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Good Riddance, Murdoch
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2420 Reads
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So Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is in serious talks to sell the Los Angeles Dodgers. If he succeeds, he’ll have owned the Blue for five years – or, in baseball time, about as long as it takes a relief pitcher to warm up. So much for tradition at the old ballyard…
I say: Good frigging riddance.
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Murdoch’s original reason for buying the Dodgers was always a naked media ploy. (Much of his motive was to block Disney from establishing its own string of regional sports cable networks.) His purpose for selling remains the same: he wants to jettison a money-losing property to further his media empire by buying the DirecTV satellite system. In so doing, he shows why absentee corporate ownership never makes good business sense in sports: all he and his minions succeeded in doing was trading the team’s franchise player (catcher Mike Piazza); sucking the farm system dry; and sticking fans with a mediocre product.
Worse, with his mercenary ways, Murdoch destroyed any sense of Dodger “tradition.” Now, I’ve never bought into the warm-and-fuzzy feeling that many Angelenos have for the O’Malley family. After all, Brooklynites still compare, unfavorably, owner Walter O’Malley to Hitler and Stalin for tearing the heart out of that city when he uprooted the Trolley Dodgers to L.A. in ’58. And there’s no question that, in establishing Major League Baseball on the West Coast, O’Malley wrangled the sweetheart real-estate deal of all-time from the city of L.A. (Take these 300-plus acres of prim-o land for less than a song – please! – and we’ll take care of displacing an entire neighborhood.)
That said, O’Malley was a dedicated “baseball man” who put the interests of the team first. He hired savvy scouts and general managers -- and let them do their jobs – and wasn’t afraid to spend money for talent. The Dodgers were his primary business – his passion -- and that was reflected on the field and in the stands. By fielding competitive teams and drawing millions of fans annually, O’Malley’s Dodgers became the model of how to operate a successful sports franchise.
News Corp. managed to retain the sound, sights, and smells of the past -- Vin Scully, an increasingly creaky Dodger Stadium, those classy uniforms, Dodger Dogs – but they were hollow imitations of the franchise’s glory days. With Murdoch, L.A. got a soulless team that never truly won fan support. The Lakers now own this city, sports-wise.
Murdoch’s retreat -- and News Corp.’s media machinations – probably wouldn’t have happened if Peter O’Malley, Walter’s son, had been able to build a football stadium at Chavez Ravine. On reflection, that failure may haunt L.A. for decades to come. If O’Malley had been able to get that deal done, the family probably would have been able to retain the Dodgers, and L.A. would have its own NFL team and state-of-the-art stadium tucked neatly next to Dodger Stadium. Instead, O’Malley was persuaded to defer to city leaders who trumpeted a refurbished Coliseum as the home for an NFL team. They’re still waiting for that.
O’Malley was smart: he took a hard look at baseball’s feeble fiscal bottom-line and realized that the time was right to get out of a losing proposition. Meanwhile, in the high-stakes poker game L.A. continues to play with the NFL, neither side has budged. And neither side has anything to show for it.
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| Posted by: David_Davis on Thursday, January 23, 2003 - 12:25 PM
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