I have always been told that if you want to find out what is behind anything, you should “follow the money.” So, that is exactly what I am going to do. The BIG MONEY can be found in the paychecks of Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, Max Scherzer, Corey Seager, and numerous other multi-millionaires in MLB. Of course, it can be found in the owner’s pockets as well. But, before you castigate the owners, I want to remind you that many of these owners worked hard to get where they are. Most of them are old guys like me and you (sorry girls – there is no Marge Schott).
Look no further than the Ricketts Family, who own the Chicago Cubs. Joe Ricketts, the family Patriarch is 80 years old and a Billionaire. His son Tom is the Cubs Chairman who has 3 siblings who are also part owners. Joe Ricketts got his first job in third grade, cleaning toilets at the county courthouse. At St. Bernard’s Academy, he met his future wife, Marlene Volkmer. In 1959, he went to Omaha to attend Creighton University, working first as a janitor and then as a hospital orderly to pay his tuition. He worked for Dean Witter for a time but quit to strike out on his own, as soon as he earned his degree. His first business was First Omaha Securities, and it allowed investors to buy and sell securities for lower commissions than old-school full-service brokerages charged.
Joe worked 80 hour weeks and plowed every spare penny back into his company. For his children, it meant that vacations were virtually nonexistent. Paper routes paid for bikes. The family car was a puke-green Ford station wagon or some other hand-me-down from a relative, his children recall. Todd, one of Joe Rickett’s sons (who happens to own a bike shop today) says this: “I tell people that one of the reasons I have a bike shop today is that I never had a bike as a kid.”
The Ricketts boys worked summers—Pete and Tom at Burger King and Todd at Kentucky Fried Chicken. (Laura, the daughter got a pass.) When it came to college, Joe showed rare permissiveness. He would pay their way to any school they wanted, with one caveat. “It had to be far enough away that we couldn’t come home to do our laundry,” says Todd. “My mom [would have] hated that.”
Joe worked hard and started a company called Ameritrade, but after the dot com crash in 2000 he was replaced, a merger with TD Waterhouse ensued and the company became TD Ameritrade. Joe and Pete owned a boatload of stock in the company and became what many call “filthy rich.” Joe is now 80 and his three sons and daughter, Laura, are all involved in running the team. Pete, the older son, is the Governor of Nebraska. How close are the siblings? Tom, Laura, and their youngest brother, Todd, all live within blocks of each other in Wilmette, Illinois.
The Ricketts Family won a World Series for Chicago – the first in a long, long time. They have fallen on hard times recently, as Theo Epstein proved that even his genius is not infallible. The Cubs are currently one of the “bottom dwellers.” Jed Hoyer, the GM has moved to a new position as President of Baseball Operations, and Carter Hawkins has assumed the duties of the General Manager. The Cubs have a lot going on… Wrigley Field is an icon of American History and also is a DUMP! Do they remodel it… or do they move to the suburbs? There is a whole lot going on. Theo “sold out” to win a World Series. I get it… but the Cubs are not in great shape now. The Farms System is near the bottom. Their immediate prospects are not good, but hopefully, Hawkins can fix that quickly.
Yes, the Ricketts family are billionaires, but that is largely “on paper” right about now. Joe Ricketts and his family are allegedly worth $4.8 Billion dollars (FORBES). He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Jackson Hole used to be the home to Millionaires… now the Millionaires are moving out… to make room for the Billionaires! By the way: It took Joe nine years to graduate from Creighton University because he periodically had to stop and earn money for his tuition… but he did it! The Ricketts family is kind of an open book. We know that they are staunch conservatives, except for their daughter (Laura) who is gay, liberal, and a political activist, but who fits right in with the rest of the family. We also know that she had a gay older brother who died of AIDS. The Ricketts family is very close and a testament to the fact that politics does not have to divide a family!
I chose the Cubs and the Ricketts family because they really are an Open Book. They are easy to research and it is easy to discover information about them. Contrast that to Mark Walter, the main owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Forbes ranked his fortune at $4.6 million while the Ricketts Family is ranked at $4.8 Billion, but there is very little information available about Mark Walter, who is evidently very private. I mean, we have the “Cliff Notes” on Walter, but not much in-depth. We do know that like Joe Ricketts, he went to Creighton University, so there is that.
Walters is a master at being private We know very little about him that he does not want you to know. We do know that the Walters are very Philontrophic and donate actively to numerous charities. We know that there has been infighting and other issues at Guggenheim Partners, but such talk has been “shushed” very effectively. For example, in 2017, it was alleged that Mark Walter had a close relationship with Alexandra Court, a beautiful woman from South Africa who was promoted to be the global head of institutional distribution for Guggenheim and who lived in a $13.5 Million Mansion in Pacific Palisades allegedly purchased by Walter.
