No one will be covering the battle after the World Series quite like Evan Drellich of The Athletic, who gives a full primer and overview of the upcoming MLB labor war with the MLBPA and the Orioles’ role in the battle of billionaires vs. millionaires that many expect to greatly impact the business of baseball immediately following the season, if not already in some markets.
Nestor Aparicio and Evan Drellich discuss the ongoing MLB labor negotiations, focusing on the potential implementation of a salary cap. Drellich explains the economic complexities, noting that players currently receive 54-55% of revenues, while the league values it at 40%. He highlights the league’s proposal to consolidate local and national TV rights, aiming to increase revenue. Drellich predicts that an agreement is unlikely before March and that missed games are possible. They also touch on the broader implications of the salary cap on competitive balance and the impact of cheating scandals, such as the Astros’ sign-stealing.
Introduction and Background
- Nestor Aparicio introduces the show, mentioning sponsors and upcoming events, including a crab cake tour.
- Nestor welcomes Evan Drellich, who has covered the business of baseball and previously worked as a beat reporter in Houston and Boston.
- Evan Drellich mentions his recent appearance on another podcast where crab cakes were discussed.
- Nestor and Evan reminisce about their previous interactions and Evan’s book on the Astros.
Discussion on Labor and Business of Baseball
- Nestor and Evan discuss the ongoing labor issues in MLB, mentioning the 1994 strike and the current negotiations.
- Evan explains the complexity of the salary cap issue and the potential economic impact on both players and owners.
- They discuss the role of Rob Manfred and the potential long-term effects of the negotiations on the league.
- Nestor reflects on the history of the Orioles and the broader context of the business of baseball.
Economic Factors and Revenue Models
- Evan explains the league’s proposal to consolidate local and national television rights to increase revenue.
- Nestor questions the sustainability of the current revenue models and the league’s ability to predict future revenue streams.
- They discuss the disparity in TV rights values among different teams and the potential impact on the salary cap negotiations.
- Evan highlights the league’s desire to capture more streaming revenue and the potential for streaming companies to become local broadcasters.
Competitive Balance and Player Proposals
- Evan outlines the players’ proposal for major changes to revenue sharing without a salary cap.
- Nestor and Evan discuss the economic and competitive balance arguments for and against a salary cap.
- Evan explains the players’ concerns about the revenue split and the potential impact of a salary cap on contract guarantees.
- They explore the league’s interest in a high revenue split as a potential compromise.
Historical Context and Ownership Changes
- Nestor reflects on the historical context of labor issues in baseball and the impact of ownership changes.
- Evan discusses the role of private equity in sports and the potential for increased franchise values with a salary cap.
- They talk about the challenges of maintaining community trust and the evolving nature of sports ownership.
- Nestor expresses skepticism about the current ownership group’s commitment to the community.
Impact of Cheating Scandals
- Nestor and Evan discuss the Astros’ cheating scandal and its impact on the league and fan perception.
- Evan explains the broader implications of cheating scandals and the cycles of forgiveness and punishment in sports.
- They reflect on the long-term effects of the Astros’ cheating on the team’s brand and the league’s reputation.
- Nestor shares his personal perspective on the ethical implications of cheating in sports.
Future Predictions and Outlook
- Evan shares his predictions for the labor negotiations, including the likelihood of missed games and the potential for a prolonged dispute.
- Nestor and Evan discuss the potential outcomes of the negotiations and the impact on the upcoming season.
- They reflect on the broader implications of the labor dispute for the league and its fans.
- Evan emphasizes the importance of understanding the economic and competitive balance arguments in the negotiations.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
- Nestor thanks Evan for his insights and encourages listeners to follow his work at The Athletic.
- Evan reiterates the complexity of the labor dispute and the potential for significant changes in the league.
- Nestor reflects on the historical context of labor issues in baseball and the ongoing challenges for the league.
- They conclude the discussion with a focus on the importance of understanding the business and economic factors driving the negotiations.
