When Pete Rose died, I thought I was done writing about him. I started this Substack by working my way through the Dowd Report. Looking back, I don’t think I did my best work. I was still finding my voice and figuring out how I wanted to approach difficult subjects. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time writing about baseball, power, money, ownership, character, and accountability. Which brings me back to Pete Rose.

Pete Rose was one of my favorite players growing up. When the gambling scandal broke, I was disappointed. I didn’t make excuses for him then and I’m not going to make excuses for him now. He knew the rules. He broke them. Then he lied about it for years. That matters.

What also matters is why I accepted the punishment. I accepted it because Major League Baseball told me integrity mattered more than any player. More than 4,256 hits. More than records. More than fame. More than money. Baseball told us that gambling represented a threat to the integrity of the game itself. It wasn’t negotiable. It wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t open for debate.

Pete Rose became the sacrifice on the altar of baseball’s integrity. That was the message. No individual player was bigger than the game, and the integrity of the game had to be protected at all costs. For decades, I accepted that argument because I believed baseball believed it too.

Today, I’m not so sure what Major League Baseball actually believes.

The same sport that told me gambling was such a threat that it permanently banned the all-time hit leader now wraps itself in gambling money. Sportsbooks sponsor broadcasts. Betting odds are discussed during games. Gambling advertisements are everywhere. Teams partner with sportsbooks. The league profits from gambling. What was once presented as a threat to the game is now treated as a business opportunity.

And that’s where I start to have a problem.

Not because Pete Rose was innocent. Not because gambling should be illegal. Not because I don’t understand the difference between a fan placing a bet and a manager placing a bet. I understand all of that. What I don’t understand is how Major League Baseball can spend forty years telling me gambling threatens the integrity of the game while simultaneously making gambling part of the product it sells.

If gambling is such a threat to integrity, why are you promoting it? If gambling is not a threat when properly managed, why did Pete Rose become baseball’s moral example for the last four decades? You don’t get to have it both ways. You don’t get to spend decades standing on a moral principle and then quietly abandon it when there is enough money involved.

That’s the part that drives me nuts.

Major League Baseball wants credit for protecting the integrity of the game while collecting checks from the gambling industry. Those two things exist in tension with one another whether the league wants to admit it or not. The irony is that Pete Rose eventually admitted what he did. Major League Baseball has never admitted what it has done. The league changed its relationship with gambling completely. It just never wants to acknowledge how dramatically the standards shifted once there was enough money involved.

For me, this has become less about Pete Rose and more about consistency. If integrity is your guiding principle, it has to cost you something. Otherwise it’s just marketing. Pete Rose paid the price for violating baseball’s standards. Today I look around the game and wonder whether Major League Baseball is willing to hold itself to the same standard.

That is the question I can’t stop coming back to. Not whether Pete Rose deserved punishment. Not whether gambling should exist. But whether integrity is still the principle baseball follows, or whether integrity only matters until there is enough fuqquin money on the table.

I still believe Pete Rose deserved to be punished. I still believe what he did was wrong. What I no longer believe is that Major League Baseball occupies the same moral high ground it claimed when it made Pete Rose the symbol of gambling’s danger. If integrity matters, it has to apply to everyone. Players. Managers. Owners. Commissioners. And the league itself.

That’s the conversation I wish baseball would have. But as long as the gambling money keeps flowing, I don’t expect to hear it.

The Athletics, Marlins, Pirates, Rockies, White Sox, Angels, Tigers, and Reds all illustrated how ownership decisions can hold a franchise back. Once I got past that group, most of the remaining organizations started blending together. Some are better than others. Some spend more. Some develop talent better. Some communicate better. But many of them are operating from the same basic playbook.

Honestly, for me this exercise was always going to come down to four organizations: the Rays, Brewers, Dodgers, and Braves.

Those are the four ownership groups that consistently stood out over the last decade-plus. The order took some thought, but the group itself never really changed. Everything after that became a matter of degree, and frankly that makes for fuqqin boring reading.

So rather than spend the next several months writing twenty-two more ownership profiles, I’m ending the series here and giving my remaining rankings along with a brief explanation of why each team landed where it did.

Kansas City Royals

The Royals deserve credit for delivering a World Series championship, something many franchises never accomplish. The problem is that the years after the championship never felt like the foundation of something sustainable. Too often the organization felt content to live off the memory of 2015 rather than aggressively build the next contender.

Washington Nationals

Winning a World Series carries tremendous weight and ownership deserves credit for being willing to spend during that window. The years since have felt more reactive than visionary, leaving the organization searching for a new identity.

Arizona Diamondbacks

The Diamondbacks have quietly become a solid baseball operation. Ownership has shown a willingness to compete, and the World Series run proved the organization is capable of building something meaningful without operating like a financial giant.

Minnesota Twins

The Twins are generally stable, generally competent, and generally competitive. They rarely feel dysfunctional, but they also rarely feel like an organization willing to push every advantage to its limit, generally...

Toronto Blue Jays

Toronto has tremendous market advantages and significant resources. The organization has been good, but when you consider everything available to ownership, it feels like there should be more to show for it.

St. Louis Cardinals

For decades the Cardinals represented one of baseball’s gold standards. Recent seasons have felt unusually passive by Cardinal standards. Still a strong organization, just not the machine it once was.

Texas Rangers

Ownership deserves enormous credit for putting resources behind its ambition and ultimately winning a championship. The challenge now is proving that success was part of a long-term organizational model rather than a single peak.

Seattle Mariners

The Mariners have talented people throughout the organization and have built a solid foundation. The frustration comes from the feeling that ownership has not always fully matched the ambitions of the baseball operation.

San Diego Padres

Nobody can accuse the Padres of lacking ambition. Ownership has been aggressive, willing to spend, and willing to take risks. Sometimes those risks have produced chaos, but at least the objective is clear. They are trying to win.

San Francisco Giants

The Giants remain one of baseball’s healthier organizations. Strong ownership, strong infrastructure, and strong market position keep them competitive, even if they have not fully recaptured the energy of their championship era.

Cleveland Guardians

The Guardians consistently prove that smart organizations can compete without massive payrolls. Their ranking would be significantly higher if ownership consistently matched the quality of the baseball operations department with greater financial commitment.

New York Mets

Steve Cohen changed the conversation the moment he arrived. The willingness to spend is unquestioned. The challenge has been turning financial power into organizational consistency.

Chicago Cubs

The Cubs broke a historic curse and built a thriving business operation. At times it feels like ownership is balancing baseball and business rather than fully maximizing the competitive potential of one of the sport’s biggest brands.

Houston Astros

The cheating scandal remains a permanent part of the organization’s story. At the same time, ownership maintained one of the strongest competitive infrastructures in baseball for more than a decade. Both realities exist together.

New York Yankees

The Yankees remain one of baseball’s premier organizations. The reason they are not higher is simple. The standard in New York is championships, and ownership has not met that standard often enough in recent years.

Baltimore Orioles

The Orioles deserve recognition for one of baseball’s most impressive turnarounds. New ownership appears committed to creating a sustainable contender, and the future looks bright.

Boston Red Sox

Multiple championships matter. A willingness to invest matters. The reason Boston sits here instead of higher is that recent years have felt inconsistent compared to what the organization is capable of achieving. Maybe I let a bias in here because I can’t stand John Henry and how he operates, now.

Philadelphia Phillies

John Middleton has consistently demonstrated something fans appreciate. Urgency. The Phillies behave like an organization that understands winning matters and that contention windows should be attacked, not managed.

Atlanta Braves

The Braves may be the most complete organization in baseball. Excellent player development, smart leadership, strong financial support, and a clear organizational identity have produced sustained success.

Los Angeles Dodgers

The Dodgers are the model for how a large-market franchise should operate. They spend aggressively, develop talent, invest in infrastructure, and consistently contend. Every advantage they possess is fully leveraged.

Milwaukee Brewers

The Brewers are my favorite ownership story in baseball. Mark Attanasio inherited a small-market franchise and built a culture of sustained excellence. Every year people predict decline. Every year the Brewers find another way to compete. That is not luck. That is organizational excellence.

Tampa Bay Rays

The Rays get the top spot because they have done the most with the least. They operate in a difficult market. They have played in a stadium that many fans and writers love to criticize. They face limitations that would cripple many organizations. Yet year after year they compete, innovate, develop talent, and influence the rest of baseball. The Rays don’t simply survive their disadvantages. They overcome them.

After spending all this time thinking about ownership, I came away with one conclusion. Fans spend endless hours arguing about players, managers, prospects, payrolls, trades, and analytics. Those things matter. But ownership matters more.

Ownership sets the priorities. Ownership establishes the culture. Ownership determines whether success is reinvested or harvested. Ownership decides whether a franchise acts like a civic institution or simply another asset on a balance sheet.

Players come and go. Managers come and go. General managers come and go. Ownership remains. If you want to understand why a franchise wins, loses, drifts, innovates, disappoints, or inspires, start with the people signing the checks.

Final Rankings

1. Tampa Bay Rays

2. Milwaukee Brewers

3. Los Angeles Dodgers

4. Atlanta Braves

5. Philadelphia Phillies

6. Boston Red Sox

7. Baltimore Orioles

8. New York Yankees

9. Houston Astros

10. Chicago Cubs

11. New York Mets

12. Cleveland Guardians

13. San Francisco Giants

14. San Diego Padres

15. Seattle Mariners

16. Texas Rangers

17. St. Louis Cardinals

18. Toronto Blue Jays

19. Minnesota Twins

20. Arizona Diamondbacks

21. Washington Nationals

22. Kansas City Royals

Previously Ranked

23. Cincinnati Reds

24. Detroit Tigers

25. Los Angeles Angels

26. Chicago White Sox

27. Colorado Rockies

28. Pittsburgh Pirates

29. Miami Marlins

30. Oakland Athletics

Every time the salary cap discussion comes up, I hear the same tired argument. The players make too much money. What fascinates me is how often the conversation begins exactly where ownership wants it to begin. Before anyone talks about franchise values, antitrust protections, revenue sharing, gambling partnerships, media contracts, or private equity investment, the discussion immediately shifts to player salaries. The focus becomes the millionaire shortstop instead of the billionaire owner. The debate becomes whether a player deserves $35 million rather than why a franchise that was worth a few hundred million dollars a generation ago is now worth several billion. That isn’t an accident.

For decades, ownership has successfully framed labor discussions around player compensation rather than ownership wealth. The public sees the contract because the contract is public. What they don’t see is the franchise valuation, the equity growth, the appreciation of the asset, and the many structural advantages ownership already enjoys. As a result, the first question many people ask is whether players make too much money. The more interesting question is why ownership needs more protections when it already holds so many advantages.

Ownership likes to talk about baseball as though it operates in a free market. It doesn’t. There is no competing major league. There are only 30 ownership groups. Thirty. That’s it. They control franchise locations, expansion, territorial rights, media agreements, and the structure of the sport itself. They operate under an antitrust exemption that businesses in most industries could only dream about.

