The Brewers Are Here Until 2050.
Maybe the general Wisconsin sports fan by then will figure out how little they understand about the way of the sports financing world. That, and other things, as we embark upon 2025.
Wisconsin sports fans are not a particularly consistent bunch.
They had no problem funding Lambeau Field’s debasement several times over into the monstrosity it is today. All of that was spurred by Governor Tommy Thompson in 1999, who turned the stadium into a district in order to authorize a county tax increase; Isthmus tells us that Brown County voters agreed to a 0.5% sales tax hike in 2000, for financing that included $160M in bonds, $92.5M in user fees (the paper helpfully advises us that included “a one-time $2,000 fee paid by season ticket holders”), $9M in state transportation cash, over $20M in [useless] Packers stock and a $13M loan from the NFL.
In 2024, that $160M in bonding would be just north of $293 million. The user fees, almost $170M. (That one-time fee? $3,664.26 today.) The $9M of state transportation money (a favorite mattress from under which the state would plunder, regardless of party, until the state dangled just over a fiscal abyss), about $16.5M. And that worthless piece of paper the Packers call stock? Just a tick under $38M.
If the Milwaukee Brewers called up their sEaSoN sEaT mEmBeRs and told them, “Yeah, we’re renovating the ballpark, that’ll be your annual cost for seats and $3,600, thankyouverymuch,” the people of this state would be outraged: cursing out Tony Evers for something something corporate welfare, jumping on Zombie Twitter and putting Mark Anntonazzia on blast, calling into sports talk shows and—ha! Kidding, they’re not calling into sports talk to talk Brewers during Packer season! They barely talk about the Brewers during baseball season.
The truth is the state of Wisconsin did with the Packers much as they did with the Brewers, and people here didn’t really care so much about one as they did the other. The difference is that, as noted numerous times before, Bud Selig threatened to move the team if a publicly funded stadium deal was not reached and demanded that the owner of the stadium, the district (read: the state), be responsible for all upkeep (which, if we’re being honest, is what a landlord is supposed to do).
Even if I grant my agreement to the notion that the public generally should not be in the business of subsidizing sports stadiums, that’s null to this situation because the district was, is and always will be on the hook for this ballpark. Meanwhile, Selig has a hologram in a recess of the park’s concourse for the heroic act of holding the state over a barrel.
And now that Bud’s last call not only has financing for its needed renovations, but a guaranteed tenant for the next 26 seasons, fans who stopped paying attention when Pete Alonso’s home run ball was still in flight have many, many opinions about the situation, and almost all of them are bad and/or misinformed.
Fools and Their Folly
The Brewers announced last October they were not extending their media agreement with Diamond Sports (Bally Sports), choosing to go with MLB and a direct-to-consumer programming model.
This was a two-fold decision: 1) DSG was left to rot by its corporate parent, Sinclair, a local television station behemoth with no experience in managing major league sports broadcasting. DSG operationally estranged itself from Sinclair in December 2022.
It merits mention that Sinclair was awarded the RSNs as a result of the Disney-21st Century Fox merger that spanned from 2017 to its finalization in 2019. Including those networks in the end result was considered an antitrust violation by the DOJ, so Disney had custody of Fox Sports Networks only so far as to package and offer it for sale to prospective buyers. Interested parties at one time or another included Liberty Media (one-time parent company of the Atlanta Braves), Comcast (NBC Sports Networks), Discovery, Major League Baseball and News Corporation, the company that had sold them in the first place, amongst others.
Reports indicate Disney was hoping to net $15 to $20 billion for the networks, recouping a sizable chunk of the cost of acquiring Fox’s assets. The networks instead went to auction and many of the major and expected buyers declined to bid; they sold to Sinclair (which didn’t have the cash on hand to buy the assets outright) for roughly $10B. Fox Sports Networks were housed under Sinclair’s Diamond Sports Group LLC, and the rest was a trainwreck. What was a fairly well-oiled machine under Fox and even in Disney’s transitional ownership fairly quickly became a top-down mess.
If you’re wondering why Sinclair would end up the only buyer in this scenario, consider the principle players in this story:
Donald Trump’s Department of Justice had four Attorneys General over the course of this episode, so there was no real leadership happening there.
Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley, Sinclair in general, has long been cozy with right-wing players and Trump in particular.
Bob Iger played nice with Trump, even being named to Trump’s transitional Strategic and Policy Forum, until he left in summer 2017, protesting America’s exit from the Paris Climate Agreement. (Also resigning? Elon Musk.) You don’t need to search Trump’s social media feeds to guess how he treated Iger and Disney properties after that. There’s probably a good reason ABC put $15 million in an escrow account for a ahem Trump presidential library.
Rupert Murdoch, well, you know.
It’s not hard to envision a scenario where a deal gets green-lit that would, 1) severely enrich the president’s allies, 2) tank an adversary out of pettiness, 3) steer a sweetheart deal to another ally, even if they are obviously incapable of managing the assets they intend to acquired because 4) no one at the DOJ is doing due diligence because, 5) Trump gets what Trump wants while 6) the acquiring friendly company can write-off and carry-over the losses.
