The Perils of Mercantilism in Sports Franchises

Yesterday Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig took one of the proudest franchises in Major League Baseball because the current owner, Frank McCourt, has driven it into the dumps.   The LA Dodgers have a distinguished tradition that runs back to Branch Rickey and through the O'Malley family.   In recent years, after the Fox people took it over for a few years, McCourt has run up several hundred million in debts for the club.   (I will admit that I am a Dodger fan so this has been especially troubling.)

The takeover presents several issues - from the mundane, who has financial control of the club; to the more complex - what infractions would allow the commissioner to step in and take over a club?   Dodger attendance is declining and when we went to a Dodger game last Spring - the stadium is showing its age.

Then there is the melodrama of the Sacramento Kings.   Unlike the Dodgers, this franchise has moved around a lot but has been in Sacramento for the past 25 years.  While it had some reasonable teams five or six years ago in recent years the Kings have competed with the Clippers and one or two other franchises as the laughingstock of the NBA.    The current owners, Gavin and Joe Maloof have tried for a couple of years to badger the city or the region into building them a new arena for a couple of hundred million.  When voters said no to tax financing, the Maloofs tried to run away to Anaheim.   Problem is a lot of the Kings fans understand something about contracts and have bedeviled the attempt to sneak away.   In recent weeks, Sacramento's mayor has done some interesting things to keep the Kings here.   A lot of the discussion has been to figure out how much public money would go into the new enterprise.

From my perspective there is very little evidence that sports franchises make a city.  The Bulls or White Sox or Cubs did not make Chicago.  And even with their pathetic record on getting to the World Series, a Cubs game is still a must do on the bucket list.  But somehow even with that data the owners of professional sports, through a combination of civic boosterism and extortion have been able to badger cities into funding their enterprises.  Cities need to "man up" when the owners come to them.

On the other side, if we are going to allow sports franchises to be limited, then there may be a reason to allow oversight of the franchises.   In the case of McCourt, I don't like the idea that Selig has taken the franchise over any more than I do that McCourt has tarnished a franchise which helped to define best practices in professional sports.