Red Sox owner John Henry was fined half a million bucks for slamming revenue sharing

Recently, when Hank Steinbrenner and Randy Levine starting slamming teams who took revenue sharing and referring to it as “welfare,” I suggested that Bud Selig may take issue with the comments. John Henry -- who has himself slammed revenue sharing -- admitted today that, yes, Bud Selig does take issue. And does so quite expensively:

Red Sox principal owner John Henry, in an interview on The Big Show, said that he was fined $500,000 by Major League Baseball for comments that he made about the sport’s current financial system. In late-2009, Henry told the Boston Globe that “seven chronically uncompetitive teams, five of whom have had baseball’s highest operating profits,” had received over $1 billion in revenue sharing money.

Harsh? Sure. But Bud Selig’s job is to keep the labor peace and keep the PR machine running smoothly. And as it has been pointed out in the past, the biggest threats to labor peace tend not to come from the owners battling the players, but the big owners battling the small owners. The last thing he needs or wants is for owners to do public battle over the system to which they agreed top be bound.

And while I’m guessing Selig’s fine doesn’t take this into account, part of that half million has to be the chutzpah tax. As in, it takes an awful lot of chutzpah for owners of the teams whose revenue and value have multiplied exponentially under this system to speak out as if the system were robbing them blind.