The average franchise is now worth billions of dollars. Even teams that lose year after year continue to increase in value. Think about that for a minute. In most businesses, failure destroys value. In Major League Baseball, failure often still creates wealth.

Owners benefit from revenue sharing, national television contracts, sponsorship agreements, gambling partnerships, data licensing deals, and in many cases public assistance for stadium projects. Now private equity firms and institutional investors are lining up to get a piece of the action because they recognize baseball franchises for what they have become. Assets.

That is why I roll my eyes every time an owner starts talking about the need for a salary cap. A salary cap is not about competitive balance. It’s about cost control. If owners were truly concerned about competitive balance, they would be fighting just as hard for a meaningful salary floor as they do for a salary cap. They would be demanding that every owner spend enough money to put a competitive product on the field. Instead, the conversation is almost always about limiting what players can earn.

Funny how that works…

The Players Association has long argued that teams should be required to spend more of the money they receive. Ownership’s focus is almost always on spending less. That tells me everything I need to know.

What makes this even more frustrating is that ownership has spent years flattening the game itself. The ballparks are becoming more alike. The entertainment is becoming more alike. The sponsorships are becoming more alike. The between-inning promotions are becoming more alike. The local quirks, traditions, weirdness, and authentic fan culture that once made baseball special are slowly being sanded down in favor of the same corporate experience from city to city. The game has become increasingly centralized, increasingly controlled, and increasingly optimized. Now they want to optimize labor costs too.

One of the reasons I think so many American baseball fans have become fascinated with Japanese baseball is because it reminds them of what baseball used to feel like. The game itself is exactly the same. Ninety feet between bases. Three strikes. Three outs. Yet people come back from Japan talking about the atmosphere, the chants, the traditions, the connection between the fans and the team, and the feeling that the experience belongs to the people in the stands rather than a corporate marketing department.

Nobody comes home talking about salary caps. They talk about how much fun they had. They talk about how alive the game felt. That’s because baseball’s greatest challenge isn’t player salaries. It’s the gradual replacement of authentic culture with manufactured entertainment.

I don’t think most fans are blindly siding with ownership anymore. In fact, I think more fans than ever understand the business side of baseball. They see franchise values climbing into the billions. They see gambling partnerships everywhere. They see private equity entering the sport. They see owners asking for public money while the value of their teams continues to soar.

What I think is happening is something much simpler. Many fans are afraid of losing baseball. Baseball is different from almost every other sport. It isn’t a weekly event. It becomes part of your life. For six months, it is there every day. It’s on the radio during the drive home. It’s playing in the background while you’re making dinner. It’s the game you check during lunch. It’s the West Coast game you fall asleep watching at night. It becomes part of the rhythm of your day and part of the rhythm of the seasons.

When labor disputes happen, fans aren’t simply watching a fight between billionaires and millionaires. They are worried about losing something they genuinely love. They are worried about losing something that has become part of their routine, their memories, and in some cases their identity. I understand that fear because I feel it too.

That fear has often worked to ownership’s advantage. Fans become so concerned about preserving the game that they sometimes stop asking difficult questions about who is asking for what and why. Nobody wants another strike. Nobody wants another lockout. Nobody wants to look at an empty schedule in April.

The easiest response is to blame whichever side appears to be threatening baseball. The harder response is to step back and look at the economics honestly.

When I do that, I keep coming back to the same conclusion. Owners already possess enormous advantages. They already operate within one of the most protected and profitable business models in America. They already benefit from rising franchise values, revenue sharing, national media contracts, gambling revenue, sponsorship deals, and a legal monopoly.

The stars who sign massive contracts are easy targets because their salaries are public. Fans see the numbers and lose their minds. What they don’t see is the owner whose franchise increased in value by $500 million while everyone was arguing about a free agent contract.

Players earn income. Owners build equity. Those are two very different things.

A player may earn $300 million over an entire career. An owner may make several billion dollars simply because the asset appreciated while he sat in the owner’s box.

And here’s the part that really gets lost. The odds of becoming a Major League player are microscopic. Millions of kids play baseball. Only a tiny fraction ever reach the major leagues. An even smaller fraction stay long enough to earn significant money. Every player who reaches the big leagues has survived one of the most competitive talent pipelines in professional sports.

Most owners didn’t win that competition. Most owners made their money somewhere else. Finance. Real estate. Technology. Manufacturing. Inheritance. Then they bought a baseball team.

When fans complain about millionaire players while defending billionaire owners, they are often criticizing the people who actually won baseball’s hardest competition while defending the people who purchased the asset afterward. There are roughly 750 active Major League players and only 30 ownership groups. Yet somehow the discussion almost always circles back to what the players make rather than who controls the billions generated by the sport.

The absence of a salary cap is one of the few remaining checks on ownership power. Once a salary cap is in place, it never really goes away. Ownership gains another lever, another control, and another protection. And that’s the part I can’t get past.

Owners already have the antitrust exemption. They already have revenue sharing. They already have gambling revenue. They already have national media deals. They already have franchise values that continue to climb into the billions. They already operate within one of the most protected and profitable business models in America.

At some point, you have to stop calling it competitive balance and start calling it what it is. A desire to keep a larger share of the money. I don’t blame owners for wanting that. If I owned a team, I’d probably want it too, maybe, not sure if I am that greedy. But let’s stop pretending it’s about saving baseball. The game doesn’t need a salary cap. The owners want a salary cap.

Those are two very different things.

But holy shit, did they make baseball feel alive.

Billy Martin was out there chain-smoking heaters, fist fighting his own players, getting tossed before the National Anthem ended, and somehow, somefuckinghow, managing his ass off. The man wasn’t managing a team, he was managing a bar fight that never ended.

George Brett once came storming out of the dugout over pine tar like someone had insulted his mother in church. I mean full-speed, eyes-bulging, foam-at-the-mouth rage. Today, he’d be trending for three days and forced to issue an apology written by his PR team. Back then? It was Tuesday.

Pedro didn’t pitch with strategy. He pitched with vengeance. He’d brush you back, freeze you with a changeup, then grin like he was mentally filing away the next time he’d drill you in the ribs. And you respected it. Because that’s how it worked. You knew the rules even if they were never written.

And don’t even start with Ohtani.

You think Pedro Martínez would give a fuck about Shohei Ohtani?
Please.

Pedro would look at Ohtani the way a lion looks at a show horse—confused why everyone’s clapping for something that’s never been in a fight. He wouldn’t care about your WAR, your exit velocity, your two-way unicorn bullshit. Pedro would brush Ohtani back just to let him know, this ain’t Japan anymore, kid. You flip a bat on Pedro? You better run. He’d put one in your ribs and smile while doing it, then strike you out on a changeup and talk shit to your dugout in two languages.

And Judge?

Oh, Judge would be his bitch.

Pedro would see that big strike zone and think, finally, a real estate investment. He’d throw that 97mph heater under his hands, then drop a changeup that makes Judge spin out like he stepped on a rake. Pedro didn’t pitch to your strengths. He pitched to your nightmares.

He didn’t give a fuck about your endorsements. You could be 6'7", jacked, and perfectly polished, Pedro would cut you down like a weed in his perfectly manicured backyard.

Pedro didn’t pitch with respect. He pitched with rules, his god damn rules.

You crowd the plate, you wear one.

You show him up, you get the message.

You act like a superstar, you better earn it.

No bobblehead days. No charity strikes.
Just fastballs with consequences and changeups that told the truth.

Modern baseball couldn’t handle Pedro.
And Pedro wouldn’t try to handle modern baseball.

He’d burn it the fuck down.

These guys weren’t “brands.” These were men with grudges. Guys who hated striking out so much they’d punch a locker, the bat rack, maybe their own teammate. Guys who slid hard into second just because they didn’t like the way the shortstop looked at them. Guys who threw at you, dared you to charge, then fed you a mouthful of fist when you did.

Jack Morris once told his manager to sit down and shut the fuck up, he was finishing the game. And he did. Ten innings in a World Series game. No whining. No pitch counts. Just balls and willpower.

Rickey Henderson framed a million-dollar check because he didn’t need to cash it. Because Rickey doesn’t cash checks. Rickey remembers them.

Even the quiet ones were psychos. Randy Johnson killed a bird mid-pitch and barely blinked. He threw 99 with that serial killer glare and a mullet that looked like it had seen some shit. And when hitters stepped in? They knew. They fucking knew.

I miss that. I miss the unfiltered chaos. The imperfections. The fire. The absolute disregard for optics, algorithms, and “player image.” Guys were out there playing like every game might be their last and if it was, they were going to take someone down with them.

Now? Everyone’s best friends. They giggle on second base. They text each other after games. Bat flips are coordinated like TikToks. Pitchers scream when they strike out the ninth batter in a 10–1 game. And don’t get me wrong—I’m not mad at emotion. But this isn’t that. This is performance without danger.

The old guys weren’t “letting the kids play.” They were telling the kids to get the fuck off the lawn. You didn’t dance. You didn’t pose. You played hard or you got hit. That wasn’t toxic, it was accountability. You ran out the ground ball, or you got benched. You took a fastball off the spine and just jogged to first, because whining was weakness.

Maybe that’s the problem. Baseball’s gotten too polished. Too packaged. The dirt’s still there, but it doesn’t feel like it gets under the nails anymore.

I want the unhinged. The rogue. The guy who talks to his bat, flips off the fans, and drops a 12–6 curve just to humiliate you.

I want the fights that meant something.
I want the glares that gave you goosebumps.
I want baseball with bite, not just branding.

So yeah, maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe I’m just yelling into the void.
But I know what I saw. And I know what it felt like.

And today’s game?
It wouldn’t survive those guys.

Because they weren’t playing a game.
They were playing for keeps.

The Brewers are not some cute little “small-market miracle” story. They are not fucking lucky. They are not just catching lightning in a bottle every few years. What I see is one of the smartest and most operationally efficient organizations in professional sports, and I think a lot of baseball people completely miss why.

And it starts with Mark Attanasio.

Attanasio did not come from old baseball royalty. He came out of high-level finance, investment management, mergers and acquisitions, and organizational strategy. That matters because people from that world understand systems. They understand infrastructure. They understand information flow. They understand that sustainable success is usually built through process, alignment, and long-term thinking instead of emotional reactions and splashy bullshit moves designed to win a press conference.

The Brewers feel exactly like that.

The organization does not feel chaotic. It does not feel emotional. It does not feel like ownership is playing fantasy baseball every offseason. It feels intentional. It feels like the entire thing was designed from the top down to maximize intelligence, communication, development, efficiency, and adaptability.

Small market does not mean small thinking. In Milwaukee’s case, I think it forced them to think smarter than everybody else. If you cannot outspend the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, or New York Mets, then you better outlearn them, outprepare them, and outdevelop them.

And the Brewers do.

What I see is an organization obsessed with information and development. They appear to have built incredibly deep systems for player evaluation, biomechanics, analytics, communication, psychology, role optimization, pitching development, and catching development. And I do not think they are just studying their own players. I think they probably know more about players across professional baseball, including the minor leagues, than most fans can even comprehend.

