ESPN.com - Baseball owners keep digging themselves into holes

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Wednesday, May 15, 2002
Baseball owners keep digging themselves into holes

By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com

Tom Hicks, the man who signed a single person to a contract that averages in excess of $25 million annually to play baseball in double-knit jammies, says it's time for his team to start toeing the line financially.


	Just 18 months ago, Tom Hicks signed Alex Rodriguez to a record-setting $252 million contract.

And coming up next on the Delayed Remorse Network: Today I get serious about the diet! Although that jelly-filled doughnut/chocolate cheesecake doubleheader last night may have set me back a tad.

Tom Hicks, owner of the Texas Rangers, is the man who gave $252 million to Alex Rodriguez and $65 million to Chan Ho Park and $12 million to Juan Gonzalez and at least a buck-fifty to John Rocker. Of these, clearly, Rocker's cut is the most offensive, but let's not get off track here.

No, the track is this: Now Hicks, who has seen precious little winning as return on investment either from the A-Rod deal of 18 months ago or the Park giveaway of this past winter, is declaring that this is absolutely, positively his final season of losing the kind of money he's losing on the Rangers.

This, of course, suggests the obvious: After driving up costs to earbleed levels around The Ballpark in Arlington and losing, Hicks seems to be suggesting that his team is going to have to contain costs, which certainly implies more losing.

Drive safely on your way home, baseball fans! No need to thank us for reminding you why you're slowly falling in hate with the grand old game.

Let's make this as non-Hicks specific as possible, since few around Texas who have seen the man work doubt his sincerity in wanting to build a winner -- and almost none question his business savvy. You don't have to smear Tom Hicks in order to embrace the larger truth here.

And that truth, in a thimble, is that baseball owners have been throwing bad money after good for so long, they no longer recognize where one line ends and another begins. It all blurs together in a hideous haze of mediocrity, $8 microbrews and that tiresome, empty rhetoric about changing the entire system via nuclear detonation of the current relationship with the players union.

You say you want a revolution? That's just the problem: There doesn't seem to be any room here for that. Looking at Hicks' recent proclamations and lining them up against his own past spending habits, you're reminded almost immediately of White Sox power guy Jerry Reinsdorf, who practically spent himself sick one off-season years ago (Albert Belle, anyone?) at the same time he was pushing wildly for some cost containment among his fellow owners.

Reinsdorf's wholly unapologetic take was that as long as the current stupid system was in place, he was going to try to win under it. Tom Hicks appeared to feel the same way. But with the Rangers seemingly going nowhere, Hicks suddenly looks up and sees a projected loss in excess of $30 million for the second straight season. That'll generally smack the rose-colored glasses right off your beak.

	“	I'm not doing it anymore. This is my last year of doing it. We're going to play within our means from now on, at least break-even. Breaking even is at least a start and has got to happen. ”
		— Rangers owner Tom Hicks

"I'm not doing it anymore," he said in Texas over the weekend. "This is my last year of doing it. We're going to play within our means from now on, at least break-even. Breaking even is at least a start and has got to happen."

Of course, the announced losses are strictly Hicks' own estimates, utterly unverifiable by any outside source. You'll just have to take his word for it. But this much is crystalline: Hicks is attempting to become a reformed spender in baseball, and history suggests that it's just about an impossible feat.

I've seen stories that explained, in tremendous detail, how the 10-year, $252 million Rodriguez contract will actually wind up making money for Hicks, and there isn't one of them worth a warm bucket of spit. Hicks will lose money on A-Rod, and the simple truth about that is that making money off A-Rod's deal was never a consideration. Signing Rodriguez was seen as a means to an end, a fanciful imaginary wonderland in which winning begets new revenue streams begets cross-marketing begets cash flying around among various loosely tied corporate ventures. In a situation such as that one, the star player is a mere engine.

Baseball owners tend to go that way, justifying this ludicrous contract and that one. Spending $65 million on Chan Ho Park was explained away as the simple obtaining of the best pitcher available on the open market. Never once addressed was what the Rangers might reasonably expect for that over-the-top money, or what would happen to the club's financial balance if Park did not suddenly evolve into Don Drysdale.

We're seeing now just a little bit of what would happen, with Hicks saying he has no plans to give Pudge Rodriguez the $15 million to $20 million agent Jeff Moorad says Rodriguez might seek when the catcher becomes a free agent next winter.

It is time, Hicks says, to get responsible about these financial losses, and to get realistic about what any single player can actually be serious about asking in salary. And it's a perfectly laudable position to take, assuming you aren't one of the many, many baseball owners who answered this question quite differently on a previous test.

Mark Kreidler of the Sacramento Bee is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.