Nestor Aparicio 0:01
Welcome home. We are WNST. AM 1570 Tass of Baltimore. We are Baltimore positive. Continuing our unending baseball coverage that doesn’t include the Rush tour or like football that’s going on or anything else that’s happening. It’s all brought to you by friends at the Maryland Lottery. I’m doing the Maryland Crab Cake Tour on the 26th at Koco’s. Don’t go to Koco’s next week for crab cake. Vacation week, so I’m wearing this now. So you get in the mood for it, and so you miss it next week, like Chick Fil A on Sunday, and it’ll be back on the 11th. We’ll be there on the 26th. All brought to you by friends at GBMC and Farnan and Dermer. They are the comfort guys. I can’t say that I was comfortable when I saw this guy. I don’t know that we’ve ever met. I know that he’s done the show many times, but not recently, and not really in the new iteration of Baltimore Positive, since he wrote really an amazing book on the Astros. And we kind of have a guy here running things that was a part of the trash can banging era back in the day. But he covers the business of baseball. I will discuss trades with Tim Kirchen and and Buster Olney and certainly Luke and I and Alan are getting after it acostasis this week. But this is more about the business of baseball because Evan Drelik covers the business of baseball. But once was a beat reporter in Houston and in Boston, and I used to call you when the Red Sox played the Orioles back in the day when the last time the team was good, like a dozen years ago, before they put Chris Davis in the Hall of Fame here this week. How are you? And congratulations on your book. And I’m so sorry I haven’t had you on to discuss that. But we met on 103 degree blazing day, you know, in the Ashburn Alley during the All Star Game, and it’s a pleasure to have you back on, man.
Evan Drellich 1:34
Hey, thanks for having me, Nestor. Every show I do now, there’s some mention of crab cakes. I was on with there’s a fellow named John Orand, who’s a really great sports business reporter at Puck, and he had me on his podcast, and we were, and he’s, I believe, grew up in D.C. We were talking about where’s the best crab cake in Baltimore. So I’m just kind of happy that crab cakes are still part of the the progression for me because I was in Baltimore only a few weeks ago.
Nestor Aparicio 1:58
Yeah, I owe him a crab cake at Fadley’s, and he’s stolen my shtick on the internet, but he’s doing it backwards. He’s getting crab cakes from not in Maryland and sort of making fun of them, which is kind of cool. But like, I got other stuff I’m gonna eat when I’m in your hometown, you know. So, you know, you and I talked about labor, and we got into it for 30 seconds. And dude, I’m in my 35th year. We’re celebrating our 28th anniversary of Baltimore Positive, which isn’t even impressive when you consider it doesn’t cover the 94 strike, but I did before I had the station. I mean, we’re going back here where we’re talking about a third of a century ago. That feels like five minutes ago to me. You know, when Angelos and Steinbrenner and Don Fear and Marvin Miller’s still alive at that point, and like Mark Belanger’s barking, and you know, like literally, I lived through that. My last name’s Aparicio, and I’ve read the books, and I remember Kurt Schilling and Mike Messina and Tom Glavine. My God, it was 30 years ago, and here we are still with really, I call it the original sin, like Adam and Eve, like the the the bad apple, and saying they’ve never fixed this, and now it’s on mr. Rubenstein’s plate and not on Peter Angelos or Fredo’s plate. It’s not Bud Seelig anymore. It’s Manford who has spent his whole life kind of waiting for this off season. Right?
8
Evan Drellich 3:16
You could put it that way. Look, you know, the question is whether they actually get it done. It being the salary cap, and it’s it’s the question worth billions of dollars that all of us are trying to figure out as you head into next year. If the players remain steadfast that they don’t want to cap, are Rob Manfred and that group that, as you point out, a newer group of owners with some new faces and you know maybe in some ways different thinking. Are they going to take it as far as they would need to take it to get to the point that the players say, “Okay, we’ll stop fighting. We’ll give you your cap. And nobody quite knows how long that would be. There’s a lot of assumptions that that would be at least a year. You know, it’s a complicated thing on many, many levels. You’re talking about Rob Manford specifically. This might be his last negotiated CBA as commissioner, at least on the major league side. There’s now a minor league CBA to negotiate, but this might be his last major league deal if he follows through on what he says he’s going to do, which is retire in 2029, January of 2029. If he wants to come back, does he need to show a great effort and land a salary cap for the owners, but at this point he says he wants to retire. So, and there’s so many economic factors and push and pull with rights holders who are going to want the games to be on, and there’s there’s we we could spend a long time talking about it.
