics of baseball. The huge divide between high end revenue teams — there was one the Yankees — and the rest of baseball would take a few years to develop. The new cable deal though did not mean Steinbrenner was opening the checkbook to all free agents.
Davis and Gulf and Western outbid the Tribune Company's WPIX, Channel 11 and Dolan's SportsChannel.
Steinbrenner was kicked out of baseball by Commissioner Fay Vincent in 1990 for paying Howard Spira to spy on Dave Winfield. While he was gone, Yankees brass decided to build a farm system and eventually that farm system would produce Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams. Steinbrenner was back in the picture in 1993 after Vincent was fired by Steinbrenner's fellow owners. Those owners that led the campaign to get rid of Vincent included the Chicago White Sox Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn (Steinbrenner friends who George once called "the Abbott and Costello of Baseball) and "Buddy", Bud Selig, the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers. The Tribune Company's Stanton Cook who ran the Chicago Cubs was also a key player in Vincent's dismissal.
Cook's Channel 11 in New York was still carrying a number of Yankees games at the time as part of a secondary deal with MSG.
In 1998, Steinbrenner was tired of the rebuilt Yankee Stadium. The 22-year-old stadium version of the original park was not in the same league as new parks that were coming on line. Yankee Stadium had narrow corridors, few luxury boxes and lacked the other gadgets that other owners had like food courts and other revenue generators.
While Steinbrenner was grousing over his old, non revenue producing stadium, he had the huge TV deal and another multimillion dollar marketing agreement with Adidas America that was signed in 1997. The nine-year, $95 million contract drew the ire of his fellow owners and Steinbrenner sued his fellow owners to make sure they didn't interfere with the marketing deal. Major League Baseball had an exclusive deal with Russell Athletic to produce baseball uniforms. Adidas and Steinbrenner were partners until 2008. Adidas was replaced by Nike in 2009.
The Steinbrenner-Adidas deal echoed a deal that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones signed with Pepsi in 1995 despite the fact that the NFL's official soft drink sponsor was Coca Cola.
The Steinbrenner-Jones connection should not have been dismissed as coincidence.
Steinbrenner's Yankees and Jones' Cowboys along with the Goldman Sachs Group and CIC Partners formed a food and retail company in 2008 called "Legends Hospitality Management LLC". The venture runs catering, concessions, merchandising and other management services at the new Yankees and Cowboys stadiums. Goldman Sachs was a minority partner in the regional sports cable network that the Yankees launched in 2002 after the Yankees-MSG deal ended. Steinbrenner finally got his new stadium in 2006. The new place opened in 2009 at a price tag of more than a billion dollars. It was a long slough for Steinbrenner who first pushed for a stadium in the 1980s.
New Jersey voters said no to a publicly funded stadium in 1985 but that didn't stop George from playing New Jersey versus New York for his affection. By 2001, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was carrying water for George and for the Mets Fred Wilpon in Queens.
New stadiums mean fresh revenue streams. Teams use new ballparks as an excuse to raise ticket prices and create high-priced club seats along with more luxury boxes. Wider concourses would allow more people to stand on concession lines and spend more money for beer, hot dogs, yearbooks and whatever else teams sell. It all brings in more revenue.
"There is a good chance that we will be able to work things out with the Mets and the Yankees," said the mayor, who has been a Yankee fan for life, in front of Yankee Stadium on opening day. "We are talking to them on a consistent basis and I have been in involved in some of the [talks]. I think there is a good chance we can work that out.
"The reality is, as I have said many times, both of them need new ballparks in order to be competitive. Maybe not this very year, but in order to be competitive over the next 10, 15, 20 years with their major competitors. Boston is getting a new ballpark; Baltimore has a new ballpark.
"Atlanta has a brand new ballpark. That's all going to enhance their revenues.
And if the Yankees and the Mets want to remain competitive with Baltimore, Boston or Atlanta, then that's something we just have to do."
Steinbrenner's Yankees always had money for free agents and Steinbrenner would pay for Reggie, Winfield, Dave Collins, Kenny Rogers and Alex Rodriguez. Whatever it took, the Yankees and Steinbrenner had the cash on hand which is a far different cry from 1962 and the Pipers.
In the game of sports business, George Steinbrenner, who was twice suspended from baseball, who fired people at his whims yet always took care of people in need, built a global brand in a sport that is played in North America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Rim, parts of South America and Australia. The New York Yankees compete with Manchester United (a former Yankees strategic partner) for world name recognition. Was it a master blueprint that made the Yankees and Steinbrenner brand names or was it just being in the right place at the right time?
There are a lot of what ifs. What would have happened if the Pipers continued to play? What if Stouffer said yes? What if Martin Davis and Gulf and Western didn't come up with the $500 million offer in 1988? Sometimes it is far better to be lucky than good.
Evan Weiner is an author, radio and TV commentator and speaker on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 14 July 2010 08:12 )
Showing posts with label New York Yankees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York Yankees. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Why N.J. cannot get a Major League Baseball team
WEDNESDAY, 05 MAY 2010 12:45
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/why-nj-cannot-get-a-major-league-baseball-team
Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig has a committee trying to figure out whether Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff can move his team from Oakland to San Jose, if San Jose can find the money and is able to build a mostly publicly-financed baseball stadium. The committee has not figured out, as of yet, if they know the way to San Jose but there will be an answer some day. What happens in Northern California should have no immediate impact on New Jersey. But as it stands now, neither San Jose nor northern New Jersey can be the home of a major league baseball team.
The areas are in other team's territories and Major League Baseball, thanks to an antitrust exemption, can just say no to anyone who wants to put a team in San Jose or East Rutherford, New Jersey. There is no proposal at the present time to attract a Major League team to New Jersey although when then Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth opened the door to possible expansion in 1987, New Jersey had a presentation ready. New Jersey also tried to attract George Steinbrenner's interest and get him to move the Yankees across the Hudson in the 1990s.
There are two owners of Major League Baseball teams who have serious doubts about the revenue production capabilities of their present stadiums. Wolff in Oakland and Stuart Sternberg in St. Petersburg.
Wolff has failed in getting a "stadium-village" for his A's and a real estate in Oakland and in Fremont, which is about 20 miles south on the I-880 of the team's present home at the Oakland Coliseum. In St. Petersburg, Tampa Rays ownership, which includes Managing General Partner Stuart Sternberg of Rye, New York is looking for a new stadium in either St. Petersburg or Tampa.
There was a rumor, which was just a rumor, that Rays ownership thought about moving the Rays to Connecticut. There is one other major fly in the ointment though. The Rays' lease with the St. Petersburg stadium ends in 2027.
Both Wolff and Sternberg are trying to work out an arrangement to remain in their present markets. Wolff can get out of his lease within a few years in Oakland as he signed a short-term agreement to keep his team at the Coliseum through 2013. Here is the problem that Wolff faces and a problem that New Jersey would face if someone in the state decided to go after a Major League Baseball team.
Major League Baseball assigns territories to teams. The San Francisco Giants ownership has the San Jose/Santa Clara County territory which is more than 40 miles south of the Giants China Basin ballpark. The Oakland Coliseum is considerably closer to San Francisco and is accessible by the Bay Area Rapid Transit and is not far down the I-880 from the Bay Area Bridge. San Jose became Giants territory in the 1990s when the team attempted to get a stadium built in the South Bay's most populous city. Neither San Jose nor Santa Clara voters had any interest in paying for a Giants stadium and turned down ballpark referendums. Despite the no votes, MLB has not changed the Giants' territorial claim.
Major League Baseball does not live by the same antitrust laws as normal businesses because the Supreme Court of the United States in 1922 ruled that baseball was a game and not a business and gave the "game" an antitrust exemption which still applies to areas like territories and television. Wolff is blocked from even thinking about crossing the Santa Clara County line because that would be crossing his baseball brothers. Wolff tried to get as close as he could to San Jose and Santa Clara and not upsetting the Giants ownership by trying to relocate to Fremont.
