COMMENTARY : Orioles’ Sale for $100 Million: Is This a Great Country or What?

Before we begin our discussion of Eli Jacobs possibly selling the Baltimore Orioles, there’s something I need to know: Any of you who think there’s something wrong with making money, raise your hands. No takers? Good.

Because this is what Jacobs stands to do.

Make much money.

Is this a great country, or what?

Three years ago, he purchased the Orioles for $70 million, and today they’re said to be worth at least $100 million, probably significantly more.

How do we arrive at that figure? Baseball is selling its two National League expansion franchises for $95 million, so that’s the floor -- and that’s for a brand new team in a brand new, untested city. The Orioles are an established franchise with an enviable fan base; in 1990 they had the eighth-highest attendance among 26 teams. And that was for a team with the ninth-worst record in baseball.

The Orioles’ attractiveness is further enhanced by two additional factors: 1) The availability next season of the new, beautiful stadium at Camden Yards, a stadium built by Maryland Lottery money, not Eli Jacobs’s money. Historically, moving into a new facility shoots attendance up like a rocket (see the Toronto Skydome). The Orioles should draw between 300,000 and 500,000 more people next year. 2) The probability that Washington will not get one of the two expansion franchises, which keeps the Baltimore-Washington market inviolate for the O’s and encourages the increasing stream of northward commuters.

And so, you might ask, if all the signs are good, why sell now, why not put in a couple of years at the new stadium and bring a tote board?

Jacobs says he wants his old life back. A shy, doggedly private -- some say introverted -- man, he says he finds the spotlight of owning a baseball team unwelcome. (Though he doesn’t seem to mind entertaining President Bush or Queen Elizabeth in the owner’s box, and it’s not like they show up incognito in wigs and Groucho masks.)

The regular pounding Jacobs endures in print and on Baltimore radio talk shows, where he’s routinely characterized as “a tightwad,” has jarred him. “I’d prefer that I live a normal, ordinary life,” Jacobs says, or at least as normal and ordinary as it gets when your net worth is up in the $500 million-dollar range. (I mean, even if he sells the team, it’s not likely we’ll see him standing on line for dollar movies.) Baseball takes far too much time away from his other business and charitable interests. He has no time to take vacations, little time to read. Before Jacobs bought the O’s he was a studious reader. “I’d like to go back to reading two or three serious books a week,” he says. (There’s a limit to how many times you can re-read “Men At Work.”)

Owning a baseball team can be exhausting, especially if you have to stay for extra innings. But there are issues raised by Jacobs’s quick turnaround that aren’t satisfied by explaining he wasn’t prepared for a few bozos calling him a tightwad. (Jacobs is based in New York. Didn’t he see the mincemeat the media and fans made of George Steinbrenner? Doesn’t he read the papers? Or did he think that hedging his bet by signing Glenn Davis for only one year, or firing Frank Robinson, would be somehow endearing on Calvert Street?)

Maybe Jacobs, who made a fortune in the ‘80s in the shark tank of leveraged buyouts, snatched the Orioles with this in mind. (You may remember the scene in “Wall Street” when Charlie Sheen’s character, Bud, confronts leverage tycoon Gordon Gekko after learning Gekko’s plan to sell off all the assets of Blue Star Airlines, the company Bud’s father works for. “You just bought it. Why would you wreck it?” Bud asks, feeling betrayed.

“Because it’s wreckable,” Gekko says. Patting Bud on the cheek, Gekko says, “It’s all about bucks, kid, the rest is just conversation.”) When Jacobs was asked about being in baseball for the long haul, he answered, “What’s the long haul? Will I own the Orioles five or 10 years from now?

Maybe Jacobs foresees a cataclysm about to hit baseball. Maybe he looks at the exponential rise in salaries -- which he abhors (see no competitive offers to top-flight free agents) -- and the certain shrink of TV revenues, and concludes he ought to sell now, and get out of Dodge. If baseball is a good investment, how come none of the heavy hitters in Washington signed up for expansion?

Maybe the annual debt service Jacobs carries on the Orioles is greater than the profits he can make, even with the new park. And his investment, therefore, is doomed.

Maybe his own personal empire is wilting in this recession. He says no. But who in his position ever says yes? (see Trump, T.D.)

And so what if he sells? Baltimore won’t lose the O’s. Fay Vincent -- a Yale Law School alumnus, like Jacobs -- wouldn’t think of leaving Camden Yards empty. Baltimoreans will be glad to be rid of Jacobs. They don’t like him, just as they didn’t like Edward Bennett Williams before him. Jacobs and EBW were outsiders, which in Baltimore is defined as anyone who didn’t grow up in a row house with a four-step front stoop. Jacobs grew up near Boston, a Red Sox fan. O’s fans hate the Sawx almost as much as they hate the Yankees.

Here’s a fanciful thought: Jacobs has friends here in Washington. He moves comfortably in political circles. What if once he sells the O’s, he gets second thoughts about baseball? The Houston Astros are for sale, and Steve Greenberg, Vincent’s deputy, has said, “The commissioner knows it is inevitable that franchises will relocate.” What if Eli Jacobs buys the Astros and brings them here? If he does that, I promise not to call him a tightwad.