Posted on 06/02/2005 10:13:11 AM PDT by Che Chihuahua
Billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros has joined Washington entrepreneur Jonathan Ledecky's bid to purchase the Washington Nationals, Ledecky said in an interview yesterday.
"The Soros family shares my belief that the Washington Nationals are a community trust that can serve as a positive platform for the economic development of the inner city," Ledecky said.
Soros spokesman Michael Vachon declined to comment. The Soros announcement is the latest in a flurry of activity in recent days as at least seven groups have filed initial bids for the Nationals with Major League Baseball, according to baseball sources. Several groups have added major partners in recent days: former secretary of state Colin L. Powell joined the Fred Malek-Jeffrey Zients group; Sallie Mae Chairman Albert L. Lord took over the William Collins-led group on Tuesday, and former Illinois senator Peter Fitzgerald became part of the Lord group...
...MLB, which owns the Nationals, is hoping the team will fetch up to $400 million, which would be one of the highest prices ever paid for a baseball team. The Nationals, formerly known as the Montreal Expos, are scheduled to move into a publicly built, $535 million stadium project along the Anacostia River waterfront in April 2008...[Emphasis added]
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Keep your eyes on his kids. The name Soros will pollute the political/ecomomic atmosphere in the USA for years to come.
He hasn't bought em yet, Fred Malek Pres Nixon's old buddy has the inside track as all the prospective buyers but two are outsiders. C'mon the Nats colors are Red, White and Blue and they'll play in Armed Forces Stadium in a few years but you may be right if Soros gets the team we might just have red uniforms.
Soros is an uber-creep.
In other news, I think this Jon Ledecky might have been my friend from high school in CT! He was a big sports fiend even then, and did the high school play by play. He knew his stuff even then.
Well, Ledecky is off my list of acceptable owners.
After what Sore-ass did in the campaign and the anti-American things he has sid, can't he be denaturalized and deported?
ARGH! Just saw in the article that he thinks Soros is a GOOD thing?! Yikes! Now I'm embarrassed.
Well, if he gets to be the owner, he'll have the right name for his team, the Washington NATIONALS. Because the NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PEOPLE'S ABORTION PARTY wants to NATIONALIZE everything like the Soviets and Communists do. Or, he will name them the D.C. Treehuggers, D.C. Abortionists, The Washington Liberals, The Washington Hillaries, something like that.
Did a little Google research, and yes, that's him. Wish I kept in touch so I could talk him out of it. Maybe he'll show up at our 30th HS reunion...
I want to see him wearing a red hat with a big white W on it. That's good enough for me.
And, since my team is in the NL East, I'll have 9+ opportunities a year to go down there with giant, hate-filled signs directed at that commie.
Taht isn't quite accurate. On a fans-per-victory basis, Washington was an outstanding baseball city.
The first SZenators moved to Minnesota because Calvin Griffith would be going from owner and landlord at Griffith Stadium to tenant at DC Stadium (now RFK) and becaue the city was getting blacker. It didn't really have to do with attendance, as the fact that they immediately put another team in DC established.
The second Senators moved out because the owner, Bob Sh*t, had a prearranged deal to move the team out before he bought it. Had he bought another team, he would hav trashed that team and moved it. This was confirmed to me by one of the Senators' players.
The attnedance in 1971 (the last season before the second Senators moved) was higher than the attendance for Les Expos in 2001. And the attendance in Texas, where they moved, was essentially the same for the first three years as it had been in DC for the last couple of years. It only started to go up when the team started to get good.
The Senators, in their last three years in DC, outdrew 8 other teams.
Fred Malek and his partners, known as Washington Baseball Club, are the heavy front-runners for the team. They will get it; Ledecky and Sore-ass won't.
Actually, fans per victory is a nice way to measure attendance. We know that in any city a winning team draws more than a losing one does in the same city. So one way of "normalizing" attendance figures is to divide the total attendance by the number of wins for the team.
For example, if a team wins 100 games and draws 3 million, their FPV is 30,000. If a team wins 80 games and draws 2.4 million, their FPV is also 30,000.
It's one way of measuring fan support.
And on a fans-per-victory basis, Washington was an outstanding baseball city.
You're right - calculating the fans per victory is perhaps one of the best indicators of fan support we can use.
I didn't know that DC scored so highly.
I'm not a fan of the weasels in Congress, but I have no particular gripe against Washington itself. I'm not looking for the Nationals to fail just because they happen to share a city a bunch of people who waste our money. After all, those people theoretically represent lots of other cities and towns....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.