Now Wolff is openly talking to San Jose despite the fact that Giants ownership will not cede the territory and Giants ownership through a subsidiary, the San Jose Giants — the California League Class A Giants affiliate — is trying to block San Jose from building a stadium. Giants ownership has a one-quarter interest in the San Jose Giants.
Wolff's Oakland A's are struggling drawing people this year. Oakland does not have the corporate crowd that fills the Giants China Basin stadium. Santa Clara residents might send Major League Baseball is big wakeup call on June 8 by going against national trends and voting to spend public money to build a football stadium for the San Francisco 49ers to show the Giants, MLB and the city of San Francisco that they are fed up with the Giants territorial claims and to stick it to San Francisco city officials and San Francisco Giants ownership by "stealing" or "poaching" the 49ers. Santa Clara is willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the stadium.
San Jose is the Silicone Valley and somehow both MLB and the Giants are convinced that money headed up the 101 Freeway to San Francisco will shift to a San Jose baseball team which would have a crippling affect on the Giants. The San Francisco baseball team is one hour away from San Jose; Oakland is across the Bay and is accessible by mass transit.
Wolff doesn't seem to want to sue Major League Baseball and challenge the antitrust exemption. Wolff shares the Oakland Coliseum with the NFL's Raiders and Raiders owner Al Davis did sue the NFL in the 1980s when the league interfered with his negotiations with the Coliseum for a lease extension and then tried to block the Raiders' move to Los Angeles.
Davis won.
In 1984, San Diego Clippers owner Donald Sterling thumbed his nose at NBA officials and moved his franchise to Los Angeles without league consent. He was fined $100 million for the move. Sterling sued the league. The two parties settled. Sterling stayed in LA and paid the NBA a $6 million fine.
Major League Baseball did not move a team between 1971 and 2004. The Washington Senators left the nation's capital for Arlington, Texas in 1972. A number of attempted franchise shifts failed for various reasons including San Diego going to Washington in 1974, the Giants to Toronto in 1976, Oakland to Denver in 1979. A number of teams looked at moving to Tampa including the Giants, Seattle Mariners, George W. Bush's Texas Rangers and the Minnesota Twins. Minnesota ownership nearly sold the team to Greensboro, North Carolina interests in the late 1990s if a stadium became available in that North Carolina city. Voters turned down a Greensboro stadium in 1998.
It is not easy to move a team to open markets like Tampa was before 1995, like Denver before 1991, like Washington between 1972 and 2004. What chance does San Jose have? What chance does New Jersey or Connecticut have?
New Jersey may have the right stuff for a Major League Baseball team. In 2000, Major League Baseball had big names like Paul Volcker, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Richard C. Levin, the Yale University President, the former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and media personality George Will, a former political operative and college professor who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977, analyze baseball's financial condition.
The "Blue Ribbon Panel" on baseball economics left the door open for franchise relocation to places like northern New Jersey and Washington despite the presence of teams in the vicinity. New Jersey or Connecticut have a major revenue stream that is currently untapped. Cablevision's Madison Square Garden network has little summer programming of note that would draw in potential viewers since the Yankees formed the YES Network and the Mets, along with Time Warner and Comcast, started SNY. There probably is more than $60 million on the table waiting for a third New York City area team.
New York City is still the financial capital of the United States. The city once had three baseball teams - the Yankees, the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Walter O'Malley took his Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957 although he kicked the tires and his Dodgers played seven games at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, N.J. in 1956 and 1957. O'Malley used Jersey City as leverage in his bid to get New York to spring for a new stadium for his Dodgers. Giants owner Horace Stoneham seemed more determined to move his team from upper Manhattan out of the New York area than O'Malley ... with Minneapolis one of his choices.
With the population, the corporate wealth and television monies available, New York City or northern New Jersey would be ripe for a failing franchise. But New Jersey is blocked (as Connecticut would be) because both the Yankees and Mets would nix any move into their territories and the Philadelphia Phillies ownership would probably object to a third New York area team if it was placed in New Jersey. (The Philadelphia Flyers got a million dollars from John McMullen when he bought the Colorado Rockies NHL team and move his newly acquired team into the Meadowlands in 1982).
In Oakland, Wolff has Comcast's TV money, but he lacks corporate support. San Jose wants to build a stadium and Oakland is back in the game.
There are three essentials to running a successful franchise whether it is in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League or the National Basketball Association or even Major League Soccer. Government support is an absolute necessity in terms of building a facility. Government can build the place with taxpayers' dollars or give substantial tax breaks and incentives (as the Giants/Jets stadium entity is receiving at the Meadowlands) to owners to build their own plants. The federal government regulates Cable TV where billions are made by sports franchises and separates the Yankees, Mets, Angels, Red Sox, Phillies and Mariners from the rest of baseball and corporate support. Corporates can take 50 cents off the dollar in buying luxury boxes, club seats for business purposes.
Wolff already shares the market with the Giants in the Bay Area and cannot get his foot in the door in San Jose. If Sternberg was looking at the New York City area, he would get a door slammed in his face. Sternberg is not seeking a New York area facility and is concentrating on getting a place built in Tampa. The lease in St. Pete has a long way to go but as the late John McMullen once said, a contract is just a piece of paper.
Major League Baseball moved the financially troubled and ownerless Montreal Expos into Washington after the 2004 season once MLB secured a commitment from the city that it would build a state-of-the-art baseball facility. Remember McMullen's comment.
A contract is just a piece of paper.
Washington is about 40 miles from Baltimore and was a part of the Peter Angelos' Baltimore Orioles territory. MLB worked out a deal with Angelos which gave him a regional cable TV network, the Mid Atlantic Sports Network, as a partial payment for the Washington team which "invaded" his territory. That agreement might work in Wolff's favor and could be used by someone in New Jersey if that someone decided that New Jersey and Major League Baseball are perfect together.
The owners of the Seattle SuperSonics took their NBA team to Oklahoma City with two years left on their contract in Seattle to use the publicly financed and refinanced facility for their basketball team. Clayton Bennett reached a financial agreement with Seattle and left. But Bennett had the NBA Commissioner David Stern's blessing. Bruce Ratner is taking the Nets from the Meadowlands to Newark for the next two years with New Jersey's approval along with Stern.
New Jersey had the right stuff for Major League Baseball in 2000 according to Volcker, Levin, Mitchell and Will. The state could not go after the Montreal Expos franchise when it was up for sale in 2002, 2003 and 2004 because of the antitrust exemption. That is why people who want a Major League Baseball team in New Jersey should be paying close attention to Wolff's actions in Oakland and San Jose and what Selig's committee rules.
The door to Major League Baseball in New Jersey could all of a sudden open.
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
COMMENTARY
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/why-nj-cannot-get-a-major-league-baseball-team
Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig has a committee trying to figure out whether Oakland A's owner Lew Wolff can move his team from Oakland to San Jose, if San Jose can find the money and is able to build a mostly publicly-financed baseball stadium. The committee has not figured out, as of yet, if they know the way to San Jose but there will be an answer some day. What happens in Northern California should have no immediate impact on New Jersey. But as it stands now, neither San Jose nor northern New Jersey can be the home of a major league baseball team.
The areas are in other team's territories and Major League Baseball, thanks to an antitrust exemption, can just say no to anyone who wants to put a team in San Jose or East Rutherford, New Jersey. There is no proposal at the present time to attract a Major League team to New Jersey although when then Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth opened the door to possible expansion in 1987, New Jersey had a presentation ready. New Jersey also tried to attract George Steinbrenner's interest and get him to move the Yankees across the Hudson in the 1990s.
There are two owners of Major League Baseball teams who have serious doubts about the revenue production capabilities of their present stadiums. Wolff in Oakland and Stuart Sternberg in St. Petersburg.
Wolff has failed in getting a "stadium-village" for his A's and a real estate in Oakland and in Fremont, which is about 20 miles south on the I-880 of the team's present home at the Oakland Coliseum. In St. Petersburg, Tampa Rays ownership, which includes Managing General Partner Stuart Sternberg of Rye, New York is looking for a new stadium in either St. Petersburg or Tampa.