When the Brewers trade for a player, it rarely feels random. It often feels like they already know exactly what the player is, what he is not, what is broken, what can be improved, and how they are going to attack the problem before he ever walks into the building.

That is not luck. That is organizational intelligence.

Fans act shocked when pitchers suddenly improve in Milwaukee. I am not shocked anymore. The Brewers do not just evaluate talent. They evaluate unrealized potential. They seem to identify correctable deficiencies better than most organizations in baseball, and then they build systems designed to unlock the player.

People hear “pitching lab” and think cameras, computers, and nerds staring at spin rates. I think it is much deeper than that. The Brewers appear to have built an entire ecosystem where scouting, coaching, analytics, biomechanics, sports science, communication, and player confidence all feed each other. That is not old-school baseball anymore. That is organizational engineering.

And then there is Pat Murphy.

Murphy makes perfect sense for this organization because he did not come out of some polished corporate baseball pipeline. He came from college baseball, places like Notre Dame and Arizona State where development, teaching, accountability, emotional management, and culture matter every single day. College coaches are different. They are teachers first. They build environments. They manage personalities constantly. They know how to develop human beings, not just fill out lineup cards.

Murphy manages like that.

He feels more like a great football coach mixed with a baseball lifer than some robotic modern MLB manager hiding behind analytics printouts. He understands who his stars are. He understands who his grinders are. He understands role players. He understands confidence. He understands pressure. He knows when to push players and when to back off.

And maybe most importantly, he adapts.

The Brewers are not trapped by ideology. If they need to play small ball, they fucking play small ball. If they need speed, they pressure teams. If they need bullpen dominance, they lean into it. If they need defense and run prevention, they prioritize it. They do not seem obsessed with proving one philosophy is “correct.” They just care about winning baseball games.

That flexibility is intelligence.

And honestly, the biggest thing I notice when I watch the Brewers is how efficient the entire organization feels. Not flashy. Not loud. Not desperate for attention. Just efficient as hell. Smart people doing smart fucking things.

A lot of MLB organizations are bloated bureaucracies full of politics, ego battles, disconnected departments, and people protecting their own careers instead of solving problems. Milwaukee feels different. The information appears connected. The departments appear aligned. Scouting seems connected to development. Development seems connected to coaching. Coaching seems connected to roster construction. Leadership seems connected to philosophy.

Everything feels intentional and over time, competence compounds. That is why the Brewers keep winning baseball games while half the country keeps acting surprised every season.

Mark my words, the Brewers will get hot in October one of these years and will get that elusive World Series title, now all my Brewers fans quit with the hating on me for my Dodgers fandom.

To understand why they land here, you have to understand what the Reds are supposed to represent. This is one of baseball’s foundational franchises. The Big Red Machine wasn’t just successful, it was central to the identity of the sport in the 1970s. Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Pete Rose, Tony Perez. Cincinnati baseball is supposed to feel proud, intense, historically aware. This is the franchise that opens the season with Opening Day treated like a civic holiday. That matters. The Reds are not supposed to feel small.

And yet, over the last decade-plus, ownership posture has often made them feel smaller than they should.

The Castellini family bought the team in 2006, and early on there was real energy. There were playoff appearances in the early 2010s. There were moments where it looked like the Reds could become one of those stable, mid-market franchises that consistently punched above weight. But over time, the organization drifted into a strange cycle of partial pushes followed by hesitation, followed by resets that never fully committed in either direction.

That’s the defining problem here, not tanking, not incompetence. HALF MEASURES…

The Reds have had legitimate talent come through the organization over the years. Joey Votto became one of the defining hitters of his generation, and instead of building sustained contenders around him, ownership often felt content hovering near relevance. Then came rebuilds framed as strategic patience, followed by moments where the club hinted at aggression before pulling back again.

And then there was the quote.

In 2022, after fan backlash over payroll decisions and organizational direction, team president Phil Castellini responded to criticism with, “Where are you gonna go?” It instantly became one of the most revealing ownership-adjacent comments in baseball over the last decade. What an asshole, it sounded like a franchise talking to its fans as trapped customers instead of emotional stakeholders.

Fan alignment fractures when ownership begins speaking like loyalty is guaranteed regardless of behavior. This isn’t a market incapable of supporting baseball. Cincinnati cares deeply about the Reds. But caring deeply also means people notice when the organization feels content operating in the middle. Too often the Reds have acted like a franchise trying to remain respectable instead of dangerous.

And over an 11-year evaluation window, that adds up. The Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays showed what sustained organizational seriousness can look like in smaller or mid-sized markets. Cincinnati has had moments of that seriousness, but not enough continuity behind it.

The Reds also suffer in the Long-Term Vision category because the organizational arc has repeatedly felt interrupted. Push a little. Reset. Push a little. Reset again. It never fully locked into a coherent identity over the last decade.

And yet, they don’t fall lower because there are still signs of baseball life here. The fan base still cares. The history still matters. The young talent cycles have not been devoid of hope. This isn’t a dead franchise. It’s a frustrated one.

The Reds don’t feel cynical in the way the bottom tier does, they feel unresolved.

Competitive Intent and Effort: 23. Some pushes, but too much hesitation and too many half-measures during potential windows.

Fan Alignment and Honesty: 24. The Castellini comments and payroll messaging damaged trust significantly.

Cultural Fit to the Area: 20. Cincinnati’s baseball culture remains strong, but ownership posture has often felt smaller than the market’s passion.

Financial Integrity and Revenue Use: 23. Mid-tier spending without sustained competitive escalation.

Labor Ethics and Organizational Culture: 22. Not dysfunctional, but lacking the internal sharpness of better-run mid-market clubs.

Long-Term Vision and Stability: 24. Repeated resets and interrupted arcs prevented sustained identity.

Integrity and Accountability: 22. No major scandal, but public-facing posture at times felt dismissive.

Relationship to History and the Game: 18. The Reds’ legacy still carries enormous weight, even if modern stewardship hasn’t matched it.

Impact on the Health of Baseball: 22. More frustrating than damaging, but prolonged mediocrity from a foundational franchise weakens league energy.

Composite Score: 198 out of 270
Overall Rank: 23

The Reds are not at the bottom because they still feel connected to baseball history and community in a real way, but over the last decade-plus, too often they’ve behaved like a franchise trying not to fail instead of one determined to matter and for a team with this much history, that should bother people more than it does.

Rankings so far:

30 — Oakland Athletics
29 — Miami Marlins
28 — Pittsburgh Pirates
27 — Colorado Rockies
26 — Chicago White Sox
25 — Los Angeles Angels
24 — Detroit Tigers
23 — Cincinnati Reds

To understand it, you have to start with ownership history, because Detroit is not some passive baseball market. Under Mike Ilitch, the Tigers pushed. They spent aggressively on Miguel Cabrera, Justin Verlander, and Max Scherzer, they built rosters that expected to win, they treated contention like an obligation, not a surprise. They didn’t win a World Series in that era, but they were present. They were relevant. They behaved like a franchise that believed it belonged in October.

Then Mike Ilitch passed, and Christopher Ilitch took over. The posture didn’t collapse. It just softened. The teardown that followed was real. From roughly 2017 through the early 2020s, the Tigers stripped the roster, accumulated high draft picks, and leaned fully into rebuilding. That part is defensible. That’s what you’re supposed to do when a window closes.

But a rebuild isn’t judged by how well you lose, it’s judged by what you do when it’s time to stop losing.

Detroit has had real assets come through that pipeline. High draft picks. Pitching prospects with legitimate ceilings. Position players that looked like pieces. There were moments where the rebuild stopped being theoretical and started to look like a foundation. And that’s where ownership posture matters most.

Because that’s when you decide if the losing years meant something.

Instead of a clear pivot into acceleration, what you got felt like a slow easing forward. Incremental moves. Careful spending. Short-term additions that didn’t fully commit to a competitive arc. It never felt like the Tigers looked at their own roster and said, “Now.” It felt like they kept saying, “Soon.” And “soon” is a dangerous word in baseball.

The Kansas City Royals went through a rebuild and then pushed hard into their window. The Baltimore Orioles endured years of losing and are now clearly transitioning into aggressive contention. You can see the shift. You can feel the urgency, with Detroit, the shift has been harder to find.

This isn’t about demanding reckless spending. It’s about alignment. If you lose for years to build something, then when the talent arrives you act cautiously, you create a disconnect. Players feel it. Fans feel it. The city feels it. Detroit is not a market that rewards passive progression. It respects effort. It respects edge. It respects when a team acts like it gives a damn.

And for long stretches of this rebuild, it hasn’t felt like ownership was in a hurry to prove anything.

That shows up in the categories.

Competitive Intent and Effort lands in the mid-20s because the rebuild was real, but the transition out of it has lacked urgency. The Tigers did the hard part, but haven’t attacked the next phase with conviction.

Fan Alignment and Honesty sits slightly better, because the messaging around rebuilding has generally been consistent, but timelines stretched, and when timelines stretch without visible escalation, belief starts to erode.

Cultural Fit to the Area drops because Detroit is a proud, hard-edged sports city. Extended drifting between “almost ready” and “not quite there” doesn’t land well in a place that values fight.

Financial Integrity sits in that same middle zone. The Tigers aren’t bottom-of-the-barrel spenders, but they also haven’t used their resources to accelerate the rebuild when the opportunity was there.

Labor and Organizational Culture feels incomplete. There are pieces. There is development. But it hasn’t locked into something that feels stable and competitive at the same time.

Long-Term Vision is where the real tension sits. There was a plan to tear it down. That part worked. The second half of the plan, the part where you turn that into sustained contention, still feels unresolved.

Integrity and Accountability are fine in the sense that there’s no scandal, no major breach, but also no visible urgency from ownership to push the franchise forward when it matters.

Relationship to History is complicated. The Tigers have one of the more respected legacies in the American League, but it hasn’t been actively leveraged to create a sense of present identity. It feels more like something behind them than something they’re building from.

Impact on the Health of Baseball is neutral to slightly negative. Prolonged non-competitiveness after a full rebuild doesn’t damage the sport dramatically, but it doesn’t strengthen it either.

All of that lands them right where they are.

Not broken.

Not irrelevant.

Not serious enough.

The Tigers didn’t fail the rebuild.

They just haven’t finished it.

And if you spend years tearing something down and then hesitate when it’s time to build it back up, that’s not patience.

That’s uncertainty.

And after a decade, uncertainty is a choice.

Rankings so far:
30 — Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas A’s
29 — Miami Marlins
28 — Pittsburgh Pirates
27 — Colorado Rockies
26 — Chicago White Sox
25 — Los Angeles Angels
24 — Detroit Tigers

Arte Moreno bought the team in 2003 and brought energy, visibility, and a willingness to spend. He wasn’t hiding from the job, and that’s part of what makes this harder to explain away. Over the 2015 to 2025 window, spending without structure became the defining flaw, and that’s a deeper problem than being cheap. Cheap teams can point to limits. The Angels never had that cover. They had Mike Trout, arguably the best all-around player of his generation, and Shohei Ohtani, a player so singular the sport had to rethink how it measures value. They overlapped for six seasons, in a major market, with real payroll flexibility, and the result was one playoff appearance and zero postseason wins.