Nestor Aparicio 4:38
Well, you know, and we will because 35 years ago, when I began this, it’s where we began. Where the Orioles had all the money, the Blue Jays had a new stadium, and at that time, it was we’re going to build a stadium. That’s going to fix it. Ah, now we’re going to have club seats. Oh, that’s going to fix it. Now we’re going to have sign. No, we’re going to have a media. No, we’re going to have a television network. We’re going to have a regional sports network. We’re going to have a BMA. And none of that, I would say, fixed it. It got a lot of people rich. It you know helped the Angelos people cash out here, and the Rubenstein and Araghetti people are trying to figure out what they own and what they can’t own, which is the battery you know model in Atlanta and how where this revenue comes from. And you know I’ll just say this, Ev, I the media part of this and that model, I have not met anyone from Rob Manford down who can explain it to me. And I’ve owned an FCC license for three decades and sold media for a living, and sort of try to understand cord cutting and all of the subs and all of the things that I have conversations about around here. I haven’t had anybody can explain to me where they think their revenue model is. So if they go to the players’ association, if they went to Marvin Miller and Don Fear, and they’re alive and well, and say, “All right, we have this, but they’ve always lied about their revenue and their revenue streams. They’ve always undercut it. They’ve always undercut each other, which is obvious when you have the Marlins and the Dodgers in the same stratosphere at TEDx, right? But the media part of this, I don’t know where the future is. They always had a predictive thing to say. Give us a stadium, we can make money. Sure, give us club level. You know, they on and on and on. Masson came here. Mister Angelo said, “We’ll get rich. We’ll be great. Okay, I don’t know where five years from now. What is the model for them to? Where is this money coming from? This revenue, as they see it.
Evan Drellich 6:18
I’d be a very wealthy man if I could tell you with full confidence what it’s going to look like in in five years, I should probably be doing something else. But you know, at the top level here, what the league and Rod Manford wants to do is make instead of this division between local and national television rights, basically make it all national, and so have the Dodgers and and the Rays and the Yankees and the Marlins all put their local TV money into one pot and then share that pot equally? That’s a very big change from the present moment, right? The Dodger TV writers are worth many times more than the Marlins TV writers. 10x is what
Nestor Aparicio 6:56
I said. In some cases, it’s it’s 1,000,000,000x because some of these teams folded shop literally, right? And I mean, they had teams that did not and do not get their games on top. It’s I don’t even know what to make of it. Now they’re going to go to war over it. That’s I just feels like have and have not was the story at Lords of the Realm. It feels it’s going to be that way again, like where the players are going to say, “Why don’t you guys get your house in order and figure out what you’re doing first?
Evan Drellich 7:21
Well, that is the crux of it. Is is the players in their own proposal? So the league proposes a cap. The players have made their own proposal. The players are also proposing major changes to revenue sharing between owners. They’re just doing it without the upper salary limitation. The owners don’t want that. They they don’t want to just change revenue sharing without getting this other thing that gives them this great economic gain, but you know, to your question about where does this go in for TV rights, the general idea here is that you take more games national, you’ll make more money because the Amazons and the Peacocks and Netflix of the world they want to have as much live sports programming as they can, makes people sign up, blah blah blah blah blah. But you know, right now most teams have about you know 145 local games, something like that. And Rob Manfred wants to drop that number and say, all right, so so your local broadcaster is going to get whatever. I don’t know, it’s 130, whatever the number is, it’s lower. And those the difference, you know, those whatever 15 additional gains. Now that gets divided up between this streaming company and that streaming company. So it’s it’s a transition toward just more national media. But still, you’ve baseball has so much inventory. You got to have a place to put it, and that’s kind of the other piece of it. Where okay, if a Netflix or an Amazon or one of these major streaming companies wants to be the local home for as many markets as possible. MLB right now has the rights to about half the league. I think it’s 14 teams that are using MLB as a broadcaster. Okay, so you know, in a couple years, could MLB sell 20 teams to Netflix, and you know, Netflix can be your local home, so let’s let’s just say the Orioles were a part of this. Okay, in Baltimore, you want to watch your Orioles, your your 130 Orioles games, you got to have Netflix, and so that that seems to be where they’re trying to take it is is just to capture as much of that streaming money as possible, both in the national and local Levels, but you know where exactly it ends up in five years. I don’t know, Nestor.