There was a rumor, which was just a rumor, that Rays ownership thought about moving the Rays to Connecticut. There is one other major fly in the ointment though. The Rays' lease with the St. Petersburg stadium ends in 2027.
Both Wolff and Sternberg are trying to work out an arrangement to remain in their present markets. Wolff can get out of his lease within a few years in Oakland as he signed a short-term agreement to keep his team at the Coliseum through 2013. Here is the problem that Wolff faces and a problem that New Jersey would face if someone in the state decided to go after a Major League Baseball team.
Major League Baseball assigns territories to teams. The San Francisco Giants ownership has the San Jose/Santa Clara County territory which is more than 40 miles south of the Giants China Basin ballpark. The Oakland Coliseum is considerably closer to San Francisco and is accessible by the Bay Area Rapid Transit and is not far down the I-880 from the Bay Area Bridge. San Jose became Giants territory in the 1990s when the team attempted to get a stadium built in the South Bay's most populous city. Neither San Jose nor Santa Clara voters had any interest in paying for a Giants stadium and turned down ballpark referendums. Despite the no votes, MLB has not changed the Giants' territorial claim.
Major League Baseball does not live by the same antitrust laws as normal businesses because the Supreme Court of the United States in 1922 ruled that baseball was a game and not a business and gave the "game" an antitrust exemption which still applies to areas like territories and television. Wolff is blocked from even thinking about crossing the Santa Clara County line because that would be crossing his baseball brothers. Wolff tried to get as close as he could to San Jose and Santa Clara and not upsetting the Giants ownership by trying to relocate to Fremont.
Now Wolff is openly talking to San Jose despite the fact that Giants ownership will not cede the territory and Giants ownership through a subsidiary, the San Jose Giants — the California League Class A Giants affiliate — is trying to block San Jose from building a stadium. Giants ownership has a one-quarter interest in the San Jose Giants.
Wolff's Oakland A's are struggling drawing people this year. Oakland does not have the corporate crowd that fills the Giants China Basin stadium. Santa Clara residents might send Major League Baseball is big wakeup call on June 8 by going against national trends and voting to spend public money to build a football stadium for the San Francisco 49ers to show the Giants, MLB and the city of San Francisco that they are fed up with the Giants territorial claims and to stick it to San Francisco city officials and San Francisco Giants ownership by "stealing" or "poaching" the 49ers. Santa Clara is willing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the stadium.
San Jose is the Silicone Valley and somehow both MLB and the Giants are convinced that money headed up the 101 Freeway to San Francisco will shift to a San Jose baseball team which would have a crippling affect on the Giants. The San Francisco baseball team is one hour away from San Jose; Oakland is across the Bay and is accessible by mass transit.
Wolff doesn't seem to want to sue Major League Baseball and challenge the antitrust exemption. Wolff shares the Oakland Coliseum with the NFL's Raiders and Raiders owner Al Davis did sue the NFL in the 1980s when the league interfered with his negotiations with the Coliseum for a lease extension and then tried to block the Raiders' move to Los Angeles.
Davis won.
In 1984, San Diego Clippers owner Donald Sterling thumbed his nose at NBA officials and moved his franchise to Los Angeles without league consent. He was fined $100 million for the move. Sterling sued the league. The two parties settled. Sterling stayed in LA and paid the NBA a $6 million fine.
Major League Baseball did not move a team between 1971 and 2004. The Washington Senators left the nation's capital for Arlington, Texas in 1972. A number of attempted franchise shifts failed for various reasons including San Diego going to Washington in 1974, the Giants to Toronto in 1976, Oakland to Denver in 1979. A number of teams looked at moving to Tampa including the Giants, Seattle Mariners, George W. Bush's Texas Rangers and the Minnesota Twins. Minnesota ownership nearly sold the team to Greensboro, North Carolina interests in the late 1990s if a stadium became available in that North Carolina city. Voters turned down a Greensboro stadium in 1998.
It is not easy to move a team to open markets like Tampa was before 1995, like Denver before 1991, like Washington between 1972 and 2004. What chance does San Jose have? What chance does New Jersey or Connecticut have?
New Jersey may have the right stuff for a Major League Baseball team. In 2000, Major League Baseball had big names like Paul Volcker, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Richard C. Levin, the Yale University President, the former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and media personality George Will, a former political operative and college professor who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977, analyze baseball's financial condition.
The "Blue Ribbon Panel" on baseball economics left the door open for franchise relocation to places like northern New Jersey and Washington despite the presence of teams in the vicinity. New Jersey or Connecticut have a major revenue stream that is currently untapped. Cablevision's Madison Square Garden network has little summer programming of note that would draw in potential viewers since the Yankees formed the YES Network and the Mets, along with Time Warner and Comcast, started SNY. There probably is more than $60 million on the table waiting for a third New York City area team.
New York City is still the financial capital of the United States. The city once had three baseball teams - the Yankees, the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Walter O'Malley took his Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957 although he kicked the tires and his Dodgers played seven games at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, N.J. in 1956 and 1957. O'Malley used Jersey City as leverage in his bid to get New York to spring for a new stadium for his Dodgers. Giants owner Horace Stoneham seemed more determined to move his team from upper Manhattan out of the New York area than O'Malley ... with Minneapolis one of his choices.
With the population, the corporate wealth and television monies available, New York City or northern New Jersey would be ripe for a failing franchise. But New Jersey is blocked (as Connecticut would be) because both the Yankees and Mets would nix any move into their territories and the Philadelphia Phillies ownership would probably object to a third New York area team if it was placed in New Jersey. (The Philadelphia Flyers got a million dollars from John McMullen when he bought the Colorado Rockies NHL team and move his newly acquired team into the Meadowlands in 1982).
In Oakland, Wolff has Comcast's TV money, but he lacks corporate support. San Jose wants to build a stadium and Oakland is back in the game.
There are three essentials to running a successful franchise whether it is in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League or the National Basketball Association or even Major League Soccer. Government support is an absolute necessity in terms of building a facility. Government can build the place with taxpayers' dollars or give substantial tax breaks and incentives (as the Giants/Jets stadium entity is receiving at the Meadowlands) to owners to build their own plants. The federal government regulates Cable TV where billions are made by sports franchises and separates the Yankees, Mets, Angels, Red Sox, Phillies and Mariners from the rest of baseball and corporate support. Corporates can take 50 cents off the dollar in buying luxury boxes, club seats for business purposes.
Wolff already shares the market with the Giants in the Bay Area and cannot get his foot in the door in San Jose. If Sternberg was looking at the New York City area, he would get a door slammed in his face. Sternberg is not seeking a New York area facility and is concentrating on getting a place built in Tampa. The lease in St. Pete has a long way to go but as the late John McMullen once said, a contract is just a piece of paper.
Major League Baseball moved the financially troubled and ownerless Montreal Expos into Washington after the 2004 season once MLB secured a commitment from the city that it would build a state-of-the-art baseball facility. Remember McMullen's comment.
A contract is just a piece of paper.
Washington is about 40 miles from Baltimore and was a part of the Peter Angelos' Baltimore Orioles territory. MLB worked out a deal with Angelos which gave him a regional cable TV network, the Mid Atlantic Sports Network, as a partial payment for the Washington team which "invaded" his territory. That agreement might work in Wolff's favor and could be used by someone in New Jersey if that someone decided that New Jersey and Major League Baseball are perfect together.
The owners of the Seattle SuperSonics took their NBA team to Oklahoma City with two years left on their contract in Seattle to use the publicly financed and refinanced facility for their basketball team. Clayton Bennett reached a financial agreement with Seattle and left. But Bennett had the NBA Commissioner David Stern's blessing. Bruce Ratner is taking the Nets from the Meadowlands to Newark for the next two years with New Jersey's approval along with Stern.
