I saw some folks chattering about this....via NJ.com
“When we looked at the Mets, we looked at it is intellectual property. … We looked at this like an entertainment sports media platform. And we thought baseball was just a small part of it. But through Jennifer we could we could drive the music with Live Nation business at Citi Field. With e-commerce we thought we had Mark Lloyd, best in class, what he’s done with Walmart, we could do the same with the Mets.
“We then thought that we can energize and turbo-charge the network by changing and mixing up programming a little bit, and by even getting better and higher talent. … So baseball was a small part of it, it wasn’t everything. And we felt we could buy this for $2.35 billion and over time make this a $10 or 15 billion holding company, much like the Fenway Group has done over in Boston.”
I can’t get too worked up about it as it didn’t happen.
What A-Rod is HONEST about is that the thing with the bat and ball (the baseball part) IS just a small part of any of this. It’s all primarily TV programming at this point, and if you happen to sell some tickets or a t-shirt along the way, that’s nice.
Maybe you get lucky and some mega-billionaire buys the team and actually decides he wants to win a championship because money doesn’t matter, but for most baseball owners – the thing with the bat and the ball is just the stuff that makes the TV shows and The Merch and the Tickets all possible…and if the building is empty, why not use it to have a concert?