At some point the fallback line that baseball is hard stops carrying weight. The randomness of October only matters if you can get there with something that holds together. This wasn’t a small market getting squeezed or a roster gutted by scandal or a rebuild that ran out of time. This was an organization that never built a durable system around elite talent. Not a contender that fell short. Not a window that closed too quickly. A decade that never formed into anything coherent enough to even test itself in October.

Moreno’s fingerprint is everywhere, not in neglect but in constant presence without clear structure. Big headline contracts for position players that felt like statements more than solutions. A pitching pipeline that never stabilized and never gave the roster a foundation. First-time general managers cycling through without a unifying philosophy above them. No empowered president of baseball operations to set direction and enforce it. Owner involvement at the wrong altitude, where influence replaces clarity. Managers coming and going, trade deadlines approached like reactions instead of plans. The Angels weren’t passive. They were incoherent, and in modern baseball incoherence at the top turns into inconsistency on the field, and inconsistency over a decade becomes identity.

Even the sale saga carried the same tone. Moreno publicly explored selling the team, framed it as the right moment for transition, then reversed course months later citing unfinished business. The message landed the same way everything else did, unresolved and unclear. Meanwhile, Ohtani leaves and says winning is his priority, which reads less like free agency language and more like a final evaluation of the environment he just left. Trout stays, loyal in a way that reflects on him more than the organization, but loyalty cannot replace direction, and it cannot create a system that was never built.

The payroll dollars were real. The effort, at least on the surface, was real. But the architecture never existed, and that’s the failure. If you cannot build a sustainable contender around Trout and Ohtani, in that market, with that ownership willingness to spend, then what exactly is the operating model. What is the plan beyond the next headline move. Because it never looked like a system designed to win over time.

The Angels are not villains in the dramatic sense. There’s no scandal to point to, no single moment that defines the fall. It’s quieter than that, and in some ways worse. In a sport built on scarcity, where greatness is rare and windows are short, they were handed something almost no franchise ever gets, and they let it dissolve into mediocrity. That’s not just failure. That’s waste.

Competitive Intent and Effort: 23. The Angels spent and tried, but effort without structure kept collapsing under its own weight.

Fan Alignment and Honesty: 23. The message was always that contention was close, even as the results kept proving it wasn’t.

Cultural Fit to the Area: 22. Southern California rewards stars, but it ultimately demands winning, and the Angels never converted one into the other.

Financial Integrity and Revenue Use: 24. The money was there, but the allocation never matched the actual needs of building a complete roster.

Labor Ethics and Organizational Culture: 24. Turnover and shifting direction created instability and prevented continuity.

Long-Term Vision and Stability: 25. A star-driven approach never evolved into a system-driven organization.

Integrity and Accountability: 23. No scandal, but repeated strategic misfires without structural correction is its own form of avoidance.

Relationship to History and the Game: 22. The 2002 championship stands, but the Trout-Ohtani era will be remembered more for what it failed to become.

Impact on the Health of Baseball: 24. The sport lost one of its most compelling potential narratives because the team around it never held up.

Composite Score: 210 out of 270.
Overall Rank: 25.

Reinsdorf has owned the White Sox since 1981, which means more than four decades of control, one of the longest tenures in Major League Baseball, and this is not an owner unfamiliar with greatness, because he owned the Bulls during the Michael Jordan era and has seen what elite looks like up close, which is what makes what has happened on the South Side feel less like misfortune and more like a choice, a quiet acceptance that the White Sox do not have to be what they could be.

This is not a secondary franchise without roots, this is a charter American League team, a franchise that carries the weight of 1917, the stain of 1919, the importance of Minnie Miñoso, and the authority of the 2005 World Series run, and that team was built with conviction and clarity, not luck, which is why what followed feels so hollow, because instead of raising the standard or creating sustained pressure to remain at that level, the organization drifted back into that soft middle where relevance can be sold without ever committing to excellence.

From 2006 through 2015 they lived in that space, close enough to matter but never serious enough to demand anything more, and then came the rebuild in 2016, with Sale gone, Eaton gone, Quintana gone, and the promise of discipline and direction, tear it down, build it correctly, sell patience in exchange for something real, and for a moment it worked, because by 2020 and 2021 the White Sox had a young core that should have forced ownership to act like a major market powerhouse, with Anderson, Robert, Jiménez, Moncada, and Giolito, along with a division title and a postseason appearance, and a window that was no longer theoretical but open and demanding action.

That is where ownership reveals itself, not in the rebuild but in what comes next, and what came next was hesitation, with payroll that never pushed into the tier it should have, and a franchise in Chicago behaving like it needed to protect itself instead of pressing forward, not poor, not incapable, just unwilling to fully commit, and unwilling to treat the moment with the urgency it deserved.

Then came the move that told you everything, the hiring of Tony La Russa, which was not a decision built for the roster, not aligned with the era, and not reflective of where the game is going, but instead a comfort hire, a personal decision wrapped in experience, nostalgia over alignment, familiarity over evolution, ownership preference over organizational coherence, with a 76-year-old manager stepping into a young clubhouse that needed energy and clarity and instead receiving something pulled from another time.

That decision was not just a mistake, it was a signal, because it showed that this franchise was still being run through the lens of one man’s comfort rather than the demands of the modern game, and the team followed that path not upward but into decay, and by 2023 and 2024 the White Sox were not merely disappointing, they were embarrassing, because a rebuild that should have created sustained contention instead produced a brief spike followed by collapse, and that is not randomness or bad luck, that is failure at the ownership level, because when the window opened it was not reinforced, it was not sharpened, it was left to fade.

What makes this worse is where it is happening, because this is not Oakland, not Tampa, and not a franchise fighting structural limitations, this is Chicago, with market size, corporate base, television reach, and a fan base that shows up and cares, which means there are no excuses here and no safety net to hide behind, because this is not a resource issue, it is a conviction issue.

Reinsdorf talks about loyalty and stability and about standing by people, and those ideas can sound admirable, but in practice they have translated into inertia, into holding on too long, resisting change when it is clearly needed, and confusing comfort with wisdom, which is how you end up with a franchise that feels fine being competitive adjacent instead of actually dangerous, fine living between 75 and 85 wins, and fine asking fans for patience while offering nothing that justifies it.

Other organizations do not hide from that moment, because Milwaukee pushes its windows, Tampa weaponizes its constraints, and Cleveland extracts every ounce of value and keeps finding its way back, while the White Sox did the hardest part by rebuilding, developing a core, and opening the window, and then ownership failed the next step, the one that proves whether any of it was meant to lead somewhere.

Competitive intent comes in at 25, because the rebuild was real but the follow through was not, fan alignment at 22 because they sold sustained contention and delivered collapse, cultural fit at 21 because the South Side deserves urgency and instead gets drift, financial integrity at 23 because a major market acted like it needed to play small, organizational culture at 22 because misalignment at the top bled into the roster, long term vision at 23 because a plan stalled when it needed conviction, accountability at 22 because there was no scandal but far too little urgency in response to obvious decline, relationship to history at 20 because the past still matters but cannot carry the present, and impact on the game at 22 because when a Chicago franchise wastes this much opportunity it reflects on the league.

That lands them at 200 out of 270, firmly in the bottom tier, not because they lack advantages but because they wasted them, and that distinction matters.

Oakland is decay, Miami is instability, Pittsburgh is fear, Colorado is confusion, and the White Sox are something else entirely, they are squandered opportunity, and that word matters because squandered means it was there, it was real, it was within reach, and it was let go anyway.

This is not about one bad season or one bad hire, it is about a pattern, a philosophy, and a decade where the franchise had every reason to become something and instead chose to remain comfortable, and at some point fans have to stop being told to be patient and start asking what exactly they are being patient for.

Because the South Side has shown up, it always has, through bad teams, through good ones, and through everything in between, and what it has gotten back over the last decade is not urgency, not commitment, and not a demand to be great, it has gotten a franchise that feels fine being almost.

In a market like this, with this history and this opportunity, is not an accident, it is a decision. The White Sox are not 26 because they cannot be better, they are 26 because they have not been required to be, and until that changes, until ownership feels pressure instead of comfort, until winning becomes expectation instead of possibility, nothing else really will, that is the truth sitting underneath all of this.

From the beginning, the city did its part, when the Rockies arrived in 1993, Denver didn’t hesitate, it showed up immediately and loudly, Coors Field became a destination before the organization had earned it, the Blake Street Bombers turned baseball into a nightly event, Dante Bichette and Larry Walker didn’t just produce offense, they created identity, the game felt alive there in a way expansion teams rarely achieve.

Then came 2007, Rocktober was not just a run, it was a signal, a team caught fire, rode momentum all the way into the World Series, and showed that Denver could matter when the games meant something, that matters because it strips away the usual excuses, the market is there, the fan base is there, the appetite is there, what has been missing is direction.

And that is where this gets uncomfortable, the Monfort family has never been invisible, Dick Monfort speaks, he shows up, he presents as someone who cares deeply about the team and the city, that sincerity is real, and that is exactly why the failure lands heavier, this is not indifference, this is conviction without clarity, and over time, that becomes something worse than neglect, it becomes an organization that believes it is right while consistently being wrong.

The Rockies had a real window, not a theoretical one that analysts like to project, a real one you could feel, back to back postseason appearances in 2017 and 2018, Nolan Arenado in his prime, a roster that for a moment stopped being swallowed by Coors Field and instead learned how to survive it, that moment demanded alignment, it demanded escalation, it demanded that ownership recognize what it had and push, instead, the organization fractured itself.

The extension of Arenado was supposed to signal commitment, what followed exposed confusion, internal doubt, direction that shifted depending on who was speaking, and then the move to the St. Louis Cardinals, a trade that didn’t just send away a franchise player, it told everyone paying attention that the Rockies did not believe in their own timeline, when a player of that caliber leaves not because of market limitations but because of belief, that lands squarely at the top.

What followed has been one of the most confusing stretches of ownership behavior in modern baseball, the Rockies are not cheap, which almost makes this worse, they spend, but they spend without structure, contracts appear disconnected from roster reality, investments are made without a clear competitive arc, messaging remains confident while results drift in a familiar range of irrelevance, this is not Oakland dismantling, this is not Miami cycling, this is not Pittsburgh choosing restraint, this is a franchise operating as if intention alone is enough.

And it shows up in the one place ownership cannot hide, adaptation, for three decades, the Rockies have known that Coors Field fundamentally alters the game, pitching behaves differently, development has to be different, roster construction has to be different, there is no excuse for not having a defined, repeatable model by now, instead, they oscillate, at times they act like the environment does not matter, at other times they overcorrect and let it dictate everything, there is no sustained philosophy, no identity that carries from player development to roster construction to in-game strategy, just reaction.