Nestor Aparicio 9:27
I keep thinking about the. By the way, Evan Drellick is our guest, longtime baseball insider writer. Doesn’t cover teams now. Not on the beat anymore. Really, this is its own beat, which is the business of baseball. Which I love flying into this world with with you and Eric Fisher and oftentimes with you know other people that for 20 years I’ve had the Masson Angelos Nationals. Just why does our team suck? People came up to me and asked me that, and I go back to like when we couldn’t keep Reggie Jackson and we couldn’t keep you know players back in the 70s, and then. Camden Yards, and then you know we we’re buying Robbie Alomar and Jimmy Key and you know players, but literally this century where it’s become incredibly imbalanced again, and and the look the baseball nerds will sit up and say, well, there’s been 31 teams that have made the playoffs to do then that many worlds, but bulljah the Dodgers and the Yankees wake up every year in the playoffs and it’s a broken system, and that really is, I say, the Garden Garden of Eden. The original sin is that the NBA went to war to figure out, and the Wizards haven’t figured it out yet, but the Knicks did how to win the NHL, which was always sort of a mess, and the Canadian dollar and all of that lost a year. Football, it’s amazing to me that when we have I have a football guy like you on that really knows football business, it’s they’re getting the 18th game, they’re getting international play, they’re getting anything they want. The league gets anything they want. They walk all over the union, and here the salary cap, which to me as a fan, and this isn’t an Aparicio thing, a business owner thing, this is just like what I think would be good for them for the good of the game, as Bowie Kuhn would say, or Peter Uberoff. Having teams have a fair fight is what makes the NFL the NFL to me, and it’s what’s made the NFL great. It’s what’s made it great for betting. It’s what’s made it great for fans. It’s what’s made it great that Lamar Jackson doesn’t feel like he’s leaving here right now, and Ray Lewis never did, and that happened for John Elway and a lot of other places where you get to build that, where Brooks Robinson built that here. I I feel like baseball with the salary cap. The existential problem is the war and how much they hated each other 60 years ago. I don’t know how much they hate each other, how they can gin that up, but I don’t know how they can make this good for the players. And I keep wondering, like, okay, if Manford, if this is your destiny that you’re going to get this salary cap, what is the formula that players would find? Current players, not Mark Belander and Andy Mastersmith, just where they are now that they can get away with this and finally jump the shark and get up with everybody else. So literally, my little Orioles and the Pirates, and that there would be something that felt like what the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants have, which is you don’t think of them as whoever the Packers grow, the Giants are going to sign, which is baseball system for from the beginning, and it’s not a good system.
Evan Drellich 12:24
Yeah, there you know there’s kind of two main buckets to talk about here. There’s the economic effects of a salary cap, and there’s the competitive balance arguments around a salary cap. There are, and you can debate how much crossover between them, but but largely, I find it’s usually productive to talk about them separately, okay. So, so the question about what could the league do to entice players to take a cap? The player position, the union position, as you point out, for decades has been we don’t want a cap, and they have a very, very long list of reasons why it makes contracts in the union’s eyes no longer guaranteed. Why is that? In a salary cap system, you have a revenue split, a predetermined percentage of money that goes to both the players and the owners. And at the end of every year, and you see this in the other sports leagues, you see this in hockey, you see it in basketball. You have to make good on that. And so, if the if the league has lost money that year, it’s below projections. Well, you’re going to give money back if you’re the player. So, and I’m pointing this out as one reason the players really don’t want it. So, is there anything that the league could do that could convince players? Theoretically, if you made that revenue split so high that it was kind of clearly better to players in in the aggregate for what they’re making now, and the the union says they’re pulling in about 54, 55% of overall revenues right now, including amateurs. And it’s a big fight over whether amateurs should be included in that counting.
8Nestor Aparicio 13:53
Is there any dispute about the numbers? By the way, okay, the unions are saying it’s 54% but you’re screwing us. That’s what we can prove. It’s 54% right? The
Evan Drellich 14:03
league likes to say it’s 40. It’s closer to 47 or 48. Fair enough. The union’s beef with that is that it is not counting when the league says that amateur signing bonuses. So the amount of money that gets paid to players in the draft and the international signing period-that’s hundreds of millions of dollars that does not get get counted, and the best players
Nestor Aparicio 14:24
in the world in in most cases, right?
Evan Drellich 14:26
Oh, sure, the best young players, anyway. You know, these are the players of
Nestor Aparicio 14:30
impact.