New Jersey had the right stuff for Major League Baseball in 2000 according to Volcker, Levin, Mitchell and Will. The state could not go after the Montreal Expos franchise when it was up for sale in 2002, 2003 and 2004 because of the antitrust exemption. That is why people who want a Major League Baseball team in New Jersey should be paying close attention to Wolff's actions in Oakland and San Jose and what Selig's committee rules.
The door to Major League Baseball in New Jersey could all of a sudden open.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Major League Baseball's cable TV problem
Major League Baseball's cable TV problem
Tuesday, 20 April 2010 23:12
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/major-league-baseballs-cable-tv-problem
COMMENTARY
It is not very often that anything that comes out of talk radio is worth a follow up discussion but a rare nugget of information came out of the Colin Cowherd show on New York's WEPN on Monday morning.
Cowherd was in a discussion with ESPN baseball reporter Tim Kirkjian about the economics of Major League Baseball and how that the discrepancy between "haves" (the Yankees) and "have nots" (Kansas City, Baltimore, Cleveland) was widening. Kirkjian agreed with the host and said Major League Baseball is trying to increase revenue sharing between the "haves" and have nots" but Major League Baseball would never have a salary cap because of the players union.
But, Kirkjian assured Cowherd that the owners and players will address the issue during the negotiations for the next Collective Bargaining Agreement which will begin presumably sometime in 2011 as the existing players/owners accord ends in December 2011.
There are a number of owners, men who live and die in their "real" businesses as free market capitalists, who would like to see more revenue sharing or wealth redistribution from the big market teams (i.e. the Yankees) to the game's financially weaker franchises (the soon to be renamed Florida Marlins, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Milwaukee and others) to level the financial playing field and allow teams like Cincinnati to bid on big ticket free agents.
The owners want more Major League Baseball socialism and that would start by forcing the Yankees franchise to pay an even larger percentage of "luxury" tax on the team's payroll than the Steinbrenner family does presently and those extra revenues would be sent to the most neediest in Major League Baseball.
Here is the rub with Major League Baseball financial parity plan. If baseball fans only were paying for a regional sports channel's bills like the YES Network or SNY, then Major League Baseball financial woes should be taken care of with baseball fans' money.
But, a lot of the dollars the Steinbrenner Yankees generate comes from people who have no interest in either the Yankees or Major League Baseball - about 95 percent of the subscribers - yet they have to pay for the channel anyway because of the 1984 Cable TV Act.
That leads to the following question.
Is it fair that cable money — which comes from non-interested subscribers from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut that should be going to the Yankees (and for that matter the Mets) and should stay in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut — ends up in the pocket of say the owners of the Florida Marlins, Kansas City Royals or the Baltimore Orioles?
The question of cable TV wealth distribution can be is easily answered.
In 1984, Congress passed the Cable TV Act, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan and assured the survival of ESPN, the Weather Channel, MTV, WTBS and CNN. Multiple System Operators (MSOs) were able to sign deals with cable networks and then bunch the networks together in a package and sell the package as one to cable subscribers.
Consumers had no say in what networks were thrown into the basic expanded tier but if they wanted a special channel, say CNN or CNN Headline News, they would also have to take ESPN, the Weather Channel and MTV. The legislation gave cable consumers three options. They could take the entire package, basic and basic expanded, just basic ... or quit cable.
ESPN would not be the business as it is today without federal government intervention. Major League Baseball teams were slowly moving games to cable TV in the 1970s and by the 1980s, all sorts of regional sports networks were popping up nationally.
The Boston Red Sox became a more than just a New England franchise because of exposure on WSBK, Channel 38. The Mets and Yankees were also up on the "bird" as both teams were seen beyond the New York area on WOR and WPIX. The Chicago Cubs became a national team when the Cubs ownership, the Tribune Company, went national with WGN and Ted Turner had his Atlanta Braves on WTBS.
Those teams started pocketing extra revenue and MSOs snapped up the stations has the games brought more subscribers.
(Major League Baseball denied the sale of the Texas Rangers from Eddie Chiles to Edwin Gaylord in 1986 and in 1988 because Gaylord planned to put Rangers games on KTVT, Channel 11 because there were too many games on national cable TV with the Braves, Mets, Yankees, Red Sox and Cubs. Eventually Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth worked with George W. Bush and put together an ownership group that would buy the Rangers in 1989. Major League Baseball has never figured out how to deal with television.)
It was George Steinbrenner who changed the game when he signed a 12-year deal worth nearly $500 million with Charles Dolan's Madison Square Garden Network in 1988. Dolan's network went from about 2.3 million to 7.5 million subscribers thanks to the Yankees deal and gave MSG a summer's worth of programming. Steinbrenner was able to use that money to spend on players and player development.
That cable TV deal put the Steinbrenner Yankees into a different economic class than the rest of Major League Baseball and MLB officials have spent the better part of two decades trying to devise a scheme that would somehow penalize first George Steinbrenner and his partners and now the Steinbrenner family for being in the right place at the right time and agreeing to the MSG deal.
Steinbrenner's Yankees lived up to the MSG agreement and then the team decided it would be so much better to own a network than have a rights deal with MSG. The result was the YES Network and virtually every cable TV subscriber in the tri-state area is paying for the YES Network whether they watch it or not because the YES Network made it to the basic expanded tier. There was one holdout for a while – Charles Dolan's Cablevision – but eventually YES was added to Dolan's MSOs.
Steinbrenner was just following a path blazed by Gulf and Western, an owner of Madison Square Garden back in the early 1970s. Gulf and Western established a hybrid sports and entertainment channel, the MSG Network in the formative days of cable TV networks.
Dolan started SportsChannel after the MSG Network debuted. There were other networks as well. In Philadelphia, there was PRISM, also a sports-entertainment hybrid and an entity that gave the Philadelphia Phillies some additional money in 1979 to sign Pete Rose. The Z-Channel in Los Angeles also played around with a sports-entertainment format.
The cable TV-sports teams nexus slowly took shape in the mid 1980s with virtually all of the teams in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball hooking up with small cable networks that planned to grown expediently. In some cases that happened and in other cases, the regional cable TV network struggled and was swallowed up by another entity.
Steinbrenner's Yankees just cashed checks in the heavily populated New York City area while the owners of the Montreal Expos failed. The Steinbrenners, the Wilpon Mets and Arte Moreno's Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are raking in cable TV cash.
Philadelphia, Boston and Seattle are doing quite well and neither of the Chicago teams is hurting financially from their cable TV deals. Kansas City, Cincinnati and Milwaukee are not sharing in the wealth.
In the next collective bargaining negotiations, the "have nots" will go after the Yankees' TV money and for those who are unaware of just where their cable TV fees go, it might be worth checking with their local municipalities and find out if there are any clauses in the municipality-MSO contract that addresses the issue of whether local subscribers be distributed in other areas.
Cowherd and Kirkjian never did tackle the cable TV revenue issue. Nobody ever does, nobody ever thinks about it in Major League Baseball because they are entitled to that money under United States laws. The negotiators probably have no idea why they get the cable TV money they just know it is there.
Major League Baseball wants "parity" which really means socialism where are the teams are on an even financial playing field. The small market teams have been after Yankees TV money for two decades and the only legitimate argument those teams have is that they are half the TV show and that you cannot have a game which has only one team.
It is understandable that those teams want to share stadium revenues from attendance but there is something wrong when the owners of the lesser revenue markets want Yankees cable TV money when that money is coming from people who are totally unaware that they cable TV fees are being sent to owners in a different area under the guise of revenue sharing. That money should stay in the metropolitan area.
Evan Weiner is an author, columnist, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Tuesday, 20 April 2010 23:12
BY EVAN WEINER
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/professional/major-league-baseballs-cable-tv-problem
COMMENTARY
It is not very often that anything that comes out of talk radio is worth a follow up discussion but a rare nugget of information came out of the Colin Cowherd show on New York's WEPN on Monday morning.
