Best Owners in Sports: 2009 MLB edition

June 20, 9:37 PMSports Business ExaminerJosh Lobdell

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Sports Illustrated recently published its annual list of the best owners in sport broken down by sports. While it is fairly easy to determine best and worst sports owners in the other sports, and the worst MLB owners re fairly easy to call out, determining the best MLB owners is actually kind of hard.

The first reason for this on average MLB probably has the best group of sports owners. On top of that many of these owners or their families have owned the teams for a substantial amount of time.

On top of all that we must realize that thee MLB teams are huge enterprises that are funding baseball operations for extensive Farm Systems that can add up to six of seven team where the players of the future are being developed. That fact alone makes evaluating baseball owners and really General Managers extremely difficult.

However there are some owners who are above the rest, even though I disagree with many of the owners on the SI list. With that being said here is a look at their list:

• John Henry-Boston Red Sox
• Arte Moreno- Los Angles Angels
• William Dewitt- St. Louis Cardinals
• Steinbrenner Family- New York Yankees
• Stuart Sternberg- Tampa Bay Rays

Now As a baseball purist I will never forgive John Henry for his role, while owner of the Florida Marlins, in the contraction mess that ended up with Bud Selig looking like a fool in front of a bunch of no nothing abut sports Senators. Even though Henry has brought a lot of success to the Red Sox I find him tainted by the whole contraction mess.

As far as the Steinbrenner family is concerned I count them among the worst owners in sports. Spending too much money harms the sports as much as teams who don’t spend enough (Florida marlins). The Steinbrenner’s have helped to cast the MLB financial model into utter chaos, and they just got done building a stadium a large percentage of their fans cannot afford to go to. That makes them very bad owners indeed, and probably the worst owners in all of American Sports.

I would rework the list in this fashion

1. Arte Moreno- Angels, Moreno has built this team into a contender year after year. He is unafraid to spend big money when he has too, but spends it wisely.
2. Stuart Sternberg- Rays, Thanks to Sternberg and his efforts baseball in Florida is now a viable product. Thanks to his AL pennant a year ago his team will get a new ballpark.
3. William Dewitt-Cardinals, The Cardinals arguably have the best player in baseball, and won a ring in 2006. On top of a new stadium things are going very well in St. Louis.
4. Bill Neukom- Giants, They have a state of the art facility and we wise enough to dump Barry Bonds when his distraction became bigger than the team. Now the Giants are defending their own turf against a possible Oakland A’s move to Santa Clara.
5. William Giles- Phillies, they are the reining World Series Champions and they have a lineup that can produce a MVP candidate almost at will.

Best Owners in Sports:
• NBA
• NHL
• NFL

Worst Owners in Sports

• MLB
• NBA
• NHL
• NFL