Evan Drellich 14:31
Yeah, that are that are coming into the into the system. So, is there something the league could do to to make it compelling to the players? You know the the the interesting question here is whether they managed to reach that threshold. But my my feeling is that what the league would have to give would be such a high percentage revenue split that they would no longer have interest in doing it, and it goes back to the bottom line. Reality that that the baseball players have long ago identified, which is that they think their economic situation is better outside of a cap system. And look, the owners wouldn’t want it if that was not the case. If the if if the economic advantage for owners was to be in the current system, they would want to stay in the current system. They want it because it is better for them, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And dude, we’re
Nestor Aparicio 15:26
on the third generation of them getting their ass kicked in 1973 because of everything that was stated in Lords of the Realm and the sort of feudal system that they had here, where Brooks Robinson, Louis Aparicio, and Frank Robinson all had to run in and beg a beer brewer for money because they couldn’t. They had no other way to work. Literally, they had no other way to perform their vocation in in a monopoly, in a legalized monopoly with antitrust. Right?
8Evan Drellich 15:55
Sure. And look, look in in the current moment. If the owners found right, you’re you’re pointing out that the battles are not the same today. That everybody. Yeah, I’m crying for Pub
Nestor Aparicio 16:04
Powell having to get a job at the brewery in the off season 60 years ago, where like I’m in front of Adley Ruchman five minutes before I saw you and treats me like a rented mule, and I’m thinking, well, he’s got 26 million dollars. Of course, he yeah, he has more money than Cal Ripken ever had when I stood next to Cal, covering him for 15 years. So the money Pete Alonso got $155 million in 20 minutes ago couldn’t run a rundown. So like I, we are dealing with have a lot and have nothing, and a media much to our chagrin, you and I, that does not cover this, you know, in a in a fundamentally sound way overall, so that the fans, the fans are going to wind up taking some side in this without even understanding it, because it’s really hard to understand. And it’s to your point when you saw me and Philly a couple weeks ago, it’s going to become the only thing we really talk about about baseball once baseball shuts down because this is this is my third or fourth rodeo with this, and this feels uglier than all the rest for a lot of reasons. Just because I don’t know where that next bucket of revenue is coming from, and there’s a lot of nouveau riche business David Rubenstein types that aren’t predictable. But the one thing I can predict is Bryce Harper and Verlander and whatever Gunner Henderson they attract, whatever the ball players do. It’s going to be in the same line if they’re going to get hand handed the Marvin Miller playbook and told they have a strike fund and they’re going to be okay and they’re going to fight like hell. That’s as I see it, and that’s where Sarasota gets swept up in this, and Phoenix and spring training and opening day and these television networks and the Rubensteins and the Araghettis. I don’t know where the fire in their belly is in the way that maybe it once was for the lords of the realm, who are now all gone. These guys just want to do good business, but I’m not even sure what good business is at this point. If good business is equity, competitive balance. Private equity
Evan Drellich 17:57
has arrived in the in in the sport and and other sports leagues and franchise values. The the the gigantic care here. If you ask me where the money is coming, besides media, which when MLB redoes its national media deals, they’re going to make more money than currently. Right now, they make 2 billion and change a year from their national media contracts. The NBA is at 7 billion. The NFL is you know 10 plus. They’re going to they’re going to get closer to the NBA. Whether they get 7 billion a year on average, we’ll see. But they’re going to make more money like that instantly. And then the other piece of it is the revenues, the franchises in other sports, the NBA, the NFL, they sell for a larger multiple of revenue than they do in baseball. An NBA team might go for 10 times its its annual revenue, or or 11 times or 12 times in baseball, it’s like 4567, somewhere in there, depending on the franchise. The owners want to increase that. You get a cap. You increase that instantly. You have cap labor costs, and well, now you you all of a sudden when you go to sell your franchise, you’re making a lot more money than you were before, and you have all these private equity groups now that are venturing into sports. That’s what they want. They want to be able to sell to PE groups at a better revenue multiple at the moment. So you know, there’s people, there’s eager buyers, and what some of these eager buyers want. What what what does PE need? It needs a return on investment, ROI, at some point. So, you know, there is money. There is plenty of money to be made, and a system that that fixes your labor cost is a particularly valuable system when you’re trying to market your sport to all these outside investors, like the Carlyle Group, from which David Rubenstein comes.