Cowherd was in a discussion with ESPN baseball reporter Tim Kirkjian about the economics of Major League Baseball and how that the discrepancy between "haves" (the Yankees) and "have nots" (Kansas City, Baltimore, Cleveland) was widening. Kirkjian agreed with the host and said Major League Baseball is trying to increase revenue sharing between the "haves" and have nots" but Major League Baseball would never have a salary cap because of the players union.
But, Kirkjian assured Cowherd that the owners and players will address the issue during the negotiations for the next Collective Bargaining Agreement which will begin presumably sometime in 2011 as the existing players/owners accord ends in December 2011.
There are a number of owners, men who live and die in their "real" businesses as free market capitalists, who would like to see more revenue sharing or wealth redistribution from the big market teams (i.e. the Yankees) to the game's financially weaker franchises (the soon to be renamed Florida Marlins, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Milwaukee and others) to level the financial playing field and allow teams like Cincinnati to bid on big ticket free agents.
The owners want more Major League Baseball socialism and that would start by forcing the Yankees franchise to pay an even larger percentage of "luxury" tax on the team's payroll than the Steinbrenner family does presently and those extra revenues would be sent to the most neediest in Major League Baseball.
Here is the rub with Major League Baseball financial parity plan. If baseball fans only were paying for a regional sports channel's bills like the YES Network or SNY, then Major League Baseball financial woes should be taken care of with baseball fans' money.
But, a lot of the dollars the Steinbrenner Yankees generate comes from people who have no interest in either the Yankees or Major League Baseball - about 95 percent of the subscribers - yet they have to pay for the channel anyway because of the 1984 Cable TV Act.
That leads to the following question.
Is it fair that cable money — which comes from non-interested subscribers from New Jersey, New York and Connecticut that should be going to the Yankees (and for that matter the Mets) and should stay in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut — ends up in the pocket of say the owners of the Florida Marlins, Kansas City Royals or the Baltimore Orioles?
The question of cable TV wealth distribution can be is easily answered.
In 1984, Congress passed the Cable TV Act, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan and assured the survival of ESPN, the Weather Channel, MTV, WTBS and CNN. Multiple System Operators (MSOs) were able to sign deals with cable networks and then bunch the networks together in a package and sell the package as one to cable subscribers.
Consumers had no say in what networks were thrown into the basic expanded tier but if they wanted a special channel, say CNN or CNN Headline News, they would also have to take ESPN, the Weather Channel and MTV. The legislation gave cable consumers three options. They could take the entire package, basic and basic expanded, just basic ... or quit cable.
ESPN would not be the business as it is today without federal government intervention. Major League Baseball teams were slowly moving games to cable TV in the 1970s and by the 1980s, all sorts of regional sports networks were popping up nationally.
The Boston Red Sox became a more than just a New England franchise because of exposure on WSBK, Channel 38. The Mets and Yankees were also up on the "bird" as both teams were seen beyond the New York area on WOR and WPIX. The Chicago Cubs became a national team when the Cubs ownership, the Tribune Company, went national with WGN and Ted Turner had his Atlanta Braves on WTBS.
Those teams started pocketing extra revenue and MSOs snapped up the stations has the games brought more subscribers.
(Major League Baseball denied the sale of the Texas Rangers from Eddie Chiles to Edwin Gaylord in 1986 and in 1988 because Gaylord planned to put Rangers games on KTVT, Channel 11 because there were too many games on national cable TV with the Braves, Mets, Yankees, Red Sox and Cubs. Eventually Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth worked with George W. Bush and put together an ownership group that would buy the Rangers in 1989. Major League Baseball has never figured out how to deal with television.)
It was George Steinbrenner who changed the game when he signed a 12-year deal worth nearly $500 million with Charles Dolan's Madison Square Garden Network in 1988. Dolan's network went from about 2.3 million to 7.5 million subscribers thanks to the Yankees deal and gave MSG a summer's worth of programming. Steinbrenner was able to use that money to spend on players and player development.
That cable TV deal put the Steinbrenner Yankees into a different economic class than the rest of Major League Baseball and MLB officials have spent the better part of two decades trying to devise a scheme that would somehow penalize first George Steinbrenner and his partners and now the Steinbrenner family for being in the right place at the right time and agreeing to the MSG deal.
Steinbrenner's Yankees lived up to the MSG agreement and then the team decided it would be so much better to own a network than have a rights deal with MSG. The result was the YES Network and virtually every cable TV subscriber in the tri-state area is paying for the YES Network whether they watch it or not because the YES Network made it to the basic expanded tier. There was one holdout for a while – Charles Dolan's Cablevision – but eventually YES was added to Dolan's MSOs.
Steinbrenner was just following a path blazed by Gulf and Western, an owner of Madison Square Garden back in the early 1970s. Gulf and Western established a hybrid sports and entertainment channel, the MSG Network in the formative days of cable TV networks.
Dolan started SportsChannel after the MSG Network debuted. There were other networks as well. In Philadelphia, there was PRISM, also a sports-entertainment hybrid and an entity that gave the Philadelphia Phillies some additional money in 1979 to sign Pete Rose. The Z-Channel in Los Angeles also played around with a sports-entertainment format.
The cable TV-sports teams nexus slowly took shape in the mid 1980s with virtually all of the teams in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball hooking up with small cable networks that planned to grown expediently. In some cases that happened and in other cases, the regional cable TV network struggled and was swallowed up by another entity.
Steinbrenner's Yankees just cashed checks in the heavily populated New York City area while the owners of the Montreal Expos failed. The Steinbrenners, the Wilpon Mets and Arte Moreno's Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim are raking in cable TV cash.
Philadelphia, Boston and Seattle are doing quite well and neither of the Chicago teams is hurting financially from their cable TV deals. Kansas City, Cincinnati and Milwaukee are not sharing in the wealth.
In the next collective bargaining negotiations, the "have nots" will go after the Yankees' TV money and for those who are unaware of just where their cable TV fees go, it might be worth checking with their local municipalities and find out if there are any clauses in the municipality-MSO contract that addresses the issue of whether local subscribers be distributed in other areas.
Cowherd and Kirkjian never did tackle the cable TV revenue issue. Nobody ever does, nobody ever thinks about it in Major League Baseball because they are entitled to that money under United States laws. The negotiators probably have no idea why they get the cable TV money they just know it is there.
Major League Baseball wants "parity" which really means socialism where are the teams are on an even financial playing field. The small market teams have been after Yankees TV money for two decades and the only legitimate argument those teams have is that they are half the TV show and that you cannot have a game which has only one team.
It is understandable that those teams want to share stadium revenues from attendance but there is something wrong when the owners of the lesser revenue markets want Yankees cable TV money when that money is coming from people who are totally unaware that they cable TV fees are being sent to owners in a different area under the guise of revenue sharing. That money should stay in the metropolitan area.
Evan Weiner is an author, columnist, radio-TV commentator and lecturer on "The Politics of Sports Business" and can be reached at evanjweiner@yahoo.com
Monday, January 11, 2010
Saturday's Miami-Cleveland AAFC rather Colts-Ravens NFL playoff game has interesting roots
Saturday's Miami-Cleveland AAFC rather Colts-Ravens NFL playoff game has interesting roots
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m1d11-Saturdays-MiamiCleveland-AAFC-rather-ColtsRavens-NFL-playoff-game-has-interesting-roots#
By Evan Weiner
January 11, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) --- There probably are not many people around who can recall the details of the first true match up between the Indianapolis Colts and the Baltimore Ravens back in 1946. The two teams did play but it was not in the National Football League nor was it in Indianapolis or Baltimore. The Miami Seahawks squad, now the Colts franchise, was shut out by the Cleveland Browns, now the Ravens franchise 34-0 in Cleveland in the first weekend of play of the new American Football Conference on a Friday night, September 6th. Miami also lost to Cleveland 44-0 on December 3 in a Tuesday night football game ay home.
The AAFC played a lot of Friday night, Sunday, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night games that year long before television dictated when games should be played and before Congress banned the NFL from competing on TV with high school and college games on Friday night, Saturday day and nights during the high school/college season.