That is not a front office issue, that is ownership, ownership sets tolerance, ownership sets urgency, ownership decides whether continuity is strength or an excuse, in Colorado, continuity has become insulation, loyalty has been extended past the point where it serves performance, familiarity has replaced accountability, over time, that takes hold into something quiet but destructive, stagnation that feels stable.

The most damning part is this, the fan experience is still strong, Coors Field still fills, the atmosphere still holds, people still show up because baseball in Denver is still a good night out, and ownership has leaned on that, not explicitly, not in a way they would ever say out loud, but in a way that shows up in behavior, the urgency never quite matches the opportunity, the pressure never quite builds to a breaking point, the organization exists in a space where being good enough to draw is allowed to coexist with being nowhere near good enough to contend, that is a choice.

So the question becomes unavoidable, what is the plan, not the public version, not the optimistic framing, the actual plan, the one that connects development, roster construction, spending, and identity into something that can be repeated, after thirty years, there isn’t one.

And that absence shows up in the scorecard, competitive intent lands at 26 because the pushes have been episodic, not sustained, fan alignment sits at 25 because the gap between what is said and what is delivered has widened, especially after Arenado, cultural fit earns a 23 because the roots in Colorado are real but execution continues to lag behind the environment, financial integrity comes in at 25, the money exists but it moves without cohesion, labor and organizational culture sits at 25, where loyalty has preserved continuity at the cost of evolution, long term vision is a 26 because there is still no repeatable model for winning at altitude, integrity and accountability lands at 24, absent scandal but marked by explanations that circle issues rather than confront them, relationship to history is a 24, with 2007 still doing too much of the work, impact on the health of the game is a 25, because a strong market living in sustained mediocrity drags on the league more than people admit.

That totals 223 out of 270, above the bottom tier, but that distinction feels technical, because the real difference is this, Oakland was stripped down, Miami resets in cycles, Pittsburgh chose caution and let it harden, Colorado has chosen belief without adjustment.

They are not villains, that would be easier to explain, they are something more frustrating, a franchise with every condition necessary to matter that has spent a decade convincing itself that it already understands why it doesn’t, at some point, that stops being a phase, it becomes identity, and that is why they sit at 27.

History matters here in a way it doesn’t for every franchise, because this isn’t some interchangeable brand trying to find relevance, this is Honus Wagner, this is Bill Mazeroski, this is Roberto Clemente, whose presence still defines how the sport talks about responsibility and humanity. The 1971 Pirates changed what a lineup could look like, and the 1979 team carried a city in a way that went beyond wins and losses, which is exactly why stagnation lands heavier here than it does in a place like Miami, because there is something real underneath it that people still recognize.

The city held up its end of the deal. Public money helped build PNC Park, and it isn’t a relic or an excuse or a place that needs to be replaced, it’s one of the best settings in baseball, a civic jewel that gave ownership a stage most franchises would envy. When Bob Nutting assumed control in 2007, he stepped into a situation that already had stability, a new ballpark, and a fan base that had endured two decades of losing but was still waiting for a reason to believe again.

That reason finally showed up between 2013 and 2015, when the Pirates broke through with three straight postseason appearances and back-to-back ninety win seasons, and that Wild Card game in 2013 felt less like a single night and more like a release of everything that had been building for twenty years. That was the window, the moment when the evaluation really begins, because the question shifts from whether you can get there to what you do once you are there.

Milwaukee leaned in. Tampa leaned in. Pittsburgh stepped back.

The Milwaukee Brewers, under Mark Attanasio, recognized their window and treated it like something that needed to be extended, not protected, trading for major league help, locking in pitching, and running payroll higher than strict market math would suggest, not recklessly but with intent, acting like contention windows are meant to be pushed. The Tampa Bay Rays, operating with even tighter constraints and a worse stadium situation, built an infrastructure that keeps them relevant year after year, reaching a World Series in 2020 and treating limitations like problems to solve rather than ceilings to accept.

Pittsburgh treated the window like something to manage carefully until it passed.

After 2015 there was no aggressive reinforcement, no meaningful payroll stretch to extend the run, and over time the core dissolved, with Andrew McCutchen, Gerrit Cole, and Starling Marte all moved without any real signal from ownership that urgency existed. You don’t need to argue it emotionally because the payroll data tells the story cleanly, with the Pirates sitting in the bottom third, and at times the bottom five, across multiple seasons from 2016 through 2025, all while league revenues climbed past ten billion dollars and franchise values surged.

Milwaukee didn’t behave like that. Tampa didn’t behave like that. Pittsburgh often chose to operate near the floor.

Revenue sharing is designed to support competitive balance, not to protect ownership margins, and when a publicly supported franchise continues to run bottom-tier payrolls during a period of league-wide financial expansion, the question stops being about capability and becomes one of intent. The city helped finance the ballpark, the fans showed up when given a reason, and the league structure provided support, so when ownership leans on language like sustainability and patience, it lands differently when the pattern shows consistent caution at the exact moments when aggression would have mattered most.

Even inside the clubhouse, the tone suggests a higher bar than what has been delivered, with Paul Skenes brushing aside nostalgia about the 2013 Wild Card game as if it represents something insufficient rather than something to be celebrated, which is a subtle but important shift because it shows that the expectation internally may already exceed what ownership has been willing to match.

The scorecard reflects that reality more than any single narrative ever could. Competitive intent sits at 28 because the Pirates did not push when they were close and have not sustained relevance since. Fan alignment lands at 27 because the messaging has emphasized patience while the experience has been cycles of rebuilding. Cultural fit comes in at 24 because Pittsburgh will accept hardship but expects visible effort, and caution rarely reads as effort in a city built on grit. Financial integrity lands at 28 given the combination of revenue-sharing support and repeated bottom-tier payroll positioning during a revenue boom. Labor and organizational culture sit at 26, acknowledging improvements in development but also the erosion that comes with constant turnover. Long-term vision lands at 27, where the philosophy is articulated but not executed at the level demonstrated by Milwaukee and Tampa. Integrity and accountability come in at 26, absent scandal but defined by a consistent pattern of conservatism framed as prudence. Relationship to history earns a 22 because Clemente’s legacy is still respected, and that matters. Impact on the health of the game lands at 27, because a historic franchise in a strong baseball city spending a decade largely outside serious contention affects the credibility of the league.

That produces a composite score of 235 out of 270, placing Pittsburgh above Miami and Oakland but still firmly in the bottom tier.

The distinction is straightforward when stripped down. Oakland reflects contraction and portability, Miami reflects instability and broken trust cycles, and Pittsburgh reflects restraint that has hardened into stagnation, while Milwaukee and Tampa demonstrate that restraint does not have to mean retreat because they operate under the same structural conditions and choose aggression within those limits, whereas the Pirates choose caution, and over time that choice becomes identity, and identity becomes record.

That is why the Pittsburgh Pirates sit at 28.

Not because they are a small market, not because Miami does not “get baseball”, not because the fans are fickle. That’s the lazy take people use when they don’t feel like thinking.

They sit at 29 because this franchise has spent three decades teaching its own market to distrust it. They have trained fans to expect betrayal as a business model. They have won two World Series and still managed to feel like a franchise without a stable identity. That combination should be impossible. Yet here we are.

If the A’s at 30 are the modern symbol of contraction and portability, the Marlins at 29 are the modern symbol of instability as operating philosophy.

And it starts at the top.

The first owner was Wayne Huizenga, the South Florida titan who helped bring baseball to the region. He didn’t arrive as a baseball romantic. He arrived as a businessman with a regional vision and a willingness to spend when the moment called for it. In 1997 he went for it hard. The Marlins won the World Series in their fifth season of existence. That should have been the birth of a generational fan base. It should have been the moment Miami became anchored to baseball the way other cities are anchored to the game.

Instead it became the origin story of cynicism.

Huizenga used the title run and then detonated the roster. The first modern fire sale. He made the argument that he couldn’t keep bleeding cash without a stadium and the revenue streams that come with it. He said you shouldn’t fall in love with a team. That line is one of the most revealing ownership quotes in the sport because it tells you exactly how he saw it. A roster is not a relationship. It is inventory. That teardown didn’t just trade players. It broke the emotional contract with the market before it ever had a chance to harden into tradition.

John Henry owned the club briefly after that. His tenure matters mostly because it reinforces how early the franchise became trapped in the stadium narrative. Henry wanted a ballpark, didn’t get what he wanted, and effectively moved on. The ownership position itself felt temporary. The franchise wasn’t being built. It was being negotiated.

Then Jeffrey Loria arrives, and this is where the story becomes a cautionary tale. Loria was an art dealer, combative, controlling, and widely resented even before he showed up because of how the Expos era ended. Yet in 2003, under Loria, the Marlins won again. A second World Series title in seven years. That should have changed everything. It should have turned the Marlins into a durable institution.

Instead it doubled the damage. Because even a second championship didn’t produce continuity. It produced another cycle.

As contracts came due and payroll pressure rose, the teardown instinct returned. The franchise moved core pieces and reset again. Then came the 2012 moment, and this is where the Marlins become one of the most important ownership case studies in modern baseball.

The stadium.

Marlins Park, now loanDepot Park, sits in Little Havana on the old Orange Bowl site. The symbolism should have been perfect. Miami is a deeply Latin city. Baseball is a deeply Latin sport. A retractable roof solves Miami weather. A modern, baseball-first park should have anchored the franchise for fifty years. But the financing turned it into a civic scar.

The public shouldered the overwhelming share of the cost through long-term bonds. Once interest is counted, the taxpayer burden balloons massively over decades. The deal triggered political blowback, lawsuits, and public anger that outlived the stadium’s construction. It became a national example of how not to build a public-private partnership. And then the franchise compounded the injury by breaking its promise almost immediately.

In the lead-up to the stadium opening, the Marlins sold a new era. Rebrand. Flash. Big signings. Miami identity turned up to eleven. Colorful everything. The home run sculpture. The nightclub vibe. The message was clear. We’re back. We’re serious. This will be different.

Then one bad season later, the roster was gutted.

If you want the human cost of that betrayal, you use José Reyes. He described being encouraged by ownership to settle in Miami, to buy a home, to build a life there, and then being traded almost immediately. You can hear the disbelief in the quote because he was processing the same thing the fans had already learned. This franchise will market hope and then sell the parts.

If you want the quote that should be engraved on the tombstone of Marlins trust, you use David Samson. Samson bragged publicly about how the stadium deal was negotiated and then said the quiet part out loud. He said they didn’t care if nobody came, they would play in front of nobody and still have the money. That line matters because it reveals a worldview. Once the stadium revenue streams exist, fan loyalty becomes optional. That is not how civic ownership speaks. That is how extraction speaks.

And then Loria sells the team for a massive windfall after the stadium is built. That is the part that still burns for people. The public assumes the risk, and the owner captures the upside. That perception is poison, even when the legal contracts are airtight. Fans don’t care about the contract. They care about the morality of the transaction.