Nestor Aparicio 19:44
Evan Trelich is here. He writes books on labor and ownership, and he offered his wisdom to me through the Athletic, and of course wrote a great, great book. Fair say, and I’ve only got you for another five or 10 minutes. I want to talk about your book a little bit because of the tentacles to a lot. And not specifically whether he’s the buyer, the seller, or the right guy, or he’s healed the Orioles or not. I would have fired him a year and a half ago when he fired the manager and Id from the media for four days and showed up in the Milwaukee dugout. But for me, with the Houston scandal and scandal in general, right? Like I was in the locker with Sosin McGuire back when you were younger, and you know, and remember the Android Steen diet, like all of that. I covered Brady Anderson, like all of the steroid era and the cheating and the scandal and all of that. Your book really, it didn’t unearth it. It unearthed the why behind all the trash can banging and who’s in on it and all of that. And now we put a guy in the Hall of Fame the other day with it, which just continues to be, you know, make me hold my nose. Cynicism in general for me, 35 years into being an Aparicio who had my trespass taken away 20 years ago, who has a Caucasian employee whose credential that I’m not. I look at all of it, and I’m very cynical about a lot of it. And I wish I weren’t. I thought the new ownership group here would bring something that would feel like fresh air. And it’s other than the dude making a bobblehead of himself and writing his own book on how much he knows about sports ownership when they’re about to go on strike or walk out or lockout, whatever this is going to be. The cynicism that anyone Tim Kerchin was on this week. I have Buster on. Like all of us that have been at this a while, even Tom Verducci was just no one feels good about this labor thing, and I think no one feels good about the people doing it. I don’t feel good about any part of it or the people doing it. I feel like it’s this is baseball. To your point, you just went through the the multiples and the Rubenstein groups and the car. Where are the people that like baseball?
Evan Drellich 21:48
Yeah, yeah. I think they’re still around. You know, they’re they’re in the stands. I think even some of the people who who own and operate these teams would would tell you they like baseball. But I I think to your point, the feeling that baseball is a business, that reality has has taken over, and you know it’s interesting to argue how is that different than 30 years ago. And one of the things that comes to mind immediately, Bud Seelig, the former commissioner, was very good at I think always treating it like a business, but making you feel otherwise, you know, he he had that kind of avuncular way about him. He’d get up there,
Nestor Aparicio 22:25
car salesman, literally a car salesman. Come on in, come on in. We’re gonna, you’re gonna buy from me today. You’re gonna buy tomorrow. Like that was a that totally was American Eisenhower World War Two. I mean, it was a different kind of philosophy than how do we get caps into the seats, and how much per beer can we, you know? But but but with the calculators, that he he wasn’t that he had a different feel about him. He really did,
Evan Drellich 22:48
right? But whether in action, whether whether that feel is just something a vibe that he gave to people that people ate up, and you know how different was it really behind the scenes? I think what is true in modern business generally compared to the ’90s and and you know even the early ’00s when Bud was still around in baseball, everything is now more hyper focused on efficiency. Technology has helped enable that. Even Moneyball, you know that that that great concept. If you want to, I say great in the sense of very large and expansive, which originates in baseball, has taken hold in all sorts of industries. Everybody is pushing for more efficiency now. But Manfred was asked at the All Star game about whether he still believes baseball has a is a social institution, has a social responsibility, and and this is something Bud Seelig used to say a lot. Baseball’s a social institution, and I’m paraphrasing, but but the commissioner’s answer was basically yes, but it’s a business. We do think we have a social responsibility, and also we’re a business. And I actually, in a weird way, appreciate Rob Manfred in the sense that I think he does a little bit less to try to hide that fact. I think with Bud, it was always you know it’s about baseball and the sound of the bat and the green grass and the hot dogs. And I think Rob Manfred is actually a little bit more direct in what the truth is, which is that like any other multi-billion-dollar industry, they are focused on revenues, growing profit, blah blah blah blah blah. That is the world we live in, and what what is more American than that, Nestor?