There were articles in the WSJ and other media and then the allegations just evaporated… never to be heard about again. Alexandra left Guggenheim in 2018 after a one-year sabbatical. Evidently, there was nothing to see here folks… move along. Walter is married, but we don’t know when they were married. We think they have one daughter, but some think it seems they may have two. Mark Walter is on Linkedin, but it seems that the family has no other social media presence.
Mark Walter’s daughter, Samantha was identified as a teenager who was still in school in an October 2017 story. However, it is not revealed whose school she attended. It’s also unclear whether she’s already graduated from high school. If she has, little is known about her university. Nothing is really known about her. That’s not a bad thing. I get it that famous people want to shield their families from the spotlight.
OK, enough of all this. it’s easy to follow the money with the Ricketts. We know how they started, We know just about everything about this family. On the other hand, we know very little about Mark Walter. We know about Magic Johnson and Billie Jean King who own a small fraction of the Dodgers and are “figureheads” but that is about it. I am not saying that staying out of the limelight is a bad thing. It’s a management decision and I respect that. The thing that both teams have in common is that they are one of five teams in MLB that are valued at over $3 Billion Dollars.
Team valuations also give us an idea as to what a team can afford. Teams in the largest markets make the most money from ticket sales, concessions, and TV deals. They can always afford the highest payrolls and that usually equates to winning, but not always. Tampa Bay, which is valued at a little over a Billion Dollars has recently been one of the best teams regardless of their payroll and revenues is an exception. Many teams are not competitive simply because of mismanagement and not just lack of revenue.
What does all of this have to do with the current Lockout of MLB PLayers? Well, there is no “typical team.” The Yankees, Dodgers, Giants, Cubs, Mets, and other “big market” teams can certainly afford higher payrolls. The lessor market teams cannot! Ultimately, MLB needs revenue sharing and a hard salary cap, as well as a salary minimum. I am fearful that the most powerful union in America (the MLBPA, in case you don’t know) will never accept anything that is less than a smash the owners in the mouth win. MLB needs revenue sharing, but the players and the owners do not want it. MLB needs transparency, but the owners don’t want it.
Owners like the Ricketts Family worked their asses off to get where they are. Should they be forced to “share” money with players or other teams who did not pay the price they did? Hell no! The Dodgers are the “Model Organization.” Should they have to share their profits with teams or players who squandered their opportunities? Again, hell no! BUT, they cannot play baseball without other teams… teams who make a lot less on TV and at the gate. This has to be figured out. Revenue sharing HAS to happen. How does that work? I have no clue, but people smarter than I can figure it out.
It is going to take time. Maybe the lockout has to continue all season. Maybe minor leaguers play for MLB teams this season. Drop TV and Ticket prices as well as concessions and call up minor leaguers to play the 2022 season. It would be difficult and fun. Players on the 40 man roster cannot be eligible, but what about this team for the Dodgers?
- Willman Diaz SS
- Mike Busch 2B
- Brandon Lewis 3B
- Miguel Vargas 1B
- Diego Cartya C
- Andy Pages RF
- Justin Yurchak DH
- Jeren Kendall CF
- Drew Avans LF
Starting Pitchers:
- Bobby Miller
- Landon Knack
- Clayton Beeter
- Hyun-il Choi
- Maddux Bruns
I will pay to watch every damn game!
Who is this?
What in the world was this post suppose to be about?!?!?
Solely for the purpose of drawing your own conclusions and there could be a lot of them.
And you choose the Ricketts family as your example of “hard working owners”?
Holy sh*t.
Do you think they didn’t work hard and sacrifice?
Chapter and verse!
Sorry I said anything. The Ricketts family is on the list for worst owners in sports, with the The Inside Story of How the Ricketts Family Schemed and Feuded Their Way to Owning the Chicago Cubs a very interesting read, tanking, tax evasions, misinformation about Obama, getting rich on OPM, political influencing, typical political stuff, most of which I can’t go into and wouldn’t be received well on a conservative blog such as yours.
And Marge Schott was a disgusting, spiteful, vulgar racist.
As you were.
Deadspin?
Seriously?
You are referring to THE DEADSPIN where the entire editorial staff resigned a few months after the Ricketts Article?
The piece was a political “hit job.” Yeah, maybe no one is as good as some think… but they are also not as bad as others think.
Marge Schott was a racist. I am not condoning it, but so were a lot of people in her time. Much of it was fueled by ignorance and not being very sensitive to people around her. She was also a philanthropist in Cincinnati and donated millions to many good causes. I simply refuse to see everything as Black and White.
