This must be from Selig's text called Outright Lies and More Subtle Forms of Baseball (Owners') Accounting.
If baseball ownership is such a bad deal why does the Minnesota Twins' billionaire investment banker owner, 86-year-old Carl Pohlad want to extort $250 million from his fellow owners (including the "poor" small market owners) for the folding of his franchise? He paid $30 million in 1986 to buy it and has spent scarcely a cent since by way of capital improvements and very little on player acquisition. He claims that his team just cannot compete and yet the Twins embarass him by leading their division by a wide margin.
If baseball ownership is such a bad deal, how did Steinbrenner acquire the Yankees with limited partners galore for $8 million total in 1973 and now have a team worth $1 billion (with a b) and far fewer limited partners? He bought the Yankees from the same clueless CBS clowns who infested our liveing rooms for as long as any of us can remember with the likes of Walter Cronkite and Dan Blather. CBS had paid $13 million in 1965.
Ah, but New York is the Emerald City of baseball markets, right? Tell it to the Mets' ownership whose team plays in Queens near fashionable Forest Hills and not in the South Bronx. Their team is not worth half as much as the Yankees. Nor as much as the $600 million that the small market Red Sox just sold for last winter.
If the union is the problem, if Steinbrenner is the problem, if small markets not being competitive is the problem:
1. How many pennants have the Cubs and White Sox won since 1910 in that tiny Chicago market? Why?
2. How many pennants have the Angels (Los Angeles, nearby Anaheim or California) won in their forty years of existence owned only by the very wealthy and well-meaning Gene Autry and then by the far wealthier and malevolent Disney Company? Why?
3. Why aren't the New York Mets world-beaters after last winter's shopping spree?
Translating your real point: Baseball players are stupid because they offend Always Right by making more money than he does or will. Always Right can relate easily to the idea that the players who want $400,000 as a baseball "minimum wage" at the major league level are getting a bigger salary than Always Right gets. Always Right does not own a company worth hundreds of millions of dollars as most of us do not. He or she will not as most of us will not. It is tooooooo complicated to wade through the thicket of Selig's lies to accurately guage the net income of the owners (including fabulous capital gains) so it would take real work to criticize the owners without facing a firestorm of critics more knowledgeable. Better to go with the flow: Hate the Yankees! Hate the greedy players! Hate those SOBs who inherited nothing but make more than we do! All hail Big Brother!
Further, the law of supply and demand is not suspended just because the SCOTUS exempted baseball as "a gentleman's sport" and not a business from the Anti-trust laws applicable to every other business. If the owners had not insisted on grubbing pennies from expansion again and again and again, the talent pool would be much less diluted and the pitching staffs would not be loaded with scrubeenies who make Barry Bonds and Mark Maguire look like Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron and, given the relative scarcity of jobs compared with expanded baseball, the salaries would be lower for many players, for those who obsess about lowering other people's paychecks.
The owners have never won a negotiation yet and they are not about to start now. For one thing, they will collectively owe one of their richer colleagues Rupert Murdoch (Dodgers and Fox Sports) $500 million if there is an actual strike as liquidated damages whether the strike is long or short. Secondly, many owners have strapped themselves with credit practices not available to the likes of you and me and cannot afford to make massive interest payments during a strike or lockout. Thirdly, the owners are liars and they are wrong. Fourth: like little tykes, they are wistfully dreaming that this time their prince will come, the union will fold, and they will be emperors once again. Not a chance!
Get rid of ten franchises minimum in towns which have no more business being in the major leagues than Kosovo has.