8Nestor Aparicio 24:26
Evan Drellick is here. He writes books and writes great great pieces at the Athletic, where you can follow his work, and you will be once the menor hits the fan in labor here. Once we get into the off season of all of this, you know, I would just say all of these years later, when it’s billionaires and millionaires, and that goes back to me being 13 years old in the summer ’81, ’82, when my dad canceled the sporting news, pissed off that you got mad at the sporting news and canceled it because there were no box scores in it anymore. So that’s how you know I go back to this in all the years in. In on the radio and sitting through strikes and sitting through the I was on the air oh my fifth year when we had the the no World Series right and we didn’t have a football team here either but I would just say this and and I’ve said this out loud and I’ve written this in my books on championships with Purple Rain 125 years ago now Purple Rain 213 years ago and I was the whore here, pimping out for expansion team when Charlotte got one and Jacksonville got one, and then we had to go steal a football team. And when we stole the team, the whole notion. And David Modell died, God rest his soul, never having lied to me. But also, like, really understood, and it wasn’t bullshit. Like, if you knew David, you knew that they did it wrong in Cleveland, and they were going to be a community organization in Baltimore. They were going to have tailgating. They were going to involve the community, the roosts, the local people, the local media, the fans, the long-suffering Colts people, the Colts player. They was going to be inclusive to the community because it’s a community trust. Yeah, we’re charging you for PSLs. Yeah, you’re paying for the stadium. Yeah, you’re going to pay for everything. That’s cool. Won a Super Bowl. Also, you know, had Ray Lewis in in a jumpsuit, right? So we had the good and the bad through all of that. But the Ravens won the soul of the city at a time when Angelo stripped Baltimore off the name and just called the Orioles the Orioles to try to keep DC. Sold DC down the river all the way through took all the money 21 years ago now we still haven’t won playoff games around here and the for me the the whole notion of a community trust Bashadi bought this thing from Modell and said it’s a community trust he now lives in Florida half the time and is on a boat doesn’t spend any time here. The team doesn’t act like a community team at all when they’re playing in Brazil. And the baseball team, Brooks to Ripken, was community, community, community. Were the local team and all that. That really the feel of all of that. They can’t sell that with any authenticity anymore. Even if they put Palmer and Pub Pal, Cal Ripken in front of it, it just doesn’t play that way, and it doesn’t feel that way. Nor does your local university, in general sense, either anymore. But I think the basis of baseball, specifically, regionally and locally, was your hometown team, and now we’re that’s gone, and they have to find something else to sell. And I think gambling is-they thought that was going to be the bigger revenue stream, and I haven’t even mentioned that. We’re half an hour into that, Ev.
Evan Drellich 27:28
The the thing that owners in sports can leverage, and and the baseball lockout is a great example of this. Fans love their teams; they want to believe that they these are community trusts and public trusts, and that it’s being done for some sort of greater good. And that’s not to say that there’s nothing benevolent that’s done by a major league baseball team. Certainly, there’s a lot of charity work. You don’t want to discount the good things that do exist. I think that’s fair, but I think the objective reality is that again, these are businesses. They want your money. They want money, and what the owners know is that kind of no matter what they do. I don’t want to say no matter anything, but they can push fans even as far potentially as away from from months of the sport, if they shut it down for a time in 2027, and they will still expect fans to show up, it is the the brand loyalty of fandom that makes these franchises in part so valuable and emboldens the owners to kind of do what they want to do. What’s stopping them if if they look around and go, you know what, we can miss two months and these guys will come running back. They’ll be so desperate to see their favorite, to see Pete Alonzo go down the list. Well, who’s who’s going to tell them no? You know, it it it everybody votes with their dollar, and as long as people keep buying $200 jerseys and 1516, $20 beers and all that, and people love it. People want to see their baseball team. Why wouldn’t they? But that that’s the crux of it. Is it? It kind of doesn’t matter what they actually do, as long as people are buying it.
Nestor Aparicio 29:20
I think maybe that’s the whole thesis of winning fixes everything. How baseball’s brightest mind created sports’s biggest mess, and we have people here running our team years later, making a million, $2 million a year, running teams. To your point, they cheated, they won. F you. So what? Give us our ring. Fans come back. Everyone I know, from John Mcclane down to my cousin in Katy, Texas, has their Astros out, and they they claim cheat. And you know my Venezuelan background would say, “You’re not gonna, you’re not gonna convince me. My Venezuelan brother at second base cheated. They all cheated. You wrote, I mean, like you wrote a tomb on it. Doesn’t matter. There’s still a line to get in down there. They’ve been back to the world. Like doesn’t matter, right? Really?
