We are six weeks into the baseball season, and the Mets remain — as many predicted before the season — eminently mediocre. After a rough start to the season, they got back to 8-8, and their record has hovered around .500 since then with remarkable consistency: They were 13-13, then 14-14, 15-15, 16-16, and now, as of this morning, they are 18-18. While it’s obviously too early to be talking about the playoff picture, the Mets are right on the cusp of the last Wild Card spot in the National League, where they figure to be for most of the season.
So not great, not terrible — and this despite their owner, Steve Cohen, making an explicit pledge to not be mediocre when he first bought the team, back in 2020. Of course, as I outlined in Part One on the Steve Cohen Delusion, there is just no reason to believe that some mythical “Good Owner” can come in and turn a franchise around. An owner’s role is purely destructive.
Fans often cling to the idea that a struggling franchise will be turned around by some rich new owner, but this is not how sports (or capitalism) work. Pro sports are a business, not a charity; athletes are not assets, they’re workers. And workers don’t get paid more because the owner is rich. In actual fact, the way owners get rich is by paying their workers less than their labor is worth, and then pocketing the difference. So thinking that a rich owner bodes well for your team represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between owners and their teams.
Of course, that begs the questions: What IS the relationship between owners and their teams? Why do rich assholes like Steve Cohen buy sports teams in the first place? And what does that say about the relationship between labor and capital in general?
Toys Or Businesses?
As mentioned in Part One, the most obvious reason people like Cohen buy teams is that it’s fun. You can sit in the best seats, invite your friends to the locker room after the game, do interviews about the team whenever you want, etc. And if your team actually wins a championship, they not only let you stand on stage with all the players — they actually give YOU the trophy.
These perks are so obviously cool that it can make buying a team seem a lot like buying a toy. Like so many toys for rich people — yachts, private jets, expensive art — pro sports teams are the kind of thing rich people buy so they can show off to other rich people. But this obscures the fact that, unlike those other toys for rich people, pro sports teams MAKE MONEY.
To be clear, they don’t just make money through the appreciation of the asset, even though that’s the most commonly cited way. Whenever people want to excoriate the stinginess of some owner, they are usually quick to cite “net worth” numbers, either the value of the team or the “net worth” of the owner himself.
And that’s understandable, since those numbers ARE eye-popping, and visible for all to see. When Steve Cohen bought the Mets back in 2020, for example, the record-setting price was printed in headlines all over the country.
But I’m not even talking about that right now. For one, as I’ve written many times before in this newsletter, those “net worth” numbers are mostly bullshit. Plus, as a socialist who doesn’t believe that assets like the Mets should be privately owned, I can’t in good conscience cite the appreciation of that asset as good business sense; in a just world, all that would be seized by the public anyway. Finally, the biggest reason not to focus on the skyrocketing value of a franchise is that you can’t eat appreciation. That is, no matter how much the value of the Mets increased, the Wilpons couldn’t really reap the benefit of that increase until AFTER they sold the team.1
No, when I say that teams make money for their owners, I mean it in a much simpler, Business 101 sense: They generate revenues in excess of their costs, which flow to the owners in the form of profit. And so guys like Cohen buy them for the same reason that rich assholes like him buy any business: to get their hands on the profits generated by the workers in that industry.
This stuff is less exciting than the franchise values — it’s not as visible, and the numbers are likely not as large. We don’t actually know how profitable teams are, because their books are not open to the public, and owners love to claim that their teams are losing money. While these are obviously lies meant to trick players into accepting salary caps and luxury taxes, it is certainly true that a team’s profitability is impacted by all kinds of macroeconomic forces, like TV rights deals and consumer spending. Put another way, we know that teams are purchased for their value as a business because owners tend to run them like a business. They set budgets and revenue targets, they hire consultants to tell them how they can make more money, and they start looking for “synergies.”
Within a few months of buying the Mets, for example, Cohen started working on plans to develop a casino in a parking lot adjacent to Citi Field. His proposal is one of several that New York State has considered for the property since the legalization of gambling, and his cause is surely furthered by his ownership of the team right next door. The details here are specific to Cohen, but the playbook is nothing new. Just a decade ago in the same city, Bruce Ratner used his ownership of the Brooklyn Nets as a Trojan horse for a highly coveted, multi-billion dollar development deal in the old Atlantic Yards section of Brooklyn. Once he was granted eminent domain rights to construct huge new residential towers, Ratner sold the team to a Russian billionaire (before the Nets ever even played a game in Brooklyn).
This illustrates that the business opportunities presented by team ownership are not always limited to the team’s business. Indeed, team ownership offers a unique kind of cultural influence and “soft power” over civic matters. In Cohen’s case, also, there was clearly an element of reputation laundering after a decade of legal troubles. It can be hard to put a precise dollar figure on matters like this, but these things are obviously primarily driven by the material interests of the owner more than any kind of civic pride or benevolent interest in the team’s success.
Confusion about the Teams As Toys vs. Teams As Businesses framework is at the root of the Steve Cohen Delusion, because many fans expect owners to treat their teams as toys, to throw money at them endlessly so they can have the most fun. And sometimes, at least for a little while, that DOES happen! For example, when Peter Seidler was nearing the end of his life, the Padres started massively increasing their payroll, supposedly because Seidler wanted to see his team win a World Series in his lifetime.
But over the long run, those material interests win out. This is why you often see the kind of cycle I highlight in Part One, where a new owner comes in and increases payroll before quickly backtracking. An owner often starts out in Toy Mode… and then when the bills come due or he gets distracted by other, shinier toys, he flips to Business Mode.