Yeah, Deadspin has pissed off some powerful people. Speaking truth to power can do that.
I’d ask you where you get your information, but I think I already know.
Marge Schott. Your kind of woman I guess.
I believe it’s time for me to close shop. Best of luck to all of us. We’re gonna need it.
Well they had a very spirited meeting and it wasn’t good. I am not very optimistic about the season starting on time. Neither side seems to want to budge much. I am pretty sure that is a photo of the last surviving member of the Bee Gees, Barry Gibb.
Right on!
Marge Schott is the worst role model I can imagine for women in baseball. But come to think of it, none of the male owners strike me as particularly heroic either.
Marge Schott was uncultured and crude, but she had a big heart.
First the Ricketts and now Marge Schott?
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
I guess you must be off your meds again…
Follow the money is right. NCIS does that all the time and finds the criminal in less than an hour! It takes a lot of money to run a team. It takes a certain kind of businessman to run one astutely. As much as he was despised by some fans, Walter O’Malley was about as forward thinking as any owner ever was. His move to LA made the Dodgers one of the most respected and solid franchises in the league for years. It took McCourt less than ten years to almost ruin that same franchise. Guggenheim fixed the broken wheel and with AF at the helm, has built a powerful organization. But, since LA is such a huge market, they can afford the players if they need to get them come deadline time. They can give their stars security other franchises cannot. I doubt Guggenheim could have done the same thing say in Miami. Or Kansas City, a medium market that has to compete with a very entrenched Cardinal team.
Interesting perspective. One could say the same thing about most MLB players. You don’t get to the show without an incredible amount of work and sacrifice. Few MLB players received large signing bonuses. Most had to grind it out in the minors. Many came to the US with no English skills and little more than a plane ticket and some pocket change as a signing bonus. So I can appreciate how hard many owners and players worked to get to where they are.
But there is a hell of a lot of greed on both sides. I’ve always been annoyed (if not angered) by how the Union and MLB players have never really seem to care about improving pay and conditions for minor league players. Aside from lip service. Despite the fact that most Union members had to endure years of grinding in near poverty in the minors. It reminds me of a very old joke by John Stewart back in his standup days.
The Joke: My grandfather walked down from the boat after arriving at Ellis Island. He put his feet on American soil for the first time, got on his knees and kissed the ground. He then turned around and looked back at all the other people waiting to get off the boat and said “You immigrants are ruining everything”.
In my mind both the owners and the players have the same issue which causes me to lack sympathy for either. It’s largely predictable human nature. Once you have yours you really don’t care to help anybody else get theirs. And that mentality isn’t healthy for the game. Owners should be required to be transparent about their finances. We know the team values but among nothing about profitability. Owners like Arte Moreno paid a pittance for their team. He bought the Angels for $175m. Now worth $2b. Players should be fighting for ALL players, including the ones in the minors. Both owners and players deserve respect for their hard work and sacrifice. But they also need to remember how much baseball has enriched them all. To an incredible level. More “good for the game is good for all of us” vrs. “What’s good for me is good for me so F*** you” which seems to be the two sides stance right now.
Baseball is a kids game and has made billionaires out of owners and multi millionaires out of the players. They shouldn’t forget that they need to leave the sport that made them all filthy rich in a better place than they found it. Not just fight endlessly for every red cent.
And I’d be 100% for playing minor leaguers if the season doesn’t start on time. It would be a blast. But I’m sure the Union would consider them scabs. So I doubt that will happen. Would be fun though!
Excellent article Mark.
Great background on the Ricketts family and their ownership of the Cubs. For Joe Ricketts to go from cleaning toilets as a third grader to a self-made billionaire is a great example of the American dream. From other sources it looks like Ricketts bought the Cubs for roughly $900 million in 2009 in the depths of the financial crisis. Per the Forbes estimate, the Cub are worth $3.4 billion today which is a very healthy increase in value over 12 years of ownership. Many critics of the owners point to the increase in franchise values as being owed to the players and should be shared with the players. However, in this case the Ricketts would have likely been better off financially to have simply invested in the S&P 500 index which was $932 on Jan 1, 2009, and $4,766 on Jan1, 2022.
I put blame on both the MLB and the MLBPA for the current lock out and CBA negotiations. The owners are being stubborn about the CBA thresholds and penalties, while the players are fighting for Boros clients more than the lower level players. The MLB has already proposed increasing the minimum salary from $570,000 to $640,000.
A compromise should be feasible at minimum salary of $670,000 to $700,000 and CBA threshold of roughly $225 to $230 million.