Miami won just three of 14 AAFC contests that year while Cleveland was 12-2 and won the AAFC championship. Miami’s owner Harvey Hester gave up and returned the money losing franchise to the AAFC. The league replaced Miami with Baltimore. Cleveland was the AAFC powerhouse franchise and Paul Brown’s team won every AAFC championship game between 1946-49.
Brown’s Browns joined the NFL in 1950 along with Baltimore and the San Francisco 49ers following the league’s demise. Cleveland won the 1950 NFL championship beating the Los Angeles Rams.
Baltimore’s football history is very complicated to say the least. The original Colts franchise in the AAFC was terrible going 2-11-1 in 1947, 7-7 in 1948 and 1-11 in 1949. But somehow the NFL owners allowed Abraham Watner’s team into the league for the 1950 season even though some franchises like the Buffalo Bills to name one example had a stronger team and the financial wherewithal to survive in the NFL. Buffalo did not get an NFL team for a number of reasons including market size and climate.
Baltimore “invaded” George Preston Marshall’s Washington Redskins territory but even the mom and pop store NFL owners understood back in 1949 there was a way to do business and it was cash on the barrelhead, Watner gave Marshall $150,000 and Marshall gladly allowed Watner into the territory.
The 10-team NFL grew to 13-teams.
Watner gave the Colts back to the NFL after the 1950 season.
Long before Tex Schramm conceived the term America's Team for his Dallas Cowboys, Dallas was the home to the original and real America's Team, the Dallas Texans, now and the Indianapolis Colts.
Oddly enough, in 1952, the Dallas Texans "hosted" a Thanksgiving Day game. The game was played at the Rubber Bowl in Akron, Ohio as part of a morning high school-afternoon NFL game doubleheader.
To understand why the Colts really claim title to "America's Team," you need to brush up on NFL history. The 1952 Texas started out life in the All American Football Conference in 1947 as the Baltimore Colts, taking the place of the Miami Seahawks, who folded after playing one year in the AAFC. The Colts joined the NFL in 1950 but went belly-up, and a number of the Colts players went to New York in 1951, where the combined team played in Yankees Stadium as the New York Yankees.
The Texans rose from the ashes of this team, which folded after three years of struggling as both the New York Bulldogs and Yankees in both the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. The Bulldogs came to New York in 1949 after a five year unsuccessful run in Boston where the team as known as the Yanks. The Boston Yanks merged with the Brooklyn Tigers in 1945, the Tigers disbanded in 1946. The Dallas Texans had roots in Dayton, Ohio, Boston, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Hershey, Akron and Baltimore.
Dallas was a big high school and college football hotbed and should have been a good pro city. It did not take off. The Cotton Bowl was nearly empty; the Texans averaged nearly 15,000 people per game in their first three home contests, and the owners gave up after the fourth game. The NFL took over and the Texans moved first to Hershey, Penn. and then Akron, Oh.
Hall of Fame defensive tackle Artie Donovan, who grew up on Grand Concourse, said the 1950 Baltimore Colts were one of two of the worst NFL teams ever assembled. The 1952 Texans were the other. He should have known, as he played for both.
The 1950 Colts were 1-11, when that team folded, Donovan's contract was assigned to the Yankees in 1951, who went 1-9-2. In the Texans' 1952 training camp, Donovan got an inkling as to what he was about to encounter with the Texans when the owners hired Willie Garcia as their equipment manager in Kerrville, Texas. If a ball was passed or kicked into the high grass, the Texans sent Willie to get it, because he had only one leg. The players figured Willie stood a 1 in 2 chance to get a rattlesnake bite.
By Thanksgiving, the NFL moved the Texans daily operations to Hershey. The 0-9 Texans would meet the 4-5 Chicago Bears as the second half of a high school-pro doubleheader in Akron. The Texans were the home team.
"In the morning they had a high school football game and they must have had about 20,000 people in the stands. When we went to warm up, there must have been about 3,000 people in the stands," Donovan recalled in his thick Bronx accent in Towson, Mary. in the early 1990s, after David Letterman "discovered" him.
"Now (Coach) Jimmy Phelan was one of the greatest men I ever met in my life, but football had passed him by years before. In his speech before the game, he told us, 'we are going to dispense with the customary introductions and meet 'em individually.
"We went out and about eight guys climbed over the fence and started shaking people's hands. Then we played and we beat them."
How the Texans ended up in Hershey/Akron is easy to explain, according to the man known as Fatso." The team was supposed to have folded after the game that was supposed to rescue us against the Rams. We played them in the Cotton Bowl and they expected about 50,000 people and lo and behold, it hadn't rained in Texas for about a year and that day it stormed. About 10,000 people showed up and the team folded.
"We then went to Hershey. From Hershey, we went to play games in Akron, Philadelphia and Detroit. I'll tell ya what, it was a great experience."
The Texans never came close to winning another game, losing to the Eagles and Lions. Phelan was fired and only 13 Texans moved to Baltimore after Carroll Rosenbloom purchased the team and Baltimore purchased enough tickets after a ticket selling campaign.
Rosenbloom would keep the franchise until July 13, 1972. In a tax deal, Rosenbloom traded his ownership in the Baltimore Colts in exchange for Robert Irsay's Los Angeles Rams, a franchise that started out as the Cleveland Rams in 1937 and moved to LA in 1946. Within five years, Irsay was looking for a new stadium and ended up moving the Colts to Indianapolis under the cover of darkness on March 29, 1984.
It seemed appropriate given the history of the franchise. Rosenbloom also had a lot of nomad in him. In 1980, he moved his Los Angeles Rams to Anaheim. In 1995, Rosenbloom's window Georgia Frontiere took the Rams to St. Louis. Irsay began looking at relocating the Colts in the 1970s. He visited Jacksonville and wanted the city to rebuild the Gator Bowl. Jacksonville would be just that in the early 1990s. He visited Memphis, toyed with Phoenix and even thought about filling the vacancy at the Los Angeles Coliseum after Carroll Rosenbloom took an offer from Anaheim to move the Rams after the 1979 season.
In the middle of a March 29, 1984 night during a snow storm in Baltimore, Irsay brought in Mayflower moving vans to the club’s training facility and within Colts equipment and recordswere headed west on Interstate 70. As soon as the vans left Maryland, Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut announced the move. The Maryland Legislature was working on a bill that would permit the Colts to be seized by eminent domain.
"I was watching TV and happened to be flicking through and a station over in DC had picked it up first and they were talking about how one of their reliable sources told them the Colts were going to be moving that night and they had sent a camera crew over there and the guy on TV said hold it the guys from the Mayflower Vans were there," recalled Nesby Glasgow, a Colts defensive back. "We will be showing footage as soon as we get it. So it was about 10:30 and I kept it on there.
"Sure enough, they showed the trucks packing everything up. The stations in Baltimore didn't even get news of it until after the fact. So what I did was call a lot of my teammates and said we are going to have a new address. Instead of going to Baltimore, we are going to be in Indianapolis. Most of them didn't believe me."
Glasgow said it was a rainy/snowy night and his first thoughts were with the people who were losing their jobs as a result of Irsay's decision.
"They had stuff everywhere and the one thing I remember about it and that saddened me about the whole deal was a lot of the people who worked there, they had taken a lot of their personal thing and packed them up and shipped them out to Indianapolis," he said. "And I saw some of the ladies the next day and, or course, they were in tears. Some of them had worked with the organization more than 10 years. To have something like that happen and not know anything about it....
"The biggest thing that upset them that a lot of their personal belongings, things that were dear to them were taken. That's probably the one thing that bothered me most about the whole situation."
Glasgow became a member of the Colts the year before and was planning to become a big part of the community. When he signed, he asked the General Manager Ernie Accorsi if the team was planning to move.
"He assured me that he was not going anywhere and the team was going wasn't going anywhere," Glasgow stated. "He was halfway right, he stayed but the team went to Indy. We were shocked"
Glasgow and a couple of his teammates went to the Colts training facilities in Owing Mills and found their lockers were empty and the equipment was gone.