Evan Drellich 30:03
Yeah, it’s interesting. You know, the the title of the book, “Winning Fixes Everything, and and I think the the Astros of 2017 are a particularly interesting example because I think from here on out, for the rest of you know the history time that follows, there there will be a discussion of, well, yeah, they won, but but in in almost all cases, it does fix everything. You know, it fans being able to show up at the ballpark after a lockout that’ll that’ll probably fix most. You and I
Nestor Aparicio 30:37
do one thing wrong or unethical, it probably really ends. At least I felt that way for 35 years, and I’ve lived that way. You know, as a public figure here, that my career would be over if I did anything on that edge of scandal. On that edge of scandal, in a general sense, if I cut my competitors’ wires so their radio station couldn’t work, I would, you know, I should freeze in hell. I find that sports the cheat. You’re not cheating. You’re trying if you’re not cheating, right? Like whatever. Like cheating pays. I mean, and I haven’t figured out why that is. Right on down to the president of the United States, but I. It is. We are an amazing place where that Mister Rogers thing doesn’t apply. I mean, especially with the Astros in your book. When I consider like they were a moribund sort of franchise with not much in this and that and whatever, and they’re still eating off of all of that. It didn’t wreck their their brand at all. It powered their brand really financially. The the
Evan Drellich 31:33
forces that come together to kind of create a cheating scheme. You you can see analogs to what happens in with white collar corruption, right? A little, little bit. What happens with the namesake of the Astros ballpark prior to going back to to its opening, Enron, right? And it’s not, it’s not totally simple, but but it is almost always the case that there’s a great incentive, you know, something that you want to achieve. You might be trying to protect something. In the case of the Astros, you know, the cheating starts, and well, you know, there’s a group of guys that they don’t want to let each other down. They don’t want to let the other guys do the other teams do better than them. You know, these circumstances that lead to cheating and corruption are actually they’re fascinating to study, and they’re not totally simple. But you could just boil it down to: there’s a lot of money attached, and a lot of pride and success attached to following through on on some of these schemes. And humans, people, fans want to forgive people when they make mistakes in a lot of settings. They look at their baseball players as heroes. It’s not surprising to me that there is more forgiveness that exists for professional athletes who are looked up to and adored than might exist for you or me or you know the layperson and other jobs. So the the cycles of forgiveness and cheating, we could do a whole hour on that alone.
Nestor Aparicio 32:58
Evangelic is here. Go follow his work out at the athletic, he will be busy, busy, busy. So you get some rest, young man, because you’re this is good. I, I, I mean, do you have any prediction? I mean, most people say, man, they’ll play the misty training. They’ll be playing by April, like, but nobody predicts that. Like, ah, january 15, they all buck up, and we’re just gonna have spring training. And look, they got that salary cap, or look, the owners just quit on it. They just want to have a season. I don’t think that’s gonna. I mean, I don’t think I haven’t had anybody doesn’t predict that this is a really problematic spring and winter, right?
8Evan Drellich 33:32
Yeah, the only predictions I at this point I think I’m comfortable making is that you’re not going to see an agreement prior to March. I would be surprised if that you could. It is technically possible. I just don’t expect it, and I also would be really surprised if there was truly an entire season missed. Now that leaves a lot of leeway in between, but but what I’m saying is, I think it’s possible there are missed games. I think it’s possible that they actually find a way to play without them still, but I I don’t know how to handicap it except to say an entire missed season. I don’t believe the incentives are really there for anybody to to do that, and particularly on the ownership
Nestor Aparicio 34:14
side. Well, feeling like where’s the upside in that? But the war is on. Evangelik will be covering it. The athletic, great seeing you! Thanks for the visit. Thanks for the deep dive, and this should hold up for all the next six months or so. So I appreciate it until there’s any change. And thanks for coming on.
Evan Drellich 34:29
You got it, Nestor. See you soon. Avajo,
Nestor Aparicio 34:31
go find the book. Winning fixes everything. A good little primer here on cheating, and get you started on your Michaelias history and going back to Jeff Luno and Jim Crane and all that good stuff as well. I am Nestor. We are WNST. I am 1570 Towson, Baltimore, and we never stop talking Baltimore. Positive.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