Also I would like to watch the MILB lineup Mark proposed play in Dodger stadium against other teams’ rosters. My contention is that the average fan would not notice the difference in skill level between AAA players and major league players. Once you put the Big league uniform on in a big league stadium and learn the new player names, the average fan will still enjoy the hot dogs, sunshine and beach balls. And the AAA payers would love to sign autographs for the fans much longer than most MLB players. The MILB players are very good and just a tiny amount of skill below a MLB player.
While I do want a compromise and the MLB players back ASAP, I think the MLBPA overrates their value to the game of baseball. Max Sherzer at $43.3 million per year is making 2000 times as much as Bobby Miller at $20,000 per year. The game of baseball was great 100 years before Scherzer played, and will be a great game long after he is retired.
friendly reminder to all, cancel your mlb tv subscription today before it automatically renews at full price tomorrow. no way should any of us be paying $130 when we won’t even get a full season
Cancelled it back in December
Haven’t got an update from todays collective bargaining discussions. Will we have a full season or will unnecessary greed (both sides in my humble opinion) interrupt our nations past time?
I accept the notion it means nothing to the principles, but with our nation reeling from two
Years of Covid impacts, Putin playing nonsense in Ukraine, inflation here in the USA at a forty-year high, gas in CA at $6.00 a gallon….do you think the owners and players might find a compromise that works for all?
Complete and utter BS if the season is impacted and I’m not sure I’ll be back. Football has had its issues but they have labor peace and the Rams won a SB so perhaps I’ll spend my $ there.
None of this is a political statement just a re-cap where we find ourselves today and how tone deaf a lockout and bad-faith negotiating appears to the rest of working stiffs who have to get by paycheck to paycheck and fill the truck up with gas to get to work and it costs $100-$125 do so.
Lock Manfred and Tony Clarke in a room and keep them there until a deal is reached
Saturday, MLB made proposals to the MLBPA on both a Draft lottery and a service time plan, making concessions to the players on both issues. MLB’s Draft lottery plan would award the top six picks via lottery while prohibiting big-market teams from picking in the top 6 in consecutive years or any team picking there in three straight Drafts.
The service time proposal from MLB would give a full year of service time to any player who finished first or second in their league’s Rookie of the Year voting — an idea that came from the MLBPA’s own proposal on the same subject.
In exchange for those two items, MLB had asked for a 14-team expanded postseason, as well as the ability to make on-field rules changes with 45 days’ notice rather than the current system, which requires either union consent or one full year of notice. Those rules changes would be handled by a committee comprised of six management officials, two MLBPA reps and one umpire.
As of Saturday, the union was still seeking expanded Super 2 eligibility (from the current 22% to 35% of players with the most service time between 2-3 years) and some tweaks to the revenue sharing system. MLB has maintained from the beginning that any change in those two issues are non-starters for the owners.
Players have insisted from the start of negotiations that getting younger players paid more earlier in their careers is one of the union’s primary objectives. Between the league’s proposals for minimum salary increases and a pre-arbitration bonus pool, MLB has offered more than $250 million in additional compensation for pre-arbitration players over the course of a five-year agreement.
Sources: MLB has tied eliminating direct draft pick compensation in free agency — so, getting rid of the qualifying offer — to increased CBT tax rates. League today indicated willingness to raise CBT thresholds, but not far from $214m, the current starting point in its offer.
As a technical note, there were no new formal proposals today from either side. But there was a lot of discussion: if we did X, could you do Y, and so forth.
On subject of expanded playoffs, union has raised concern that league’s proposed 14-team format does not provide enough incentive for two division winners that did *not* finish with best overall record in league and receive bye into Division Series,
Union proposed “ghost win” in 12-team format and floated same idea in 14-team plan, sources say. In best 2-of-3 wild-card round, other two division winners would start with one-game advantage while playing entire series at home. League not receptive thus far. (Familiar last sentence, that’s fast becoming.)
Example: Brewers in 2021 would have faced Phillies in best-of-three. Under union plan, Brewers would have needed to win 2 games, Phillies all 3. Without “ghost win,” only advantages for non-bye division winners in league proposal would be choice of WC opponent and home field.
Dave Roberts and the Dodgers are discussing a contract extension.
Badger is right. The best that can be said about most owners is that they view their club as a hobby that is extremely profitable, and prestigious. They are generally not “baseball people” who have worked their way up through the minor leagues and have some loyalty to the game, the players, and the fans. They may have “sacrificed” to build their fortunes, but once they buy a baseball club, it’s a trophy and a cash cow, more than something they are truly “invested” in.