Welcome to Snyder's Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it's free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you'll get smarter, though. That's a money-back guarantee. Let's get to it.
I'm generally always game to talk about owners in Major League Baseball, but it's actually been a topic that has made the rounds a little bit lately. That means it's an easy time to discuss many of my thoughts and feelings while the bootlicking brigade is free to tell me how business-unsavvy I am and how little I understand about economics. It's a win-win, really.
The Soto sentiment
I recently saw a Yankees fan on social media say that he didn't want the Yankees to re-sign Juan Soto because it would cost too much. Now, I'm not suggesting he is a representative of a majority of Yankees fans or anything, but I also wouldn't focus on just one random fan. This is a common refrain in any fan base and it's just so unbelievably maddening.
Soto is about to finish in the top six of MVP voting for the fourth time and he hasn't even turned 26 years old. He's already won a World Series ring and he was one of the most important players on that team ... at age 20. He's having a career year this season and there's no reason to believe he'll age poorly with his skill set at the plate.
And for the love of all that is holy, do you have any idea how much money baseball teams have? Forbes currently lists Hal Steinbrenner's net worth at $1.5 billion. The Yankees are worth an estimated $7.1 billion. Why in the world would you be worried about a player getting too much money from an owner in a league with no salary cap?
I know the standard answer to that question and it's that it might prevent ownership from spending down the line. This isn't a reason to hope that your favorite team avoids signing Juan Freaking Soto. It's a reason to bring a torches-and-pitchforks crowd at ownership for not spending more to supplement the team in the future, should all of this come to pass.
The Yankees can absolutely afford re-signing Soto without it handcuffing any future spending at all. If they don't, they should be publicly shamed by fans and media alike. The only reason they'd avoid going huge would be that the Steinbrenner family now worries more about the bottom line than winning. And let's be clear about what that means. It doesn't mean they have to go into the red in order to sign Soto and win. It just means they might make less of a profit. Oh the horror!
You really are not obligated to worry about protecting the profits of billionaires.
Castellanos' feelings
Recently, Phillies outfielder Nick Castellanos said he'd like to see "severe consequences" for MLB owners who don't do a better job of trying to win more games for their fans. It was an outstanding sentiment and hopefully we keep getting players speaking out like this. Maybe fans will pick it up too. We need to continue to turn the tide against penny-pinching owners in the arena of public opinion.
Castellanos playing for the Phillies means he's gotten to see first-hand these last few years what one of the good ones looks like.
Middleton is one of the good ones
Phillies owner John Middleton recently made comments that he has "an obligation," to the fans and that "we are accountable to the fans and to the city."
This is beautiful and it's a shame it isn't more common. So many fans dedicate time and resources on their favorite team that is just crushes me to see how many owners couldn't possibly care less about them. The pie-in-a-sky hope is that we some day end up with 30 owners who view their approach to owning a major-league ballclub the exact same way. Unfortunately that will never happen.
I have no doubt that Steve Cohen of the Mets is going to eventually prove to be a great owner as well. There are others, too. There are also plenty of bad ones.
Nutting is not
There are more than a handful of awful owners in this sport, but I'll focus on Bob Nutting of the Pirates, if for no other reason than the fact that his fanciful narratives about the dangers of spending money seem to have worked on a large portion of that audience (in addition to the success of the Steelers and Penguins in salary cap leagues).
The other reason I'm using Nutting as a vehicle here is because recently Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made a comment online about the Pirates' ownership gig.
I'll only take issue with the part about standing in public and letting people yell at you. Nutting doesn't do that. He doesn't even listen to people online. He just rakes in the proceeds and doesn't give us any indication that he cares all too much about how the team on the field performs.
Oh sure, we'll hear on occasion about how he isn't making any money and how much of a chore it is to own a baseball team.
To that line of thinking, I have a simple suggestion: Sell the team.
The Royals are a small-market team. They were sold for $1 billion in 2019. The Orioles were sold for $1.725 billion earlier this year. The Nutting family bought the Pirates for $92 million in 1996. I'd say the return on investment is enough to justify cutting bait on the team right now, right?
That is, of course, unless they are making a ton of money by owning the team. Think about it. My hunch is Cuban's suggestion that the family is making around $25 million a year is low. Otherwise, again, why wouldn't they just sell? Is it really that much fun owning the Pittsburgh Pirates? And if it is, why don't you want to spend a little more in order to achieve more success? Winning is great! On an exponentially smaller scale, I'd certainly much rather spend more of my money for great experiences rather than hoard a little bit extra that I might never use.
