Evan Drellich\u2019s reporting<\/a> on that $10 billion valuation is true \u2014 and Evan\u2019s very good at this stuff \u2014 gives us a pretty clear breakdown of the maximum financing vs. equity split. Private equity, in its most vampiric form, is a big part of the reason your life might suck. Fast food used to be cheap, quick, with dubious quality. Now Roark, Inspire and 3G have made it pricey and slow, while maintaining dubious quality. The inheritance you expect from your parents will instead likely be burned away in assisted living and end-of-life care, an industry so dominated by PE that it burps revolvers. Sears was so big it had the naming rights to the tallest building in the richest nation on earth, now it\u2019s a footnote in an accounting textbook.<\/p>\nThese are the worst case scenarios, orchestrated by the worst people to exist in the history of capitalism. I am cautiously optimistic that this will not happen, to the same degree, to the New York Yankees. Part of that optimism comes from the arrogance of the folks who still run the team \u2014 there\u2019s far more value in calling it Yankee Stadium than Amazon Field, simply because of the legacy other people helped build before Hal received the keys to the kingdom.<\/p>\n
Still, the entry of Apollo signals a change that has been coming around for a while, but is here all the same. The business of baseball has always been about making money. To us, Babe Ruth is the greatest player to ever step on a field because of 714, because of 14 WAR seasons, because of the called shot. To the business of baseball, Ruth is the greatest because nobody, past or present, sold as many tickets just with his name. To us, Jackie Robinson is a hero because of the moral courage, determination, and grace he showed in breaking baseball\u2019s segregation. To the business of baseball, Jackie is a hero because he unlocked a brand new customer base \u2014 see AM Glimmitz\u2019s excellent The Metropolitans.<\/p>\n
You used to have to be good, or at least be interesting, to make money in baseball. You used to have to sell tickets and ad space on the back of your actual accomplishments. Even rights fees from regional TV deals, the lifeblood of baseball, was at least a little dependent on Winning Baseball Games. Revenue sharing socialized all of that, the rich subsidizing the poor and allowing the poor to continue to drag themselves along the bottom, which I\u2019m pretty sure I was told is against the ethos of American capitalism. Anyway.<\/p>\n
Private equity doesn\u2019t particularly care about the quality of your product at time of buy-in. Private equity cares whether there is something that can be cut away, or something that can be fertilized, in order to recognize an outsized return with a very quick turnaround. PE found its legs in distressed assets, companies that did have fat or inefficiencies or, yknow, pensions. Strip away that fat, those inefficiencies, those employees, temporarily boost profit, and spin off the now-crippled asset is the name of the game. It won\u2019t work with the Yankees and that MLB rule still holds, but one wonders about the actual distressed assets in the league \u2014 what this mindset could do to the Pirates, the Rockies, the Angels.<\/p>\n
That the New York Yankees seemingly no longer have to worry about being good, about having a Babe Ruth or a Jackie Robinson, that they can sign a document that injects $2.5 billion into various numbered accounts and solves a debt issue that otherwise might have made them think about how to grow the business and increase quality, is that canary keeled over when the worker returns. PE will reach into your wallet at every opportunity, your diet, your parents, your mechanic. It has now come for your leisure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Supposedly that\u2019s what Yankees Global Enterprises, the consortium that controls the New York Yankees, Legends Hospitality, owns a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320429,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130,120766,120767],"class_list":["post-320428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news","tag-yankees-analysis","tag-yankees-editorials-reactions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}