Frank McCourt bought the Los Angeles Dodgers for $430 million in 2004. Then he chopped his team up, poured kerosene all over it, torched it, and then peed on it while the flames rose higher and higher and he still realized a 500% appreciation of his asset in less than eight years.
Bernie Madoff was inventing investment returns from whole cloth and even he didn’t have the guts to do that. Would have been far too ridiculous. Meth dealers don’t get that kind of return. Maybe the cash doesn’t flow in as much as some owners would like, but they are all sitting on crazy-appreciating assets. Owning a baseball team is a license to print money, even if you haven’t a clue of what you’re doing.
So I guess what I’m saying is, the next time you hear the owner of a major league baseball team cry poor, the next time you hear an owner say that they can’t sign that player everyone likes, the next time you hear an owner say that the taxpayers need to give him a publicly-funded ballpark or else the world will end, please remember the $2.15 billion sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers and kindly call b.s. on that noise.