Nielsen Knuckleball

Derek Zumsteg

Part One -- What media ownership means for the teams.

It's no secret that the Yankees, held up as America's team, have been in low-key, long-term negotiations to sell out to the media company that buys the rights to broadcast their games. This shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone. After all, the Tribune Company owns the Cubs, Turner owns the Superstation and the Braves, and Fox owns the Dodgers. The Yankees will eventually be bought up, because they are barely more valuable as a broadcast property than the cost to buy them out.

I can see this happening in cable network meeting rooms across the country: a bunch of frighteningly white guys sit at a table.

"They're holding out for more money."

"We have to get those games. Otherwise, we're paying syndication rights for "Mama's Family," and we can shoot our network affiliation."

"We might as well just buy them."

Much laughter. The head guy chuckles and squiggles on his Palm Pilot. "I'll look into that," he says.

I don't have anything against companies owning teams, because baseball teams are like dysfunctional companies anyway, but I think this particular trend deserves extra scrutiny. For Fox, there's a great incentive to build a winner to build ratings, but even if you don't get the wins, you can just make wild personnel moves to generate press. Threaten your own coach. The more strangely Fox manages the Dodgers, the more press they create, and that's money for Fox Sports talk shows, the Fox News Channel...you see where I'm going.

In Chicago, the Tribune Co. has made a business out of selling a team just good enough to watch in a great stadium, sometimes competing for something. They've played fan favorites when those favorites were a huge burden on their team. In general, they've played to the crowds.

The Braves seemed to be an exception. Run solidly for years, they built around their superstars with a great farm system and instructors. Lately, though, they've seemed to be making moves more to remind people they're still around than to do much (the Boone trade, for instance, which accomplished scant good).

There are two things that can happen to competition as media companies take over more and more teams. The first is a sort of tacit mediocrity, where no one competes too hard for the title because it's in everyone's best interest if everyone's still in the race because it'll sell papers. I don't think this would last long, but then, you'd think OPEC wouldn't either. (I don't know where that came from.)

The other is total fiscal insanity. We've seen hints of this already, as LA and the Mets have signed players to ludicrous long-term contracts that can't possibly be justified in a few years in order to compete now, and when that doesn't work they raid vulnerable smaller teams for their veterans, and when that doesn't work, they'll fire their coaches and bring in Phil Jackson to run a triple-post pitching staff for $8M/year. In the coming years many of these teams will do anything to win, and if it means benching a $15M dog to play a new $7M scrub, then they'll do it.

And what I think will emerge from that is a bizarre stratification of media teams. We'll have the Orioles and like teams, unable to manage to pay for wins, spending their way to their last-season record, and there'll be the perennial wild card contenders, spending on the big-name free agents to keep their heads above water. Whoever manages to land a great GM may dominate the game as long as the Braves have and then some, reeling off 100-win seasons for a decade, their money pouring into international development and signing draft picks for amounts that scare the other teams with high picks.

I've written about the age of superteams before, but I think things are going to get even weirder soon, as media-owned teams unbalance themselves dizzy on money and players, write feature stories about the new sensation, and then get right back on the ride again with another $10M of profits from a film about their last turbulent season.

Next up: What about me? Where the fans'll go.

about the author

Derek Zumsteg is about to head to New York on vacation, where it's rumored that 52,000 Yankee fans are already waiting to beat him with pipes. Steer him away from the ambush at dmz@strikethree.com.