A story published Wednesday about the Braves made it even easier to dislike the team.
No, it wasn’t that the gutted roster is absolutely unwatchable and positively the worst in baseball, a true example of an organization flipping off a city it’s leaving behind.
The story was from Bloomberg, the financial news service, headlined: "The Braves Play Taxpayers Better Than They Play Baseball."
On Wednesday, the Braves gave up a grand slam to sink to a Major League-worst 4-17 record. Bloomberg writers, however, described how the team’s front office hit its own grand slam when it came to soaking taxpayers.
“Over the last 15 years, the Braves have extracted nearly half a billion in public funds for four new homes, each bigger and more expensive than the last,” Bloomberg wrote. “The crown jewel, backed by $392 million in public funding, is a $722 million, 41,500-seat stadium for the major league club set to open next year in Cobb County. Before Cobb, the Braves built three minor league parks, working their way up the ladder from Single A to Triple A.
“In every case, they switched cities, pitting their new host against the old during negotiations. They showered attention on local officials unaccustomed to dealing with a big-league franchise and, in the end, left most of the cost on the public ledger.”
They are at it again in Florida, playing Palm Beach against Sarasota as the club moves its spring training facilities away from Disney World where it has operated for two decades.
It’s like the movie “The Flim-Flam Man,” but instead of George C. Scott roaming from town to town fleecing rubes, Liberty Media and its Hessians in suits are selling an overblown concoction of economic development to star-struck politicians.
Study after study shows the tax money lavished on pro teams is rarely worth the investment.
The Braves started 15 years ago to move the Single-A Braves to Rome, something nearly half the taxpayers there opposed in a referendum. The team has operated with greater secrecy since.
Bloomberg focused on Pearl, Miss., which got the Braves Double A team from Greenville, S.C., in 2005. The town regularly pays $900,000 a year — more than 5 percent of its general fund — toward the team. In December, Pearl’s debt rating was downgraded to junk status, with Moody citing the stadium liabilities. This makes it hard to borrow for government essentials like roads and fire trucks.
The story came after Liberty’s public offering of “tracking stock” that split off the Braves and other “assets” into separate entities apart from the conglomerate. The two Braves stocks have “tracked” the team’s on-field prowess. Each are down to about $15 from offering prices of $36 and $27.
“It only gets more and more complex and confusing,” a financial analyst told Bloomberg in a different story about the Braves when he was asked to describe the scheme. These days, sports fans must follow Bloomberg, not ESPN.
Again, Bloomberg: “Entities controlled by billionaire John Malone are creating three tracking stocks and spinning off two companies, the latest of numerous and complicated financial maneuvers that have enabled his empire to save taxes and develop targeted investments over the years.”
That’s the same John Malone, Liberty’s founder, who got the Braves a decade ago in an arcane stock swap with AOL-Time Warner. In that deal, Liberty got rid of $1.8 billion of Time Warner stock and received the Braves, then worth about $460 million, and $1.4 billion in cash. It saved a reported $600 million in taxes.
In essence, Malone got a free MLB team, plus millions in cash.
Atlanta fans, used to a winning team owned by local eccentric, Ted Turner, worried the new faceless Colorado-based conglomerate “considers the team more of an asset for short-term tax benefits than a long-term investment,” the New York Times wrote in 2006.
The worriers were right. The Bravos have won just two playoff games (and no playoff series) since.
Malone recently confirmed the Braves are just a cog in his corporate synergy. “Keep in mind,” he told shareholders, “the Braves now are a fairly major real estate business as opposed to just a baseball club.”
To be fair, Liberty wasn’t the first team owner to raid public treasuries. They just perfected it.
Take our friends in Gwinnett, which is exactly what the Braves did. The suburban county cut a deal, born in secrecy, to build a $45 million stadium for the Braves Triple-A team. Another $19 million came to cover overruns. This year alone, Gwinnett will pay $1.6 million. All this for a field that was to pay for itself.
In 2013, it was Cobb’s turn.
Neil deMause, who studies stadium financing and authored “Field of Schemes,” has a grudging admiration for the latest endeavor: “The Braves should be credited in an evil genius kind of way for figuring out who the mark was and going after them before anyone else could figure out what was going on.”
Now if they could funnel that genius into a team that can play.
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