And the clown show that [most likely] brought you all of this that resulted in several seasons of miserable experiences trying to watch baseball and basketball is coming back for another wave of fascist backroom-dealing that’s [most definitely] already moved out of the backrooms.
Where were we? Oh, right. Sorry.
As mentioned above, MLB’s had its eye on the RSNs for some time. If you think it’s because Bob Manfred gives a crap about the fan experience, what has Manfred done that would make you think he has ever given one?
In fact, MLB was in court throughout Diamond’s bankruptcy proceedings, urging that the government force liquidation of the company so they could snap up the rights for all teams for pennies on the dollar. They were opposed to Amazon’s strategic investment and proposed partnership with DSG.
It’s not even like MLB had the entire infrastructure of MLB Advanced Media in place; they spun that off years prior to…Disney (surprise!) as BAMTech, which became the foundation for Disney+.
Why? Because removing RSNs from the equation puts MLB in position to control the rights to nearly all their broadcasts. Manfred believes he can get an NFL-type centralized media agreement for MLB, despite zero indication that there is national appeal for baseball, particularly Manfred’s MLB.
Centralized media means centralized money, and centralized money means the league has a perpetually stronger negotiating position from which it can enforce a hard salary cap. Manfred is a owner-side labor lawyer and has been since graduating Cornell Law. The goal has always been to crush salaries and get a hard cap in place.
With all of that in mind, this brings us to 2) The Brewers had one of the worst media deals in baseball because they exist in a small market with fans who hate paying for things, up to and including cable. The club remains overly reliant on revenue sharing, ticket sales and moving bottles of Secret Stadium Sauce (probably). Breaking from a decades-old agreement that stretched, in essence, back to Midwest Sports Channel, represented sacrificing the potential for more revenue from a volatile partner for certainty of less revenue — most sources say about 20% less than an RSN deal — from a stable partner.
For an organization that’s already rightly or wrongly viewed as cheap, the optics were poor. Slinking back to a flailing damaged goods property, since rebranded (Diamond is now Main Street Sports; Bally Sports — a naming agreement made by Sinclair — is now FanDuel Sports Network) and making the announcement at 3 pm on New Year’s Eve isn’t exactly a first-rate move by a franchise that has been by most rights one of the most successful in the past 20 years.
It’s admittedly a bold decision to spurn MLB, but one look at the Peter Seidler-less San Diego Padres, who spent last season broadcasting on MLB’s DTC model and have been actively in a fire sale trying to shed salaries, justifiably gave many clubs pause.
At the same time, the next collective bargaining agreement ends after the 2026 season. If the RSN model has any chance to survive, with clubs able to still operate with some semblance of agency and better call their own shots with media money, this is it. Whether they like it or not, teams like the Brewers (and players) and outfits like Main Street need each other right now.
And both need cable subscribers willing to pay for Brewers baseball.
Meanwhile, the Diamond/Main Street brain trust has been gutting local operations of talented, experienced logistics and production personnel to make their exit from bankruptcy viable in the eyes of a judge. It had to look better on paper than it probably will on your screen. Remember that when the technical difficulties message pops on your screen and pre- and post-game coverage is about four minutes total and features Chet from the terrace box seats giving half-drunk hot takes on Chuck Crim while a confused Vinny Rottino looks on.
Even then, this is still a preferred scenario to Manfred running broadcasts. Anytime Manfred loses, the rest of us win by default.
Muscle Memory
One last nugget from this past week: the Brewers announced changes to their strength and conditioning high performance staff.
I’m not sure there’s a team that’s suffered more soft tissue injuries, strains and pulls — actual ones, not the dIsCoMfOrTs and SuBlUxAtIoNs regularly used to disinform the public when arms, backs, knees and souls were pureed and they just didn’t want to admit it — than the Brewers, forcing us all to tout their depth when, in reality, they just couldn’t keep guys on the field.
I’m sure Dave Yeager is a nice enough guy, and he definitely knows more about sports performance training than I ever will. But, sweet baby Jesus in a manger, this club seemed to have more protracted IL stints due to intercostals, hamstrings, calves, forearms, groins and just about anything else in the body that could be pulled, strained, bruised, itchy or less than comfortable than anybody. It’s also pretty clear the Brewers have struggled at the end of multiple seasons, and looked particularly gassed in their October postseason appearances.
A hallmark of Mark Attanasio’s ownership has been maintaining continuity with leadership roles, often to a fault. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that a non-baseball guy generally stays out of baseball operations affairs; in fact, I call it a hallmark because it really is one of the better traits of this ownership, unlike other pro sports teams where the owner makes decisions because they’re the owner and they can.
But it is a hallmark and a fault. Too often, principal actors have been allowed to stay too long, and often in the face of flaws and deficiencies so clear the public can see them.
Wars are won and lost by logistics. Professional sports aren’t war, but the logic still applies. While this isn’t a sexy move like a big free agent signing or blockbuster trade, it’s an upgrade decision that nonetheless speaks volumes about taking winning seriously. The 2024 Brewers look a lot different if Christian Yelich stayed healthy, or William Contreras didn’t run out of gas and/or hide a knee injury.
But no one around here remembers that now; they’re too busy sharpening their knives for Matt LaFleur. Again.