Then Bruce Sherman buys the franchise in 2017 and brings Derek Jeter in as the face. This is important because it was supposed to cleanse the franchise. Jeter is a symbol of winning culture, professionalism, and long-term credibility. His presence was supposed to signal stability and seriousness. The new regime promised sustainability. The franchise told Miami, in effect, we understand you don’t trust us. We’re going to earn it back.

And then they immediately pressed the reset button again.

Stanton gone. Yelich gone. Ozuna gone. Realmuto gone. The most marketable core in years was shipped out quickly. Yes, you can defend it as necessary teardown after Loria’s mess. But the problem is Miami has heard that song too many times. Every new ownership group claims it inherited a mess and needs time. The fans have been asked for time since 1998.

Jeter said at the town hall that he couldn’t sit there and say trust me. He was right. And that line is the indictment. A franchise with two championships had reached a point where its ownership had to ask for trust like it was an expansion team. That is not a fan problem. That is an ownership history problem.

Then Jeter resigns. He says the vision for the future is different than the one he signed up to lead. That matters because it suggests the ceiling is still structural. It suggests that even a guy like Jeter, the embodiment of winning expectations, could not reconcile his concept of competitiveness with the ownership group’s appetite for spending and risk.

Now we hit payroll, because the payroll story is the simplest way to show posture.

The Marlins have repeatedly spiked spending in short bursts and then collapsed it. It happened after 1997. It happened after 2003. It happened after 2012. The pattern is not that they never spend. The pattern is that they spend, sell the hope, and then pull the plug.

The 2012 stadium season is the cleanest example. They spent to create the illusion of a new era and then traded it away immediately. That wasn’t just baseball strategy. That was a breach of trust during a public-financed moment when trust was the only currency they had left.

MLB revenues surged past $10 billion annually in the modern era. Franchise valuations have exploded. Miami’s stadium situation is resolved. They have the asset. They have the roof. They have the city branding. The structural excuses are thinner than they used to be.

Now bring in the Tampa Bay comparison, because it destroys the lazy “small market” narrative.

Tampa Bay exists under similar Florida conditions. It has revenue-sharing support. It has stadium uncertainty. It has payroll constraints. And it has been a sustained contender because it treats constraint as a discipline problem, not an excuse to reset the franchise identity every time payroll gets uncomfortable.

The Rays use revenue sharing as competitive oxygen. The Marlins have too often used it as insulation while the reset button gets worn down to the plastic.

Now the scorecard, with the why embedded in each number the same way we did for the A’s.

Competitive Intent and Effort: 29. The Marlins have not demonstrated sustained commitment to staying in a window once it opens. Their history is ignition followed by demolition. Two titles, and still no sustained era. That is the definition of unstable competitiveness.

Fan Alignment and Honesty: 29. The franchise has repeatedly sold a story it did not support with behavior. Stadium promises followed by a roster dump. New ownership promises followed by another teardown. Trust is the product. They have repeatedly shipped it out of town.

Cultural Fit to the Area: 27. Miami is global, Latin, intense, stylish, and skeptical. The Marlins have tried to market their way into that identity through spectacle, color, and vibe. But cultural fit requires authenticity. Nothing kills authenticity faster than a franchise that constantly reboots its identity and treats stars like temporary assets.

Financial Integrity and Revenue Use: 29. The stadium financing left a permanent scar, and the franchise’s spending posture has too often signaled that ownership would rather reset than risk. The perception, fair or not, is that the public assumed risk and ownership captured upside. Perception is reality when you’re trying to build loyalty.

Labor Ethics and Organizational Culture: 28. Constant churn is a workplace condition. Managers turned over. Front offices changed. Star players were moved. Jeter resigning over vision differences matters here. So does the steady league-wide perception that Miami is not a stable destination.

Long-Term Vision and Stability: 28. The Marlins do not build arcs. They build resets. Even the moments that should have anchored stability, two championships and a new stadium, were followed by chaos.

Integrity and Accountability: 28. The organization has repeatedly externalized blame. Market. Attendance. Politics. Miami. Stadium. Accountability is not just admitting reality. It is absorbing responsibility in a way that builds trust. That has been rare.

Relationship to History and the Game: 26. Two championships exist, but the franchise never allowed those moments to become a durable civic identity. In other cities, history becomes a spine. In Miami, history has often been treated like a highlight reel that doesn’t obligate the present.

Impact on the Health of Baseball: 28. Baseball needs Miami to be alive. Miami is a global baseball city, a gateway market, and a cultural engine. The Marlins’ repeated instability weakens the league’s footprint in a region the sport should dominate.

That is why they are 29.

Composite Score: 252 out of 270

Not because Miami cannot support baseball. Miami has proven it can, when it believes. Not because the Marlins cannot win. They have proven they can, twice. Not because the stadium is badly located. It’s in a culturally important neighborhood and it should have been the anchor.

They are 29 because ownership behavior taught the market to stop caring as a defense mechanism.

The A’s at 30 are the story of a legacy institution being shrunk and made portable. The Marlins at 29 are the story of a market that was never allowed to form a stable bond because ownership kept treating the franchise like a short-term project.

Two titles. One stadium. Thirty years.

Still asking fans to trust.

That is the indictment.

And that is why the Miami Marlins sit at 29.

Overall

29. Miami: 252

30. Oakland: 268

Baseball is not a business. It is a business wrapped around something that was never fucking meant to be one, and the people who own it have either forgotten that distinction or decided it no longer matters. That difference is not philosophical. It is structural. Because the moment you treat baseball as nothing more than a business, you begin stripping away the very things that gave it value in the first place.

And here is where the argument collapses under its own weight. You do not own a normal business. You operate under a federally protected antitrust exemption that has existed for over a century, an exemption that has allowed you to control structure, limit competition, dictate franchise movement, and maintain a system that would not survive in a true open market.

So, when you say, “it’s a business,” the obvious question becomes, which kind?

Because if you want to be treated like a business, then act like one. Give up the exemption. Open the market. Let competitors form leagues. Let cities build their own systems. Let the game exist without your centralized control. But do not pretend that doing so would suddenly create a level playing field. You have had a century-long head start, protected and reinforced by the very exemption you now ignore when it is convenient. You control the teams, the territories, the media rights, the farm systems, the infrastructure, and most importantly, the history. You own the timeline.

Yes, there are other leagues, but that does not make your system open. Those leagues exist outside your structure, not within it, and no new team can simply join yours. Entry into Major League Baseball is not determined by merit, demand, or market opportunity. It is controlled, restricted, and granted at your discretion. Entire cities can be locked out indefinitely, not because they lack fans or support, but because they are not invited. That is not how a real market works. In any true business environment, if there is demand, supply can respond. New entrants challenge incumbents. Competition forces evolution. In your world, access is permission-based.

That is not competition. That is control.

And any new league that tried to compete would not be stepping into a neutral environment. It would be competing against a century of protected dominance, entrenched loyalty, exclusive media ecosystems, and a cultural monopoly that was never forced to defend itself in an open system. That is not capitalism. That is a moat you did not build alone. It was fucking given to you, reinforced by law, and maintained without real competition.

With that comes something you keep trying to avoid. Responsibility.

The problem is not that baseball generates revenue. The problem is that ownership and the league have allowed the pursuit of revenue to redefine the purpose of the game. Every time you say “it’s a business,” you are asking fans to lower their expectations, to accept that loyalty is one-sided, that decisions will be made without regard to history, community, or connection, and that the things they care about most are secondary to the balance sheet.

You are asking people to care deeply about something you are treating superficially.

And nowhere is that more obvious than in your full embrace of gambling.

This is the same sport that built its mythology around integrity, that banned players for gambling, that positioned itself as something that had to be protected from even the appearance of compromised outcomes. Now you are partnered with sportsbooks, integrating betting into broadcasts, placing odds alongside the game itself, and turning every pitch into a potential wager.

And when anyone questions it, you fall back on the same line.

“It’s a business.”

No. It’s a contradiction.

You cannot sell integrity as part of the game’s identity while simultaneously monetizing the very thing that historically threatened it. You cannot lecture players about protecting the game while cashing checks tied directly to its risk. You cannot stand on tradition when it suits you and abandon it when it becomes inconvenient to revenue growth.

Because baseball was never just about watching players perform. It was about knowing them, not personally, but through presence, through repetition, through the slow accumulation of moments that turned players into something more than statistics. You knew their stance, their rhythm, how they carried themselves through failure and success, how they existed over the course of a long season that gave you time to understand them.

That required continuity. It required patience. It required a game that was not constantly being optimized for attention or monetization.

Under your version of “business,” players have become assets, roster turnover feels like inventory management, loyalty is replaced by optionality, and contracts define identity more than character. You are not building connection. You are managing portfolios. Fans feel that, whether they articulate it or not. They feel the distance, the lack of permanence, the shift from relationship to transaction, and once that connection erodes, everything else follows.

Fans do not attach to financial metrics. They attach to people. They attach to the player who struggles and finds his way back, to the veteran who hangs on a year too long, to the rookie who arrives without warning and becomes part of a summer. They attach to presence, and presence cannot be optimized, scaled, or reduced to a metric.

When you flatten baseball into a business model, you reduce those moments to content, something to consume, something to scroll past, something interchangeable with everything else competing for attention. Baseball was never supposed to be that. It was supposed to be something you lived with, something that unfolded slowly enough for meaning to take hold, something that did not demand your attention but earned it over time.

A business demands attention. Baseball used to earn it.

There is a difference, and you are erasing it.

Every rule change driven by pace over presence, every pricing decision that pushes families out, every gimmick designed to compete with short-form content, every moment where access to players is turned into media instead of mystery, all of it gets justified by the same line.

“It’s a business.”

No. It is a choice. A choice to trade depth for efficiency, connection for control, long-term meaning for short-term return and this same flawed thinking shows up in another place where it does not belong. Government.

“Run government like a business” sounds efficient and logical on the surface, but it fails for the same reason. A business serves shareholders. Government serves people. A business can cut what does not produce profit. Government cannot decide that certain people or communities are no longer worth serving because they do not generate enough return without abandoning its purpose.

When you apply a business framework to something that exists for public trust, you strip away its meaning. That is exactly what is happening here. You are applying a business model to something that exists as a public cultural asset, something built on shared memory, civic identity, and generational continuity, and in doing so, you are hollowing it out.

The irony is that you still rely on the very things your model is eroding. You rely on nostalgia to sell tickets, on tradition to justify pricing, on history to maintain relevance, while your decisions steadily undermine all of it. You want fans to feel something, but you do not want to be accountable to that feeling.

So, you fall back on the line, “It’s a business.” It is not; it is a fucking excuse.

Because if baseball were truly just a business, fans would treat it like one. They would walk away when the product declines, switch to something better, make rational decisions based on value. But they do not. They stay, they argue, they care, they pass it down, because they know, whether they say it or not, that baseball is not supposed to be just a business.

It is supposed to be something worth protecting from becoming one.

