CHICAGO – When Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Entertainment Group bought the Los Angeles Dodgers from the O’Malley family back in 1998, I asked Chicago Cubs President Andy MacPhail during spring training whether having Fox as an owner was good for baseball
MacPhail hesitated before giving an ambiguous response, suggesting the economic trends in baseball probably signaled the end of family ownership in favor of big corporations such as Murdoch’s $11 billion News Corporation, which ran Fox. “The dollars are getting so high that it’s not inconceivable you’ll have more companies and corporations owning teams,” MacPhail said.
“I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. … In my view, the salary structures of clubs are becoming sort of fragmented. “You’re going to have seven or eight ‘super franchises’ that are really capable of sustaining high payroll numbers and 22 or 23 others that are not going to be blessed with those kinds of revenues.” MacPhail turned out to be prescient, for better or worse, though the number of “super franchises” in 2025 could be down to three: the Dodgers, New York Mets and New York Yankees.
The World Series champion Dodgers, now owned by Guggenheim Baseball Management, have a 26-man payroll of $288.8 million, according to spotrac.com, and this winter they signed top free agents Blake Snell and Tanner Scott along with Roki Sasaki, the most coveted pitcher out of Japan.