"The Colts used the cover of the night and got out of town, but that was the only way they could do it. If they waited until the daytime, I am sure they would have put an injunction on the team to prevent him from moving the team to Indianapolis. So he had to do it as quick as he possible could if he wanted to make that move," Glasgow said. "People couldn't stand the owner. They liked the Colts but they hated Robert Irsay. That's all you heard when I lived there for the one year.
"They wanted the team without the owner but they couldn't have it that way. It was his team and they had to accept him as owner. The community never really did that and never did anything to appease him and to make him feel like hey they wanted him to stay in town. So he made a business decision.
"I'm not going to sit here and fault him. Let's face it; Indianapolis gave him everything he wanted. The deal was so sweet; he couldn't afford to pass it up. He had to do what he had to do."
Glasgow was able to sell his townhouse by June and set up shop in Indianapolis. His teammates were not able to sell their properties that quickly. Irsay's family wasn’t happy with the terms of the deal by the mid-1990s and was rumored to be on the move to Cleveland or other cities before signing a new lease arrangement in Indianapolis.
Baltimore applied for an NFL expansion team in the early 1990s, but Commissioner Paul Tagliabue was not pushing to put a team back in the city and Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke liked having the territory to himself, just like George Preston Marshall back in the late 1940s. The league ultimately picked Charlotte as the league’s 29th franchise and Jacksonville as the 30th team in 1993 and left the Baltimore, St. Louis and Memphis’s bid on the table.
Cleveland’s owner Art Modell, who was in dire financial straits and was frustrated by Cleveland city officials lack of movement in building his Browns a new stadium and giving money for a new baseball stadium, a new arena and the Rock and Roll hall of Fame revisited Baltimore’s expansion proposal. In 1995, Modell agreed to terms with Maryland to move his Browns to Baltimore although he “agreed” to leave the Browns record book and colors behind in Cleveland.
Modell’s departure also spawned a threatened lawsuit from Cleveland elected officials. The NFL and Cleveland quickly came together on a stadium plan and the Browns “rejoined” the NFL in 1999 complete with Modell’s old colors and Modell’s record book.
In Baltimore and in Indianapolis there will be references to the Colts once playing in Baltimore but in the business and politics of the NFL and sports it is just the tip of the iceberg. Indianapolis’s roots go back to the Dayton Triangles, a team which started play in 1913 and joined the American Professional Football Association in 1920 when $100 down bought someone a professional football franchise. That league was renamed the National Football League in 1922.
In July 1930, Brooklyn’s William Dwyer purchased the Triangles and moved the team to Ebbets Field. The version of the Brooklyn Dodgers ended up in the AAFC in 1946. That franchise was not successful but out of the ashes of the AAFC Dodgers came an idea from the team’s general manager Branch Rickey in the late 1950s that was co-opted by a young Dallas businessman named Lamar Hunt. Rickey, who was a baseball executive who moonlighted in football, wanted to start a third major league in baseball that featured television revenue sharing. Hunt was uninterested in owning a Dallas-based Continental Baseball League franchise as he was pursuing an NFL franchise for the city. Hunt never got an NFL team and formed the American Football League which borrowed from Rickey’s Continental Baseball League business model.
National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle would use Rickey’s formula, which in NFL circles was “leaguethink,” to propel the league into becoming a mega business.
The background story of the Baltimore-Indianapolis match up started in 1946 in a different league in different cities but it illustrates how the NFL became the NFL through a series of happenstances rather than a solid business model.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3926-Business-of-Sports-Examiner~y2010m1d11-Saturdays-MiamiCleveland-AAFC-rather-ColtsRavens-NFL-playoff-game-has-interesting-roots#
By Evan Weiner
January 11, 2010
(New York, N. Y.) --- There probably are not many people around who can recall the details of the first true match up between the Indianapolis Colts and the Baltimore Ravens back in 1946. The two teams did play but it was not in the National Football League nor was it in Indianapolis or Baltimore. The Miami Seahawks squad, now the Colts franchise, was shut out by the Cleveland Browns, now the Ravens franchise 34-0 in Cleveland in the first weekend of play of the new American Football Conference on a Friday night, September 6th. Miami also lost to Cleveland 44-0 on December 3 in a Tuesday night football game ay home.
The AAFC played a lot of Friday night, Sunday, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night games that year long before television dictated when games should be played and before Congress banned the NFL from competing on TV with high school and college games on Friday night, Saturday day and nights during the high school/college season.
Miami won just three of 14 AAFC contests that year while Cleveland was 12-2 and won the AAFC championship. Miami’s owner Harvey Hester gave up and returned the money losing franchise to the AAFC. The league replaced Miami with Baltimore. Cleveland was the AAFC powerhouse franchise and Paul Brown’s team won every AAFC championship game between 1946-49.
Brown’s Browns joined the NFL in 1950 along with Baltimore and the San Francisco 49ers following the league’s demise. Cleveland won the 1950 NFL championship beating the Los Angeles Rams.
Baltimore’s football history is very complicated to say the least. The original Colts franchise in the AAFC was terrible going 2-11-1 in 1947, 7-7 in 1948 and 1-11 in 1949. But somehow the NFL owners allowed Abraham Watner’s team into the league for the 1950 season even though some franchises like the Buffalo Bills to name one example had a stronger team and the financial wherewithal to survive in the NFL. Buffalo did not get an NFL team for a number of reasons including market size and climate.
Baltimore “invaded” George Preston Marshall’s Washington Redskins territory but even the mom and pop store NFL owners understood back in 1949 there was a way to do business and it was cash on the barrelhead, Watner gave Marshall $150,000 and Marshall gladly allowed Watner into the territory.
The 10-team NFL grew to 13-teams.
Watner gave the Colts back to the NFL after the 1950 season.
Long before Tex Schramm conceived the term America's Team for his Dallas Cowboys, Dallas was the home to the original and real America's Team, the Dallas Texans, now and the Indianapolis Colts.
Oddly enough, in 1952, the Dallas Texans "hosted" a Thanksgiving Day game. The game was played at the Rubber Bowl in Akron, Ohio as part of a morning high school-afternoon NFL game doubleheader.
To understand why the Colts really claim title to "America's Team," you need to brush up on NFL history. The 1952 Texas started out life in the All American Football Conference in 1947 as the Baltimore Colts, taking the place of the Miami Seahawks, who folded after playing one year in the AAFC. The Colts joined the NFL in 1950 but went belly-up, and a number of the Colts players went to New York in 1951, where the combined team played in Yankees Stadium as the New York Yankees.
The Texans rose from the ashes of this team, which folded after three years of struggling as both the New York Bulldogs and Yankees in both the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. The Bulldogs came to New York in 1949 after a five year unsuccessful run in Boston where the team as known as the Yanks. The Boston Yanks merged with the Brooklyn Tigers in 1945, the Tigers disbanded in 1946. The Dallas Texans had roots in Dayton, Ohio, Boston, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Hershey, Akron and Baltimore.
Dallas was a big high school and college football hotbed and should have been a good pro city. It did not take off. The Cotton Bowl was nearly empty; the Texans averaged nearly 15,000 people per game in their first three home contests, and the owners gave up after the fourth game. The NFL took over and the Texans moved first to Hershey, Penn. and then Akron, Oh.
Hall of Fame defensive tackle Artie Donovan, who grew up on Grand Concourse, said the 1950 Baltimore Colts were one of two of the worst NFL teams ever assembled. The 1952 Texans were the other. He should have known, as he played for both.
The 1950 Colts were 1-11, when that team folded, Donovan's contract was assigned to the Yankees in 1951, who went 1-9-2. In the Texans' 1952 training camp, Donovan got an inkling as to what he was about to encounter with the Texans when the owners hired Willie Garcia as their equipment manager in Kerrville, Texas. If a ball was passed or kicked into the high grass, the Texans sent Willie to get it, because he had only one leg. The players figured Willie stood a 1 in 2 chance to get a rattlesnake bite.