And you, as owners and as a league, are not just operators. You are caretakers of something you did not create, something you do not fully control, and something that will not survive if you continue to treat it as nothing more than a vehicle for return.

Because baseball does not disappear all at once. It erodes, quietly, decision by decision, each one justified the same way, until one day the numbers still look good, the revenue is still there, the business is thriving, and the game, the thing that made all of it matter in the first place, is gone.

The Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas fucking A’s sit at 30. Not a surprise… It is the outcome of a nine-category evaluation applied across a decade of ownership behavior. When you line up payroll contraction, revenue-sharing intake, relocation posture, and stewardship philosophy from 2015 through 2025, the result is not ambiguous. The A’s finish last because the trajectory of the franchise bent smaller while the sport grew larger. But before you can understand why they sit at the bottom, you have to remember what they were. Under Charlie Finley in the 1970s, the A’s were disruptive and central. Green and gold uniforms. Mustaches as identity. Three straight World Series titles from 1972 to 1974. They were bold and visible. Under Walter Haas, the tone changed but the responsibility deepened. Haas treated the franchise as a civic trust rooted in Oakland. Rickey Henderson said, “Walter Haas treated us like people. He cared about Oakland.” That is ownership at its highest level. Care, place, responsibility. Then came Moneyball, when Billy Beane and his front office reversed the logic of baseball and forced the entire league to modernize. For decades, the A’s were dominant, eccentric, or revolutionary. They were never irrelevant.

John Fisher’s era defined them differently. Fisher inherited Gap wealth, retail wealth trained to preserve margins and protect assets. That background is not disqualifying in commerce. But baseball ownership is not retail management. It is custodianship of competitive intent and civic memory. From 2015 through 2025, the A’s provided one of the clearest examples of ownership contraction in modern baseball. They made the postseason three straight seasons from 2018 through 2020 with payroll hovering in the $85 to $95 million range. League payroll averages during that stretch exceeded $130 million, but Oakland was within striking distance of viability. Then came the collapse. Payroll dropped near $50 million by 2022, remained near the floor in 2023 and 2024, all while league revenues surpassed $10 billion annually and franchise valuations exploded. Rebuilds happen. That is not the indictment. The indictment is posture. When you dismantle a competitive core during a revenue boom and operate at or near the payroll floor while receiving substantial revenue-sharing distributions that in some seasons likely exceeded your entire active payroll, that is not cycling. That is insulation. The system exists to allow small markets to compete. It does not exist to subsidize dormancy. And if you can watch that pattern unfold and not think what the fuck is this model, you are being polite on behalf of a franchise that stopped being polite to its own city. Then came relocation. Oakland to Sacramento to Las Vegas. Framed as inevitability, but inevitability implies exhausted alternatives. What it felt like instead was incremental leverage. Attendance cited as evidence while payroll shrank. Fan engagement questioned while investment declined. The franchise shifted from civic institution to movable asset. That is where stewardship collapses.

Competitive Intent and Effort: 30. Postseason windows were liquidated rather than reinforced.
Fan Alignment and Honesty: 30. Messaging diverged sharply from behavior as payroll contracted and relocation tension lingered.
Cultural Fit to the Area: 30. A franchise once synonymous with Oakland edge drifted toward abstraction and portability.
Financial Integrity and Revenue Use: 30. Revenue-sharing recipient operating at or near the payroll floor during a league revenue boom.
Labor Ethics and Organizational Culture: 30. Sustained non-competition and instability erode institutional morale and trust.
Long-Term Vision and Stability: 30. The path from Oakland to Las Vegas was turbulence, not arc.
Integrity and Accountability: 29. Houston’s sign-stealing scandal earns sole possession of 30 in pure integrity collapse. The A’s handling of contraction and relocation still reflects defensive ownership posture.
Relationship to History and the Game: 29. The A’s legacy is enormous, but fractured by detachment from place.
Impact on the Health of Baseball: 30. Relocation churn and payroll suppression undermine the credibility of revenue sharing and competitive balance league-wide.

Seven categories at 30. Two at 29. Composite score: 268 out of 270. Overall Rank: 30. This is not about personal dislike, though I will admit plainly that I do not respect this ownership posture. It is about trajectory. Finley made the A’s loud. Haas made them rooted. Moneyball made them revolutionary. Fisher made them smaller. They are last not because they were small, but because they chose smaller.

I had the topic. I had the opinion. I even had the outline in my head. Normally that’s enough to sit down and put something together.

But when I got to the point where I would actually publish it, something felt off. The excitement wasn’t there.

Not because the topic wasn’t interesting to me. It still is.

What stopped me was something else entirely. The realization that even the places that once felt quiet now feel crowded.

Substack used to feel like a refuge from the rest of the internet. A place where people wrote longer thoughts and didn’t seem to be chasing the same attention economy that drives everything else.

Now it feels different.

Not bad. Just louder.

You can almost feel the volume of voices. Everyone has something to say. Everyone is building an audience. Everyone is trying to be heard.

There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just the natural gravity of the internet. Every platform eventually fills with people wanting attention.

But standing in the middle of that realization, I found myself asking a strange question.

Do I actually want to add another voice to the room?

That hesitation surprised me.

Because the truth is I enjoy thinking through ideas and writing them down. I’m not trying to be a content creator. That phrase alone makes me tired. I’m not trying to build a machine that constantly feeds posts into the world.

What interests me is something simpler.

Occasionally sharing a thought that has been sitting in my mind. Something I’ve noticed about baseball, business, culture, or life.

Maybe someone reads it. Maybe they don’t.

But even that simple impulse has started to feel heavier lately.

I spend most of my professional life in business development in the medical device world. It’s serious work, highly regulated, and full of people who are trying to build things that actually matter. But even there I’ve noticed how much of modern professional life has shifted toward visibility.

Every conference seems to generate a flood of selfies. Every announcement becomes a moment of personal branding. It often feels like people are documenting their work more than actually doing it.

Social media amplifies that dynamic.

Everyone is encouraged to stay visible. Post often. Share everything. Build your brand.

After a while it becomes exhausting.

And strangely, that exhaustion has started to show up in places I didn’t expect.

Even baseball.

Normally this time of year I feel a certain energy as the season approaches. But this year I’m not even sure I’m looking forward to it in the same way.

Not because I love the game any less.

Because of everything surrounding it.

Sports talk radio never stops. Every day demands another take. Another argument. Another prediction.

Major League Baseball tries to sell the game back to us through carefully packaged nostalgia. Throwback uniforms. heritage promotions. themed nights designed to make us feel something about the past.

But nostalgia doesn’t work that way.

The moments that stay with you from baseball were never scheduled by a marketing department. They happened quietly.

A late night game on the radio.
A box score in the morning paper.
A summer evening at the park that didn’t feel like an event because it was simply part of life.

Those moments weren’t trying to grab your attention.

They just existed.

The more I see nostalgia packaged and promoted, the more I realize how much I miss the accidental kind.

Maybe that’s part of why I hesitated to post this.

Because even writing about these things can start to feel like participating in the same noise I’m trying to step away from.

And yet the thought keeps sitting there.

Not as a hot take. Not as something that needs an audience.

Just as an observation about the moment we’re living in.

We are surrounded by more voices than ever before. More commentary, more opinions, more people broadcasting themselves.

At some point the natural response isn’t to shout louder.

It’s to pause.

That’s probably where I am right now.

Still thinking about baseball. Still noticing things about culture and work and the strange way everything now seems to demand attention.

But maybe speaking a little less.

Sometimes the most honest thing you can do in a loud room is simply stand still and notice how loud it has become.

There are things ownership does that drive me fucking insane, and there are things I deeply respect. John Fisher pisses me off. Watching a franchise with the history of the Athletics shrink into portability while revenue sharing flows and valuations explode makes me angry. Not because they were small, but because they chose smaller. That posture feels extractive. On the other end, I respect Mark Attanasio in Milwaukee. He doesn’t grandstand. He doesn’t posture. He operates in the background. Sometimes I wish he’d show more fire publicly. But the Brewers are serious internally. They draft, develop, pitch, compete. They don’t behave like victims of their market. They behave disciplined. That earns respect.

The Dodgers always want to win. That matters to me. You can hate the imbalance. You can roll your eyes at the payroll. But they behave like October is the expectation. They don’t drift. They don’t dabble. They don’t pretend that finishing second is acceptable. The Yankees, on the other hand, have confused me over the last decade. They’re rich. They’re iconic. They talk championship standard. But the posture hasn’t always matched the mythology. There have been moments of aggression and moments of restraint that feel misaligned with who they claim to be. When you’re the Yankees, drift hits differently. It feels louder.

The Mets under Steve Cohen are dramatic, and I don’t hate that. Baseball needs drama. It needs bold owners. It needs risk. Cohen swings hard. Sometimes he misses. But at least you can’t accuse him of hiding. That chaos has energy. The Braves feel structured. The Rays feel relentless. The Rangers pushed when it mattered. The Orioles endured pain honestly. The Guardians operate lean but sharp. The Padres swung big. The Mariners finally broke through and felt alive again. The Phillies act like contention is the baseline, not the dream.

Then you have teams that float. The Twins at times felt cautious when conviction was required. The Cubs oscillated after their title. The Rockies feel like they exist in their own fog. The White Sox under Reinsdorf often felt stuck between eras. The Angels had generational talent and still drifted. The Nationals won a title and then collapsed into uncertainty. The Diamondbacks rebuilt quietly and struck fast. The Blue Jays hover on the edge of something that never fully locks in. The Cardinals carry legacy heavily. The Red Sox oscillate between bold and baffling. The Astros rebuilt ruthlessly, then damaged credibility, then stabilized into machine-like competence. The Tigers are still trying to find their arc again. The Royals flash, then fade. The Marlins feel perpetually provisional. The Pirates test patience. The Reds tease potential. The Giants feel like they’re searching for their next identity.

Every franchise has a story. I don’t need ownership to be perfect. I actually like tension in the game. I like when an owner is bold enough to be polarizing. I like when markets feel alive because something is happening. What drives me fucking crazy is drift disguised as strategy. What drives me fucking crazy is spin. What drives me fucking crazy is when ownership treats baseball like a margin vehicle while asking fans to treat it like inheritance.

I appreciate seriousness. I appreciate when an owner acts like winning is the job. I appreciate when a franchise knows who it is. I appreciate when mistakes are owned instead of buried. I appreciate when payroll decisions match messaging. You might disagree with my conclusions. That’s fine. That’s part of it. But I’m not grading vibes. I’m grading patterns.

If I call something out, it’s because I care. If I praise something, it’s because I see structure behind it. This isn’t about tearing down for sport. It’s about saying plainly that ownership matters. Some of them are doing it right. Some of them are not. And over the thirty weeks of the season, I’m going to say which is which. Let the chips fall where they may, I hope to spark the discussion about ownership more deeply so they can’t hide like the players, managers, and GMs can’t… John Fisher you drive me fucking crazy, see around opening day…

I’ve always been wired to care more about structure than spectacle. About how decisions get made, who makes them, and what incentives sit underneath everything we see. In my professional life, that’s the real work. Strategy. Alignment. Accountability. Long-term consequences. Outcomes don’t magically appear. They are built, or undermined, by the people at the top and the systems they design.