The Brewers, though!
Surely by now all the small-market guardians out there are yelling about using a large-market Philadelphia owner contrasted against those destitute, small-market Pirates.
Let's talk here about the Brewers for a second, then, under owner Mark Attanasio.
If you ranked MLB teams by market size, the Pirates would be above the Orioles and Royals. The Brewers are in the smallest market in baseball (until the A's land in Las Vegas, where I'm sure owner John Fisher will start spending lavishly).
Anyway, the Brewers have been a very successful franchise lately. They are going to make the playoffs for the sixth time in the last seven seasons. They might even win the World Series this season. They extended Ryan Braun (twice, technically) during a career that saw him win MVP and help the Brewers snap a long playoff drought. They also gave Christian Yelich a long-term extension after his MVP season more recently.
Yelich's extension was nine years and $215 million. The biggest deal in Pirates' history is Bryan Reynolds' eight-year, $106.75 million.
In the last 10 years (we could go back further and it doesn't improve), the Pirates haven't ranked higher than 20th in player payroll. They haven't been higher than 27th since 2017, though. Since then, it goes 28th, 30th, 30th, 28th, 27th, 29th. In that same timeframe, the Brewers -- again, keep in mind they are the smallest-market team in MLB -- go 26th, 17th, 22nd, 22nd, 19th, 19th, 20th, 22nd.
The point, Pirates fans, is that it doesn't have to be this bad. It's Nutting, not the lack of a salary cap. I suppose you can argue that it's both, but the ownership being cheap part is the main problem. Again, look at the success of the Brewers. Or the Guardians. Or the Royals. Or the A's before the owner decided he was the real life embodiment of Rachel Phelps.
About those rebuttals ...
Invariably, any time I discuss my disdain for certain owners along with my wishes that everyone would be like the good ones, the Bootlicking Brigade comes around to yell at me. Here are a few of their greatest hits with my easy rebuttals.
So, Matt, you're telling billionaires how to spend their money?
No, I'm absolutely not. They aren't required to follow my wishes. They can do whatever they want with their teams, within the CBA rules. I'm also allowed to shame them for being cheap and dishonest. They can deal with those insults. They should be forced to deal with them a lot more often, in fact. Please join me.
They are billionaires and you are a loser sportswriter, so they obviously know more about business than you.
OK, so first off, most of these owners were born into wealth, so gimme a break on those. As I've said multiple times about the A's owner, being born to parents who founded The Gap isn't a skill. You all know the analogy about being born on third base and acting like you hit a triple. Well, he was born about a step off of home plate and struts around like he hit a bomb.
Secondly, yes, there are absolutely self-made billionaires in the club who were incredibly successful in life in a way I could only dream. Again, I'm not telling them how to use their money. I'm just wishing that more of them would run their baseball teams the way Middleton and a few others do. I don't think it's too much to ask that the majority of baseball fans should agree. We are their customers and can wish for better treatment.
If the owners spent a lot more on payroll, the prices would just transfer to the fans in ticket prices.
Nope. They can't do this outside basic demand. If the price point on tickets is set too high, the owners risk empty ballparks and then they can't make as much money as possible. If the ballparks fill up with high-priced tickets, well, that means there is high demand and, hey, welcome to capitalism.
The players make too much money as it is!
Welcome to capitalism.
And the owners make more.
When you watch a game from the stands, do you focus on the players or face the owner's suite? I've yet to see a person wearing a jersey of the owner at a game. The players have finite time before their joints tell them they are done playing this game, too. The owners aren't the ones putting their bodies on the line every night. The players are the talent. That's who we are paying to see. They deserve to be paid as such.
If you hate the owners, you must be a socialist.
Yes, I've heard this before and it's an embarrassing take. The best players should make the most money (meritocracy) and I simply want the owners to take care of their customer base, which is a basic tenet of any business model. Bad ownership hurts the enjoyment of the fans and that's just not acceptable to me. It's weird how many small-market fans get angry at me for getting angry at ownership for not better taking care of them as fans.
I'm on your side. I want the owners of your favorite teams to stop lying to you and instead try to give you a lot more fun memories. For now, my biggest hope is that I'll stop seeing fans worried about their favorite team signing a generationally great player and then I'll settle for seeing less caping for owners in general. And I really wish we could drive the Nuttings of the league out.