The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse by Molly Knight Read Free Book Online Page A

some potential that we’ve never seen in baseball.”
    Walter’s instincts proved correct eighteen months later when Time Warner agreed to pay the Dodgers $8.35 billion for the rightsto broadcast their games for the next twenty-five years. McCourt may have cleared a cool eight hundred million, but he’d been ousted a year and a half before he could have collected a signed contract for ten times that amount—a bitter pill to swallow for someone who could never stockpile enough cash to be satisfied. Had the McCourts buried their differences awhile longer, they could have split that windfall.
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    In many ways, Mark Walter was Frank McCourt’s opposite.While McCourt hid from media behind PR lieutenants, in Walter’s first season owning the Dodgers he greeted journalists like old pals and often divulged too much, to the point where Kasten begged him to begin his informal chats with members of the press by telling them that what he said was off-the-record. While McCourt never helped himself by appearing uncomfortable in his own skin, Walter was fully present, and hopped around the field during batting practice like a giddy child. He hugged stadium employees he hadn’t seen in a while, and greeted most of them by name. Walter grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, not far from the Field of Dreams, and radiated warmth, so much gosh darn Midwest salt-of-the-earth nice that it was difficult to imagine how he had the instincts necessary to run a company that managed $210 billion worth of assets. In considering this question, he smiled and shook his head.“I’m nothing special,” said Walter. “Just the king of common sense.”
    Perhaps common sense isn’t that common. After all, it was boring logic that led Walter to value the Dodgers at three times what Forbes did. Because the NFL is the most popular sport in America, many financial laymen believe that football franchises are worth the most money. But Walter didn’t think that was true. The NFL broadcasts its games on national networks each week and splits that revenue equally among its thirty-two teams. Forbes estimated that the Dallas Cowboys were the most valuable franchise in the United States in the spring of 2012. But the Cowboys don’t have the option of broadcasting their games on their own television network and reaping the benefits of the advertising dollars that would go along with that. In baseball thereare no such limitations. When Walter took over in Los Angeles,MLB was as fiscally unregulated as the Wall Street financial institutions that caused the economy to collapse in 2008. While the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL relied on pooled profits and hard salary caps, Major League Baseball’s evolution mirrored the staggering wealth disparity in postrecession America. The new Dodgers television deal would give the team an average of $334 million a year. The St. Louis Cardinals, on the other hand, made only about $25 million annually in media revenue. And the Pittsburgh Pirates pulled in just $18 million. For the Cowboys to be worth as much as the Dodgers during this TV revenue boom, Walter estimated the team would have to rake in one hundred dollars in beer and T-shirt sales per fan per game. To his credit, Frank McCourt saw this windfall coming a decade earlier. But Walter did, too.“We didn’t have the dough to buy the team back then,” said Walter. “No one did.”
    While his predecessor wore silk and linen to ball games, Walter, fifty-three, favored sneakers, blue Dodgers pullovers, and dad jeans with his cell phone clipped to his belt buckle. He and his wife, Kimbra, had met as undergrads at Northwestern University. They had one daughter, Samantha, who was twelve when her father bought the Dodgers. When Samantha expressed an interest in becoming a veterinarian, Walter bought a zoo in Tampa, Florida. After Walter purchased the Dodgers and she got a behind-the-scenes look at how professional sports organizations were run, she told her dad that she