Can anyone spare $3-4 billion?
It’s going to take that much dough to take
the New York Yankees off the hands of the Steinbrenner family. If the Los
Angeles Dodgers are worth $2.175 billion after years of dysfunction and
mismanagement, think of how much the Yankees are worth with a hugely successful
regional television network. Sure, there are all sorts of questions about the
value of the product on the field, with the team struggling during the first
two months of the season, falling well short of our admittedly high
expectations. But that has not made them less profitable, at least not yet.
For the record, I don’t believe the
Yankees are actually for sale right now. I think someone in the Yankees camp
casually mentioned the possibility of a sale with one of his banker friends
over scotch and cigars one night and the thing just snowballed. Hal
Steinbrenner is a businessman, not a die-hard baseball fan, so I could see him wanting
to sell the team at some point in the future. But he is a businessman so he
surely knows he can get even more for his already valuable property by waiting
until general market conditions improve.
I’d be willing to pitch in to buy the
Yankees. If we all chip in a little, we and thousands of our fellow Yankees fans
could be the proud owners of the most storied franchise in sports. But then we’d
have to stop criticizing our team because we’d only be hurting ourselves.
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