The Worst Team Money Can Buy, June Edition

We’re going to stay away from the obvious here in choosing this month’s award for The Worst Team Money Can Buy, which would mean selecting the Los Angeles Dodgers, because ripping this sorry lot is shooting fish in a barrel. But after Don Mattingly decided to call out two of his overpriced players – benching Andre Ethier and then Matt Kemp – the Dodgers did seem to get some semblance of a clue this past week, at least for the short term, as they won three of four against the equally moribund California Los Angeles Angels of Yucaipa Anaheim. Now, the Angels fooled everyone briefly with an 8-game winning streak, although it should have been taken with a grain of salt because they beat on the Mariners and the Kansas City Royals (or Réal Ciudad Kansas, as we call them around here, the football-style club name making them seem somehow less incompetent), but the Angels then promptly gagged vs. the Dodgers and are now struggling with the Astros. The Freeway Series in L.A. should have been dubbed The Battle of Who Could Care Less.

Mattingly will ultimately be a fall guy in L.A., I would bet, even though he has a lineup full of round holes and nothing but square pegs to work with. Last year’s astonishing deal with the Red Sox continues to pay little to no dividend, which is a shock to absolutely no one, as the Dodgers took on every bad, bloated contract the Bostons had in exchange for James Loney, a good-field-no-power 1B now plying his trade in Tampa Bay. The Red Sox just gave away all of their problems in one fell swoop and have laughed their way towards the top of the AL East this season. The deal was intended to be a bold foray by the new Dodgers ownership, a salvo across the bow to announce their arrival as big time players after coughing up $2.3 billion – yes, billion – for the franchise at auction. And when people spend money this badly, you wonder sometimes how it is that they ever accrued so much in the first place, given that their decision-making seems problematic.

How much does a bad team cost these days? Well, if you’re in the NBA, it’s $535 million, which is the final price for the June WTMCB nominee Sacramento Kings to be sold to a group of Bay Area investors. Now, I will make no bones about the fact that I’m a Seattle basketball fan, and have gone on and on about the Seattle v. Sacramento saga previously, and I think Seattle got jobbed a bit here owing to the continuing interference of that little troll named David Stern, but I am opposed in principle to franchise relocation, and I wish the folks in Sacramento good luck. Because they’re gonna need it, as the deal in place for the Kings is so bad on the Sacramento end that it seems almost doomed to be a failure.

Between the Seattle group’s deep pockets and the NBA’s need to practice some public extortion, they’ve driven up the cost of doing business so high that, in order to “save” the Kings, the group of investors on the Sacramento side a) spent $535m for a franchise valued at around $295m by Forbes; b) agreed not to take $18m in supplemental revenue sharing will still playing in Arco Sleep Train Arena for the foreseeable future; and c) agreed not to take any revenue sharing money at all once a new arena is built. Now, the Seattle group could do that, because they’re bazillionaires and the revenue streams would be there in the future in Seattle, which means they would be payees into the NBA's coffers. The Kings, meanwhile, take a minimum of $20m a year from the league in just to break already (and more likely more than that), and the realities of demographics suggest the Kings will NEVER be able to be a payee into that system. So this group who bought the Kings are losing money from the moment the ink dries on the Purchase Agreement, and will continue doing so until a new arena opens and probably long thereafter, since the economics of the game aren't likely to remain stagnant.

And the iffy arena deal in Sac claims it will only include $258m in public subsidy from parking revenues – which could turn out to be more like $340m or more – and that the building will be done in 2-3 years – which almost certainly be longer. And all that time the Kings will STILL be losing money. If the building takes 5-6 years, which is far more likely than not here in the Republic o’ California, you're talking about being down $100m off the top. Then again, they just $535m for the Kings, so maybe they have $100m to needlessly chuck down a rathole. But I just don't see how this team can hope to compete, other than to luck their way into a superstar in the draft lottery. And in chatting with frustrated Seattle basketball fans and theorizing with them about the subject of future NBA landscape shifts happening, I have argued that the most likely franchise to relocate in the future is still the Sacramento Kings, albeit 5-6 years from now. Not that it's much consolation to present-day Seattleites, of course, a lot of whom want to extend the middle finger in the direction of the NBA offices, and are right for feeling that way.

But that $535m in Sac is chump change compared to the $2.4 billion – yes, BILLION – that the taxpayers in Dade County will be ponying up over the next 40 years to pay off the bonds used to finance the modernist monstrosity that is Marlins Ballpark. Having bitten hook, line, and sinker for the claims from Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria that the franchise was going broke, the county along with the city of Miami cleared out a swath of Little Havana for this ballpark. The Marlins constant low payrolls and cheap ways masked the fact that they were, in fact, profiting wildly and basically pilfering baseball’s revenue sharing plans to do so, but Loria et. al strong armed and sweet talked their way into getting this deal shoved through the various wings of South Florida government, teaming up with politicos who were long on ambition and short on smarts.

It galls me somewhat that a snake oil salesman like Loria – who bought the Expos in Montréal, ran them into the ground, sold the club to MLB and bought the Marlins – managed to luck his way into winning a World Series a few years ago, thus adding some sort of credibility to his regime (an achievement which had EVERYTHING to do with the fact he brought Montréal’s outstanding baseball development staff with him to South Florida, and NOTHING to do with his acumen as an owner) while some truly decent and long-suffering franchises continue to go without.

This ballpark deal has already led to a mayoral recall, the Securities and Exchange Commission has an open investigation going, and the Marlins have returned to their cheap ways this season after an offseason fire sale that followed last year’s ill-advised free agent spending spree, fielding a team this season that is currently 15-41 and may go down as one of the worst the game has ever seen. The Fish most definitely rot from the head. The fans in Miami are in open revolt – the Marlins are singlehandedly responsible for 40% of the decline in MLB attendance so far this year. Loria has managed to blunt all the wonderful lifestyle advantages South Florida possesses in the process, as no free agent in their right mind will want anything to do with this toxic waste dump of a franchise. Meanwhile, Giancarlo Stanton, who is potentially one of the great players of his generation, can only count the days before he can leave.

The Marlins have pretty much poisoned the well for every other sports entity in the state when it comes to doing business. Already this year, the Florida state legislature has ignored a request from the Miami Dolphins for public assistance in remodeling their aging stadium, and then turned around and nixt a plan for property tax relief so as to finance remodeling of Daytona International Speedway – both of which are far more economically significant than the Marlins, mind you, since DIS generates something like $1.5 billion annually in economic benefit for Central Florida, while the Dolphins stadium frequently hosts Super Bowls and NCAA championships and such. (Good luck to the Tampa Bay Rays ever getting out that terrible dome in St. Petersburg, that's all I gotta say.) Now, perhaps something good will come out of this in the end, in that municipalities will stop shelling out enormous public subsidies for sports franchises so willingly. But in the meantime, there are plenty of good seats available in Miami to watch the Marlins, the Worst Team (Your Tax) Money Can Buy in June and pretty much every month for the next 39 years.