It's about the ATL Braves but I think his summation of the "rough bargain" is really spot on:

Deflated because early-21st century sports owners and early 21st century sport fans have fallen into something of a rough bargain. It’s not a consciously-negotiated bargain, but it’s one that, through practice and example, fans and owners have realized is the sweet spot for our relationship. That bargain is this: we, as fans, will endure you fleecing taxpayers for stadiums, taking your games off of over-the-air television in favor of big money cable deals which raise our rates, pocketing money in “management fees,” and selling anything and everything that isn’t nailed down with a team logo slapped on it. In exchange, you will at least pretend to be interested in delivering a winning team and, in your utterances and actions, demonstrate that you understand that fans want to see an entertaining and, occasionally, championship-caliber product a million times more than we want to hear about the financial health of ownership and the business vision of the franchise. Obviously not all teams do this. But the teams with the happiest, most engaged fans and with the owners who are less-loathed than their brethren generally fit this description.

To the extent the Braves have made news in the past few years it’s been because they’ve (a) decided to abandon their relatively new ballpark in the city they call, for marketing and territorial purposes, home in favor of a taxpayer funded ballpark no one but wealthy white suburban people can get to (and even they can’t without difficulty); and (b) sent off all of the players which have excited fans in the past several years. Against that backdrop, the largely faceless CEO of a division of a largely faceless corporation which owns the team is claiming implausible but, I suppose, unfalsifiable things about the business of baseball which read like a pat on the back for financial performance more than any sort of argument for the competitive prospects of the team (Q: “When can we expect to see the Braves in the top 10 in terms of payroll?” A: “I won’t give you a timetable, but you will start seeing major jumps 1/1/17”).

-- Modified on 11/16/2015 10:09:16 AM