Who the hell said anything about expecting him to operate his business at a loss? I was responding to your implication that he owns the Astros for no other reason than to turn a profit. Your assertion that "a baseball team is a business like any other to these guys" is laughable. Cool that you have insight into the psyche of all professional sports owners. Weird that none of them are competitive and care about winning, just makin sure that bottom line continues to tick up, and if there's some winning thrown in there, that's a sweet lil bonus! Not that winning improves a team's profitability or anything.
Moving Astros would be costly to future owner By BERNARDO FALLAS Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/bb/6812596.html That's a pretty stiff penalty but is it insurmountable, especially when you have groups of millionaire/billionaire investors sharing the cost? I have no clue about this kind of stuff so I'm just asking the question. Also, are there any cities that would be suitable for an MLB team that don't currently have one or more already?
Didn't that almost happen once already? Serious question...I thought there was a buyer back in the 90's that wanted to move them to Northern Virginia. Isn't that part of the reason we have MMP?
I thought it was McLane himself ready to move the team to Virginia. I thought of this period when I read his "sacred trust with the city" quotes. I'm a huge fan of McLane, but it's a lot easier to have a "sacred trust" when they give you a state-of-the-art bazillion-dollar stadium.
Nothing in that article suggests that he was the leak. In fact, it suggests exactly the opposite. The fact that the media kept asking him for the last year while he was denying it suggests that they already knew something. Maybe they finally brought something to Drayton that made it impossible for him to deny anymore. Nothing in that article suggests that he was leaking the info. That's just silly. So no secrets ever come out more than a year after the event occurred? Really?
You do realize that selling tickets and having the franchise value appreciate depends on winning, right? If you're right, and Drayton is just a greedy pig who wants to maximize his profits and the value of his franchise, the best way to do that is simply to win.
Not to mention added revenue from playoff games, and awards given to players and teams by MLB that are very valuable. Drayton certainly cares about the Astros for more then just profit though. He wouldn't meddle if he didn't care. He wouldn't buy Oswalt a tractor if he didn't care.
you are talking about two different things. big difference between simply trying to win, and taking risks and going after championships. drayton, lately (at minimum), is risk averse. that's the crux of the problem that many of us have with him. you can still take risks and aggressively pursue a ring without forfeiting profit, if you're a savvy enough owner. that's the kind of owner us "complainers" want, and feel we deserve, after barely sniffing a title in almost 50 years. we pay their salaries, we line drayton's pockets. can we blame him if he wants to operate the club as nothing more than a business, like you claim he should? i guess not, but we can sure be dumbfounded. like i said, there is something innately wrong with you if you are a billionaire sports franchise owner and willing to take a tyrannical, one vs. the masses approach without having any sense of duty to the fans, and view them as nothing more than vessels to bilk out of their money.
If he was operating it as nothing more than a business he would not have agreed to sign Brett Myers, bring in Pudge, etc. You can argue that he is foolish when it comes to baseball matters, but it is ignorant to say he doesn't care about winning. He just spend $107 million on this team last year. He didn't need to do that. He could easily gut this team of all payroll and turn a profit if he wanted to do that. The Marlins turn a profit every year and Drayton could operate that way if he wanted to. Just because he isn't willing to throw away money to win doesn't mean he doesn't want to win.
But taking risks doesn't make you more likely to win a championship. The Rockets made major trade after major trade - Barkley, Pippen, Francis, McGrady, etc. They constantly change their roster adding superstar after superstar, and it doesn't get them any closer to a championship. Meanwhile, you have a boring old non-risk-taking franchise like the Spurs winning titles every few years. Risk taking is a horrible proxy for a committed owner. A risky move that doesn't pay off just means you handcuff your franchise. Besides which, he's made his share of risky moves like trading virtually his entire functional farm system for Tejada and Jennings, or signing Carlos Lee to a massive 6 year contract. Those moves didn't work out, but they were the very definition of risk. And in many ways, the risky Tejada/Lee signings handcuffed the franchise from making other moves because those two players took up 30% of the payroll. I don't think Drayton has made good moves over the last 5 years, and I've been pretty clear about that. I think he needs to commit more to rebuilding and signing smarter contracts and stuff like that because the Astros are a mess right now. But I don't think any of that is a result of a lack of commitment to winning or a lack of being aggressive. If anything, it's the exact opposite - an inability to see when the aggressive approach hasn't worked and the inability to step back and walk away from the mistakes. Why would you be dumbfounded? You buy all sorts of stuff in the world, which pays the salaries of the employees and lines the pockets of the owners. You don't expect Target or Best Buy or HEB to not be run as a business when you buy stuff from there. Why is it when you buy tickest from a sports franchise? I would suggest virtually every owner takes this approach. Some are just better at hiding it than others. Fans are important to owners only as far as customers are important to a business.
apples to oranges applies to most of your arguments. no use in continuing going back and forth repeating the same things - we obviously have two opposing views on the man, but target doesn't have a legion of fans rooting for them to win the World Series of Department Stores nor do fans pay admission to sit inside the store and watch their cashiers ring up toiletries, and the Spurs and basketball are certainly a different beast than the Stros and baseball. Savvy (and a touch of luck) built the Spurs and positioned them to not have to "take risks" - although i guess i should have qualified my definition of taking risks in baseball, because ours aren't the same. ineptitude is destroying the astros. i am viewing things from a fan's perspective, and you are viewing them from a business man's perspective. as a fan who roots for my team to win or be put in the best possible position to win championships, i think drayton is an abomination of an owner. in my view, he inherited a team with a great farm system, enjoyed a lot of early regular season success because of it, had a nice little postseason spike when 2 roided star pitchers wanted to pitch for their hometown team for a couple years, and has since shown his absolute ineptitude as an owner in building (demolishing) his ballclub after all that has passed. i don't see how you or any of us other astros diehards could possibly be in favor of him as our owner. i guess i may just be naive, but i would think that in most every case, owners purchasing sports franchises do so because of their deep-seeded competitive nature, with championship winning being at the forefronts of their desires, a sizable notch ahead of "how much richer is this baby gonna make daddy?". you can see it in the jerry joneses and the mark cubans. i've just never gotten that sense from drayton. he's just always seemed like a bull***** artist who plays the fans for fools to me.
that was actually a surprise to me when i read that. sad...all those wins and no world series championship
Didn't surprise me at all. The Astros had a *great* run in the regular season for over ten years. Here's hoping they can put it back together for another great run, except maybe this time eclipse the Br*ves or whoever else for #1 and bring home a RING.
Winning and going to the playoffs is much better than not. I miss meaningful September/October baseball. I'll take the 1997-2005 years over any other stretch in Houston sports.
It is disappointing, but the Braves only have one to show for even more success. Looking at the bright side, the Cubs haven't even made the World Series.