Baseball clicked for me the same way.

The game on the field is the visible layer. The real story is upstream. That’s where direction is set. Where corners are cut or protected. Where truth either exists or gets managed. I’m less interested in what happens on a random Tuesday night in July than in why it keeps happening year after year.

Every season we argue about the wrong people. Players. Managers. Slumps. Contracts. Effort. Body language. We debate front offices like they’re sovereign entities.

It’s noise.

None of it exists without ownership.

Baseball moves at the speed of money, patience, ego, leverage, and risk tolerance. All of that lives in the owner’s box. Players come and go. Managers get fired. Prospects rise and disappear. Owners stay. They decide when a team is “close enough.” They decide when a rebuild is convenient. They decide when payroll is a tool and when it’s suddenly a burden. They decide when a city deserves a winner and when it should be grateful just to have a team.

We rarely talk about them honestly.

This season, we will.

Who Owns the Game will run for thirty weeks. One owner at a time. Ranked worst to best. Yes, worst first.

And before anyone asks, I already know who sits at the bottom.

It’s the Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas fucking A’s and their asshole of an owner.

That isn’t hyperbole. It isn’t emotion for emotion’s sake. It’s a decade-long pattern of extracting value while eroding trust. It’s treating a franchise like a movable asset instead of a civic institution. It’s treating a fanbase like collateral damage in a leverage play.

That’s where we start.

From there, every other ownership group will be evaluated across nine categories:

Competitive Intent and Effort

This is not about wins. It is about whether ownership consistently tried to win in good faith.

Did they avoid deliberate non-competition as a business model. Did they maintain pressure during competitive windows. Did they push when opportunity existed. Did they tolerate mediocrity when aggression was available.

This category measures organizational will.

Fan Alignment and Honesty

This measures whether ownership respects its fan base.

Did they communicate transparently about rebuilds and strategy. Did they blame fans for attendance while cutting payroll. Did messaging match behavior.

Fans are stakeholders. This category measures whether they were treated that way.

Cultural Fit to the Area

Baseball franchises are civic institutions. They sit inside real cities with real histories.

Did ownership understand the character of its city. Did it lean into that identity or flatten it into a generic brand. Did it treat the team as rooted, or as portable.

This measures stewardship of place.

Financial Integrity and Revenue Use

Where did the money go.

Did revenue growth translate into competitive investment. Was revenue sharing reinvested or pocketed. Were financial constraints used honestly or strategically.

This category measures whether ownership behaved like a custodian or an extractor.

Labor Ethics and Organizational Culture

How were players and employees treated.

Did ownership improve conditions when it could. Did it resist basic standards until forced. Did it create a culture of stability or churn.

This category measures how power is exercised internally.

Long-Term Vision and Stability

Did ownership provide coherent direction.

Were front offices allowed to operate with stability. Was there constant churn. Did strategy shift with mood, or follow a sustained plan.

This measures institutional discipline.

Integrity and Accountability

When mistakes happened, what followed.

Did ownership absorb responsibility. Did it correct systems. Did it deflect blame.

This measures moral posture under pressure.

Relationship to History and the Game

Did ownership honor the franchise’s past.

Was history treated as marketing decoration or institutional memory. Were former players respected. Was continuity preserved.

Baseball is a memory sport. This category measures whether ownership understands that.

Impact on the Health of Baseball

Ownership decisions ripple beyond one franchise.

Did behavior improve competitive balance. Did it damage league credibility. Did it strengthen or weaken public trust in the sport.

This measures influence relative to footprint.

Each category will be ranked 1 through 30. No ties. No hedging. The rankings will reflect ownership behavior from 2015 through the 2025 season, weighted toward sustained patterns and recent accountability.

Every team will be judged relative to its resources. Market size matters. Revenue matters. Ownership wealth matters. Stadium control matters. Division context matters. You are not compared to New York if you are Milwaukee. You are compared to the best possible version of Milwaukee. Large-market teams do not get credit simply for having capacity. If you had the means to push harder and chose not to, that will show up.

Ownership is judged on what it did with what it had.

Baseball ownership is not morally neutral. It is a custodial role with ethical obligations. Exploitation that is legal is still exploitation. Indifference is still a choice.

Shame will not come from adjectives. It will come from placement.

If you rank 28th in competitive intent, that means 27 ownership groups tried harder over the last decade. If you rank near the bottom in integrity, that means others handled power better.

If we want to understand why some franchises feel alive and others feel hollow, why fan trust feels thinner than it used to, we have to stop pretending ownership is background noise.

It isn’t. It’s the engine. We begin at the bottom. And we work our way up. See you around opening day John Fisher…

I’ve always been wired to care more about structure than spectacle. About how decisions get made, who makes them, and what incentives sit underneath everything we see. In my professional life, I live in that world. Strategy, alignment, accountability, long-term consequences. You learn quickly that outcomes don’t magically appear. They’re built, or undermined, by the people at the top and the systems they design. Baseball clicked for me the same way. The game on the field is the visible layer, but the real story is upstream. That’s where direction is set, corners are cut or protected, and truth either exists or gets managed. I’m less interested in what happens on a random Tuesday night in July than in why it keeps happening year after year. That’s the lens I’m bringing here, because that’s where the game actually gets decided.

Every baseball season, we argue about the wrong people. We argue about players. About effort, contracts, loyalty, slumps, body language. We yell at managers like they’re generals instead of middle management. We debate front offices as if they’re sovereign entities. It’s all noise. Because none of it exists without ownership. Baseball doesn’t move at the speed of the game on the field. It moves at the speed of money, patience, ego, and leverage. And all of that lives in the owner’s box.

Ownership is the quiet constant in a sport obsessed with the daily churn. Players come and go. Managers get fired. Prospects rise and disappear. Owners stay. They decide when a team is “close enough.” They decide when a rebuild is convenient. They decide when payroll is a tool and when it’s suddenly a burden. They decide when a city deserves a winner and when it should be grateful just to have a team. Yet we rarely talk about them honestly. When we do, it’s usually framed as inevitability. Small market. Big market. Business realities. As if those phrases explain anything at all.

I’ve never been as interested in player stats as most fans are. I don’t obsess over WAR, exit velocity, or projected upside in a vacuum. I’m far more interested in who actually runs the game. Baseball, at its core, is an organizational sport from top to bottom. Drafting, development, payroll philosophy, patience, communication, risk tolerance, and honesty. None of that shows up in a box score, but all of it determines whether those box scores ever matter. The organizational strategy matters. The incentives matter. The people at the top matter. And when ownership gets it wrong, everything downstream suffers. The clubhouse. The fanbase. The city.

If anyone doubts that baseball is an organizational game, they only need to look at the Los Angeles Angels. For years, the Angels had two of the most extraordinary talents the sport has ever seen in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani. Generational players. And what did the organization do with them. Almost nothing that mattered.

That wasn’t a failure of talent. It was a failure of structure, vision, and leadership. Trout and Ohtani didn’t fail the Angels. The Angels failed them. Poor roster construction. Short-term thinking. Constant churn. No coherent pitching strategy. No sustainable development pipeline. The presence of those two players should have guaranteed relevance, contention, and credibility. Instead, it exposed how hollow the organization really was from the top down. You can have Mike Trout. You can have Shohei Ohtani. You can have highlight reels, jersey sales, and national attention, and still be fundamentally broken. Talent doesn’t save bad ownership. Stars don’t fix misalignment. Baseball punishes organizations that mistake individual brilliance for organizational health.

This season, Who Owns the Game is me pushing back on all of that. One owner at a time. Thirty weeks. No pretending this is neutral. No hiding behind balance for balance’s sake. This will be my take on the people who actually shape the game. The owners I respect. The owners I don’t trust. The owners who confuse me. And the owners who flat out piss me off. Because if we’re going to keep asking fans to emotionally invest in baseball, to pass it down, to show up, to care, then it’s fair to ask what kind of people are sitting at the top deciding what that investment is worth.

Some owners get it. Mark Attanasio runs a small-market club with discipline and realism, but without contempt for the fanbase. He doesn’t pretend Milwaukee is something it’s not, and he doesn’t treat restraint like a moral achievement. Mark Walter and the Dodgers show what happens when resources are paired with competence instead of chaos. That organization feels intentional. Serious. Like winning is the expectation, not a happy accident. You may not like the imbalance, but you can’t say it’s bullshit.

Then there are owners who test the limits of patience and goodwill. Bob Nutting has turned loyalty in Pittsburgh into an endurance sport. And then there’s John fucking Fisher. This is where pretending this can all be discussed politely breaks down. Because this motherfucker isn’t a market problem. It’s not bad luck. It’s not timing. It’s a case study in treating a franchise like a disposable asset and a fanbase like collateral damage. That deserves to be called exactly what it is.

The extremes matter too. Steve Cohen proved that unlimited money doesn’t guarantee coherence if you don’t understand how baseball actually works. Arte Moreno spent years convincing fans that star power was a plan, when it was often just a distraction from deeper dysfunction. Longevity doesn’t equal wisdom either. Jerry Reinsdorf forces us to ask what happens when ownership outlasts urgency, curiosity, and the willingness to evolve.

This series isn’t about piling on. It’s not about pretending owners are villains by default. It’s about accountability. About patterns. About behavior over time. About whether an owner absorbs risk or exports it to fans and cities. About whether losing is treated as failure or simply folded into the business model. About whether baseball is seen as a civic trust, a competitive pursuit, or a financial instrument wrapped in nostalgia.

I love this game. That’s why I’m willing to say things plainly when they need to be said. Baseball deserves better than being run on autopilot by people who never have to answer for the experience they create. Fans aren’t stupid. They know when they’re being sold hope instead of progress. They know when patience is being abused. They know when the message doesn’t match the behavior. This series is about sitting with that gap and refusing to look away.

Each week, I’ll take one owner and pull the thread. Who they are. How they made their money. What that tells us about how they see the world. What they’ve done right. What they’ve done wrong. And whether, at the end of the day, they act like someone who actually deserves to own a baseball team. Not because they can afford it. But because they understand what it represents.

If we want to understand where baseball is going, why some franchises feel alive and others feel hollow, and why fan trust feels thinner than it used to, we have to stop pretending ownership is background noise. It’s not. It’s the engine. So, let’s finally look it straight in the face and ask the question we avoid every year.

Who owns the game. I will see you in a couple of months…

Stoicism
A fresh start is usually just a change in perspective.

Daily Takeaway
Let today be a reset.

Journal Prompt
Where would a clean slate help you breathe easier.

Honor the Small.
Respect the Moment.
Trust the Path.

Buddhism
Presence softens the edges of the day.

Daily Takeaway
Let the quiet close the month for you.

Journal Prompt
What sound helps you wind down.

Honor the Small.
Respect the Moment.
Trust the Path.