Baseball's Blues: It's Not Just the Dodgers

By Dave Zirin
Los Angeles Times
April 22, 2011

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-zirin-dodgers-20110422,0,4297920.story

Three years ago, I spoke at Fremont High School in
South-Central Los Angeles and asked a room of 50
teenagers how many of them had ever been inside Dodger
Stadium. One intrepid student raised his hand. To
understand why Major League Baseball had to seize the
storied franchise this week, look no further than this
moment. But it's a moment that could be replicated in
cities across the country.

The league takeover of the Los Angeles Dodgers is more
than just a comment on owner Frank McCourt's financial
problems or the McCourt divorce drama. It's more than a
black eye for the onetime franchise of Jackie Robinson,
Sandy Koufax and Fernando Valenzuela. It's more than a
comment on a club that from 1973 to 1986 led the major
leagues in attendance every year except one. It is a
commentary on the rotten economic state of Major League
Baseball.

As has been widely reported, attendance is
significantly down, but that's just the tip of the
iceberg. For years, owning a baseball team was like
having a license to print money. Public subsidies,
luxury boxes and cable deals filled the coffers of
owners. Ownership subsidized the lavish conspicuous
consumption of Frank and Jamie McCourt. It also created
enterprises that are overleveraged sinkholes dependent
on tax dollars while pricing out working-class fans.

The evidence isn't pretty, and it goes well beyond
Frank McCourt's needing a personal loan from Fox
Broadcasting to make the team's payroll. Last year, the
World Series-bound Texas Rangers were bought at a
bankruptcy bidders' auction in the middle of the
season. This season, the New York Mets - playing in the
game's largest market - started the year as a husk of a
franchise. The team allegedly had been used by owners
Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz as a cash register to invest
with disgraced financier Bernard Madoff. Now they're
being sued for every cent they have by the trustee for
Madoff's victims and are looking to unload a piece of
the franchise.

These are the most dramatic examples of an industrywide
squeeze as the old revenue streams, in these tight
economic times, are running dry.

Two years ago, Michigan's then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm
described automakers as "a healthcare provider that
happened to make cars." For a generation now, baseball
has been a highly leveraged real estate urban
development plan in which men happen to play a game.
Now, young fans are disconnected from the game, and a
franchise such as the Dodgers, with all its history and
dazzling brilliance, is in receivership. The L.A.
Chamber of Commerce has worried that in a worst-case
scenario, the team would leave Los Angeles. Although
this might provoke cheers in Brooklyn, it would be a
tragedy for the game.

MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and the league have no
answers about the future of the Dodgers or even
baseball in Los Angeles. They don't seem as if they
have any long-term answers at all. This unprecedented,
jarring response to simply seize the team can only be
read as a panic move. Like someone who just throws out
everything in the attic rather than sort through the
debris, it reads like a reactive response to
everything: the McCourt divorce, the inability of a
league owner to meet his payroll, questions about
security after the tragic near-fatal beating of a rival
team's fan on opening day and the need to bring in
showboating security specialist and former LAPD Chief
William J. Bratton.

It's long been said - whether about steroids,
realignment, the All-Star game - that Selig's nickname
is "Mr. Reaction." This will do nothing to allay that
criticism of his tenure.

The answer to the Dodgers' problems is a somewhat
simple one, although enacting it flies in the face of
the bylaws of Major League Baseball. The answer isn't
found in the glittering Hollywood Hills but in the
sparsely populated tundra of Green Bay, Wis. The NFL's
Green Bay Packers offer an alluring alternative that
couples winning with community connection. The Packers
have no embarrassing owners like the McCourts. In fact,
they have more than 112,000 owners.

The team is owned by the fans, the only publicly owned,
not-for-profit major professional team in the United
States. This has created a relationship between team
and community unlike any in the NFL. Not only has home
field been sold out for two decades, but during
snowstorms, the team puts out calls for volunteers to
help shovel and is never disappointed by the response.

Could this work in Los Angeles with the Dodgers? Would
the fans pony up to make sure that the franchise
doesn't leave the City of Angels? Would fan ownership
also translate into a deeper connection between the
city and the team?

Those are tantalizing questions. But without profound
public and political pressure, it's doubtful that
Angelenos will get the chance to find out. Considering
the generations of civic love bestowed on this team,
the people of Los Angeles certainly have a greater
claim on the team than Major League Baseball. But then
this is also a team founded on the original sin of the
Chavez Ravine land grab. Maybe the chickens have just
come home to roost.

[Dave Zirin is the author of "Bad Sports: How Owners
are Ruining the Games we Love" (Scribner) and just made
the new documentary "Not Just a Game." Receive his
column every week by emailing [log in to unmask]
Contact him at [log in to unmask]]

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