This is why I’m reluctant to give Cohen too much credit for increasing the Mets payroll thus far. For one, it strikes me as telling that he has, so far, mostly avoided any long-term financial commitments. The Mets’ payroll HAS increased, but most of the free agent additions have been on short-term deals: Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, James McCann, Starling Marte, Mark Canha — none of them were signed for more than four years, and of them only Marte is still on the roster.
In other words, he is giving himself flexibility to back out of Toy Mode once the other goals that have been served by his ownership of the team have been achieved. And even if that DOESN’T happen — even if he keeps payroll perpetually high — he is only paying the players out of the revenue THEY created. Which leads us to the question of what we can learn about owner/labor relations in general…
Owners, Am I Right?
The reason I think this Toy v. Business dichotomy is so useful is that it gets at some of the tensions embedded in the modern capitalist conception of the word “ownership.” When most of us think of things we “own,” we’re thinking of, essentially, toys. Our stuff, basically. A car, some furniture, maybe a house or a record collection, if you’re into that sort of thing, etc.
These are tangible things, and usually they invoke some kind of emotional response in the owner. These things are “ours” in a sense that is very personal — if someone came along and replaced your couch with a totally different one, you’d probably be a little upset, even if the two couches were of equivalent value. What the hell? I liked that couch. It was just the right amount of soft, and there was a nice groove in the arm rest right where I like it.
So when socialists come along and start talking about “the abolition of private property,” people start to get very defensive. After all, who are you to come around and start talking about taking my shit away? When it comes to my stuff, I am essentially a king, and I can do whatever suits my whims — that’s what makes it mine. The idea that someone might have anything less than complete control over the things they own strikes many as downright offensive, as almost an invasion of privacy.
But this is not really the kind of ownership that socialists care about — at least, it’s not the kind that I care about.2 The kind of ownership I care about is like Steve Cohen’s ownership of the Mets. Right away, there are some obvious differences. Most obviously, the Mets generate revenue, and this isn’t just a trivial or economic distinction. Most of the property that an average person “owns” doesn’t make them any profit.3 And once it does — once you start, say, renting out your home on AirBnB, or charging people to listen to your records — you accept some loss of control over that thing. It’s not “yours” in the same way anymore.
In other words, once something starts generating revenue for the owner, it becomes a business — the means of production. Therefore it is no longer “private” in the sense that other private property — toys — can be. The Mets aren’t something Cohen can keep in his living room, so it doesn’t make sense to think of them as private property in the same way as your couch or your record collection. And yet we still give owners a degree of power over the enterprises they own that borders on the dictatorial.
Perhaps that strikes you as an exaggeration. After all, there ARE limits on what Cohen can do with the Mets. He can’t have them play by different rules, or pay players below the league minimum — he can’t even change the team’s logo or uniform without approval by the league office.4 So we do accept SOME limitations on the power of owners over their property when it comes to businesses. But these limitations are usually very contested, and the ideology of capitalism is inherently suspicious of any check on the near-total authority someone has their “property,” whether that property is a shirt in their closet or a factory they own.
And two things in particular are considered sacrosanct when it comes to an owner’s power: What to do with a company’s profits (that’s “his money”) and how his employees have to behave (they work “for him”). Any limitations on an owner’s near-dictatorial power in these realms are treated as presumptively illegitimate, in the same way as someone taking your couch away. An owner can set his own budget, hire whatever sex pests he wants, and even make players shave if he feels like it.
So whether Steve Cohen wants to keep spending money on payroll, or go back to running the team like the Wilpons did, is entirely up to him. In this way, the Steve Cohen Delusion makes some sense — owners DO have a great deal of discretion, and so it’s natural to think individual owners can make a huge difference. But it’s actually precisely because owners have so much power that they all, over the long run, run their teams the same way: in the interest of maximizing personal profit.
After all, if all the profit a team generated belonged to you, then you would ALSO be tempted to maximize that profit, at the expense of the on-field product, no matter how big of a fan you are. So you’d do what most owners do: rely on players in their first six, pre-free agency years; follow whatever “analytics” trends keep you at the forefront of wage suppression (in the recent years that’s meant the proletarianization of pitching); sign the occasional big free agent, but never go over the luxury tax.
This is why all teams are run kind of the same way now. It’s also why every cell phone looks the same, and why every movie is branded content, and why every show is a reboot… Capitalism homogenizes everything. Allowing owners to extract revenue from businesses turns them all into profit-seeking monsters. Some of them are pretty good at it — Steve Cohen might be the best. But, crucially, it doesn’t make the product any better for the fans or the public, so expecting an owner’s interests to be aligned with yours is a fool’s game. It doesn’t really matter if he’s a nice guy, or if he grew up a Mets fan — an owner’s role is exploitive and extractive by design. It is a function of their role in the economy… so maybe we should just get rid of the role?
This obviously isn’t 100% true — there are plenty of ways to capitalize on an asset that is increasing in value without selling it. But, as the word “capitalize” ought to suggest, they are all premised on the notion of private ownership, and almost all reduce your equity position in that asset in some form or another.
There is extensive literature about the precise meaning of “private property” in Marxism, or socialism more broadly. Some Marxists like to make a distinction between “private property” and “PERSONAL property” which is sort of similar to the “business” vs “toy” distinction I’ve drawn here, but others resist that.
Again, we’re not counting appreciation here, so if your Spider-Man comic has gone up in value, that’s not what I’m talking about.
It should be said that most of these limitations are due to the peculiar set up of Major League Baseball, or professional leagues in general. Most owners of the means of production are subject to much more relaxed regulations than this.