THE FILTHY RICH WANT GOLF, THE NFL AND THE NBA — AND FORGET ABOUT BASEBALL

Ever notice what owners spend on football ($6.05 billion) and basketball ($4 billion) and even to help the PGA Tour with $3 billion, but when someone buys the Orioles for $1.725 billion, we laugh

     Where else would we find controlling owners of the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, New York Mets and Milwaukee Brewers on a late January afternoon, with pitchers and catchers about to report? They were pouring money not into baseball teams but into … golf! They’ve collected $3 billion to help stabilize the PGA Tour, an idea I posed last year but it took a while for a geopolitical gathering.

     And yet, the Strategic Sports Group calls it a win for the players while allowing a co-investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. These men — Americans all the way, from John Henry and Tom Werner and Tom Ricketts and Steve Cohen and Mark Attanasio to NBA honchos to an NFL/Home Depot owner in Arthur Blank — are infusing their money and not getting rid of the Middle East headhunting issues in launching a for-profit enterprise called PGA Tour Enterprises.

     So CEO Jay Monahan took their money but didn’t dump LIV Golf, which just signed Jon Rahm to a $550 million contract. Meanwhile, fans of the Red Sox, Cubs and Mets wonder why their owners aren’t buying the offseason’s top free agents. You’ll find them on the 19th tee.

     “Today marks an important moment for the PGA Tour and fans of golf across the world," Monahan said. “By making PGA Tour members owners of their league, we strengthen the collective investment of our players in the success of the PGA Tour. Fans win when we all work to deliver the best in sports entertainment and return the focus to the incredible — and unmatched — competitive atmosphere created by our players, tournaments and partners. And partnering with SSG — a group with extensive experience and investment across sports, media and entertainment — will enhance our organization's ability to make the sport more rewarding for players, tournaments, fans and partners.”

     Repeat that, please. What?

     Said John Henry, the Red Sox owner and owner of the Fenway Sports Group: “Our enthusiasm for this new venture stems from a very deep respect for this remarkable game and a firm belief in the expansive growth potential of the PGA Tour. We are proud to partner with this historic institution and are eager to work with the PGA Tour and its many members to grow and strengthen the game of golf globally.”

     Who knew so many “baseball” men were into alternative interests? It shouldn’t surprise anyone watching the game’s economics, fueled by a devastating erosion of mass-media money when the NFL profits with $120 billion and the NBA is searching for a high portion of that. Just look at Las Vegas next week. They will rave and rhapsodize and chase the high life, two massive multinational corporations, the NFL and Taylor Swift Productions Inc. Any hedonism might involve the Kansas City Chiefs, who have used Swift to boost their brand value by $332 million. It’s absurd to even rank professional sports as empires anymore.

     In the latest Forbes list of the world’s most valuable teams, the NFL has 30 of the top 50 and six of the top eight. The Washington Commanders sold for $6.05 billion and the Denver Broncos for $4.65 billion, figures that will increase dramatically in future deals involving the media-and-gambling wave of 21st-century life. The only American league that comes close is the NBA, which has three of the top 15 in the Golden State Warriors, New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers. The Phoenix Suns were sold for $4 billion after Mark Cuban sold the Dallas Mavericks for more than $4 billion, while maintaining control of day-to-day basketball operations.

     Those 50 are worth close to $300 billion. The cutoff at No. 50 is $3.7 billion. So when the Baltimore Orioles are sold for $1.725 billion to David Rubenstein, it should turn commissioner Rob Manfred into a senseless loon when he speaks of baseball as such: “I am somewhere in between really and wildly optimistic about the upside. I think it begins with the fundamental quality of our game, that I do believe is the greatest game in the world. The fact of the matter is, there’s one national pastime. To me, what that phrase means is our game occupies a special place in American culture that gives you a bedrock for which you can always grow.”

     The bedrock from which decabillionaires look at sports is financial muscularity. They want the NFL. They want the NBA. They want prominent global soccer. They want Formula 1 teams. They do not want baseball, unless it’s an old-timer such as Rubenstein, a Baltimore native who told the Washington Post, “I am 74 years old, an age which is too young to be president of the United States but generally considered to be old enough for other things.”

     Baseball is a ninny in the wild ages. Only the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, who paid more than $1 billion for Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, make the top 25. The only other teams left in the top 48 are the Red Sox and Cubs, soon to fall out in their golfing daze. GQ had a compelling story on the hunger of super rich people who want to own teams, from Jeff Bezos on down. Said Gerry Cardinale, a player among the players: “Will Bezos buy an NFL team? Probably. He could buy the whole league if he wanted to … if it’s not gonna be the Silicon Valley guys. The next rung down in terms of their ability to pay are the hedge fund guys, the private-equity guys.”

     Think they’re trying to buy the Orioles or other wayward baseball franchises? Low rent. “It’s my world, the finance-investing-Wall-Street crowd,” Cardinale said. “It’s not gonna stop. Once capitalism gets involved, there is no moderating it. We are going into corporatized ownership. It’s an arms race. And it’s just gonna keep going. Capitalism will find its way into the cracks.”

     An arms race, he said.

     It blows me away when older writers ignore finances and treat baseball as, well, the national pastime. The Oakland Athletics might fold completely before they wind up in Las Vegas. The Tampa Bay Rays are still looking for a permanent stadium. The Chicago White Sox have fallen twice as low in value as Jerry Reinsdorf’s NBA team, the Bulls, and the 87-year-old owner is trying to swindle foolish politicians with swirl about a new South Loop stadium. Does anyone wonder who’s paying for it? Wouldn’t that be Question No. 1? Not Reinsdorf. Yet there was Manfred, telling a business website: “I’m supportive. A new facility could be a game-changer for the White Sox. … Jerry is very bullish on the location. That would be a great deal for the city of Chicago and the White Sox.”

     Somehow, Manfred believes Reinsdorf when he says the move would require “no new taxes.” Again, WHO IS PAYING? The last Forbes listing of the team’s value was $2.05 billion, somewhere in the middle of MLB despite a Chicago location, which isn’t too much higher than Swift’s value boost of the Chiefs. Is Reinsdorf offering the team to an outsider such as, oh, David Rubenstein? A lot of farts might want to save the dysfunctional, stadium-inept White Sox. But the Orioles went for only $1.725 billion, which isn’t much in 2024.

     It’s $1.3 billion less than what owners gave the PGA.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.