By Thanksgiving, the NFL moved the Texans daily operations to Hershey. The 0-9 Texans would meet the 4-5 Chicago Bears as the second half of a high school-pro doubleheader in Akron. The Texans were the home team.
"In the morning they had a high school football game and they must have had about 20,000 people in the stands. When we went to warm up, there must have been about 3,000 people in the stands," Donovan recalled in his thick Bronx accent in Towson, Mary. in the early 1990s, after David Letterman "discovered" him.
"Now (Coach) Jimmy Phelan was one of the greatest men I ever met in my life, but football had passed him by years before. In his speech before the game, he told us, 'we are going to dispense with the customary introductions and meet 'em individually.
"We went out and about eight guys climbed over the fence and started shaking people's hands. Then we played and we beat them."
How the Texans ended up in Hershey/Akron is easy to explain, according to the man known as Fatso." The team was supposed to have folded after the game that was supposed to rescue us against the Rams. We played them in the Cotton Bowl and they expected about 50,000 people and lo and behold, it hadn't rained in Texas for about a year and that day it stormed. About 10,000 people showed up and the team folded.
"We then went to Hershey. From Hershey, we went to play games in Akron, Philadelphia and Detroit. I'll tell ya what, it was a great experience."
The Texans never came close to winning another game, losing to the Eagles and Lions. Phelan was fired and only 13 Texans moved to Baltimore after Carroll Rosenbloom purchased the team and Baltimore purchased enough tickets after a ticket selling campaign.
Rosenbloom would keep the franchise until July 13, 1972. In a tax deal, Rosenbloom traded his ownership in the Baltimore Colts in exchange for Robert Irsay's Los Angeles Rams, a franchise that started out as the Cleveland Rams in 1937 and moved to LA in 1946. Within five years, Irsay was looking for a new stadium and ended up moving the Colts to Indianapolis under the cover of darkness on March 29, 1984.
It seemed appropriate given the history of the franchise. Rosenbloom also had a lot of nomad in him. In 1980, he moved his Los Angeles Rams to Anaheim. In 1995, Rosenbloom's window Georgia Frontiere took the Rams to St. Louis. Irsay began looking at relocating the Colts in the 1970s. He visited Jacksonville and wanted the city to rebuild the Gator Bowl. Jacksonville would be just that in the early 1990s. He visited Memphis, toyed with Phoenix and even thought about filling the vacancy at the Los Angeles Coliseum after Carroll Rosenbloom took an offer from Anaheim to move the Rams after the 1979 season.
In the middle of a March 29, 1984 night during a snow storm in Baltimore, Irsay brought in Mayflower moving vans to the club’s training facility and within Colts equipment and recordswere headed west on Interstate 70. As soon as the vans left Maryland, Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut announced the move. The Maryland Legislature was working on a bill that would permit the Colts to be seized by eminent domain.
"I was watching TV and happened to be flicking through and a station over in DC had picked it up first and they were talking about how one of their reliable sources told them the Colts were going to be moving that night and they had sent a camera crew over there and the guy on TV said hold it the guys from the Mayflower Vans were there," recalled Nesby Glasgow, a Colts defensive back. "We will be showing footage as soon as we get it. So it was about 10:30 and I kept it on there.
"Sure enough, they showed the trucks packing everything up. The stations in Baltimore didn't even get news of it until after the fact. So what I did was call a lot of my teammates and said we are going to have a new address. Instead of going to Baltimore, we are going to be in Indianapolis. Most of them didn't believe me."
Glasgow said it was a rainy/snowy night and his first thoughts were with the people who were losing their jobs as a result of Irsay's decision.
"They had stuff everywhere and the one thing I remember about it and that saddened me about the whole deal was a lot of the people who worked there, they had taken a lot of their personal thing and packed them up and shipped them out to Indianapolis," he said. "And I saw some of the ladies the next day and, or course, they were in tears. Some of them had worked with the organization more than 10 years. To have something like that happen and not know anything about it....
"The biggest thing that upset them that a lot of their personal belongings, things that were dear to them were taken. That's probably the one thing that bothered me most about the whole situation."
Glasgow became a member of the Colts the year before and was planning to become a big part of the community. When he signed, he asked the General Manager Ernie Accorsi if the team was planning to move.
"He assured me that he was not going anywhere and the team was going wasn't going anywhere," Glasgow stated. "He was halfway right, he stayed but the team went to Indy. We were shocked"
Glasgow and a couple of his teammates went to the Colts training facilities in Owing Mills and found their lockers were empty and the equipment was gone.
"The Colts used the cover of the night and got out of town, but that was the only way they could do it. If they waited until the daytime, I am sure they would have put an injunction on the team to prevent him from moving the team to Indianapolis. So he had to do it as quick as he possible could if he wanted to make that move," Glasgow said. "People couldn't stand the owner. They liked the Colts but they hated Robert Irsay. That's all you heard when I lived there for the one year.
"They wanted the team without the owner but they couldn't have it that way. It was his team and they had to accept him as owner. The community never really did that and never did anything to appease him and to make him feel like hey they wanted him to stay in town. So he made a business decision.
"I'm not going to sit here and fault him. Let's face it; Indianapolis gave him everything he wanted. The deal was so sweet; he couldn't afford to pass it up. He had to do what he had to do."
Glasgow was able to sell his townhouse by June and set up shop in Indianapolis. His teammates were not able to sell their properties that quickly. Irsay's family wasn’t happy with the terms of the deal by the mid-1990s and was rumored to be on the move to Cleveland or other cities before signing a new lease arrangement in Indianapolis.
Baltimore applied for an NFL expansion team in the early 1990s, but Commissioner Paul Tagliabue was not pushing to put a team back in the city and Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke liked having the territory to himself, just like George Preston Marshall back in the late 1940s. The league ultimately picked Charlotte as the league’s 29th franchise and Jacksonville as the 30th team in 1993 and left the Baltimore, St. Louis and Memphis’s bid on the table.
Cleveland’s owner Art Modell, who was in dire financial straits and was frustrated by Cleveland city officials lack of movement in building his Browns a new stadium and giving money for a new baseball stadium, a new arena and the Rock and Roll hall of Fame revisited Baltimore’s expansion proposal. In 1995, Modell agreed to terms with Maryland to move his Browns to Baltimore although he “agreed” to leave the Browns record book and colors behind in Cleveland.
Modell’s departure also spawned a threatened lawsuit from Cleveland elected officials. The NFL and Cleveland quickly came together on a stadium plan and the Browns “rejoined” the NFL in 1999 complete with Modell’s old colors and Modell’s record book.
In Baltimore and in Indianapolis there will be references to the Colts once playing in Baltimore but in the business and politics of the NFL and sports it is just the tip of the iceberg. Indianapolis’s roots go back to the Dayton Triangles, a team which started play in 1913 and joined the American Professional Football Association in 1920 when $100 down bought someone a professional football franchise. That league was renamed the National Football League in 1922.
In July 1930, Brooklyn’s William Dwyer purchased the Triangles and moved the team to Ebbets Field. The version of the Brooklyn Dodgers ended up in the AAFC in 1946. That franchise was not successful but out of the ashes of the AAFC Dodgers came an idea from the team’s general manager Branch Rickey in the late 1950s that was co-opted by a young Dallas businessman named Lamar Hunt. Rickey, who was a baseball executive who moonlighted in football, wanted to start a third major league in baseball that featured television revenue sharing. Hunt was uninterested in owning a Dallas-based Continental Baseball League franchise as he was pursuing an NFL franchise for the city. Hunt never got an NFL team and formed the American Football League which borrowed from Rickey’s Continental Baseball League business model.
National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle would use Rickey’s formula, which in NFL circles was “leaguethink,” to propel the league into becoming a mega business.
The background story of the Baltimore-Indianapolis match up started in 1946 in a different league in different cities but it illustrates how the NFL became the NFL through a series of happenstances rather than a solid business model.
evanjweiner@yahoo.com
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