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[King Jeff]

I know Brett posted the Yahoo! article yesterday, but the papers here have been all over this for a couple of days and it's not going to go away or end nicely. Here's a link to the report on it. They have been fighting to get a ballpark in Miami for some time now, the problem is there is no money for it, and the team had no money to put into it. The Marlins are one of the most notoriously shady organizations even though they've only been around for about 20 years. It's pretty apparent that ownership has been in on some shady business, and now the feds are all over it. They somehow got funding from a reluctant county to build the stadium and parking garage. The real problem comes after, when the team gets to pocket all baseball related income without having to pay anything back to the city/county, and on top of it, the county will have to pay the taxes on the parking garage(something like two million a year) There is almost no way this got approved without some seriously underhanded dealings going on. I can't get a good feel for what the proceedings have been going like for the Cubs and their funding. I'm wondering if the Cubs, who seem to be having similar problems, are in even more of a hole because of a spotlight being cast on this, and presumably, all public funded stadium deals. There is talk that David Samson, Jeff Loria, and even Bud Selig could be in hot water over all of this, and that the investigation might even cover how Loria came to be owner of the Marlins in the first place. None of this sounds good.

[T C]

An important thing to remember regarding this case is just how awful the Marlins ownership is as human beings. Theyve been doing nothing but trying to maximize profit out of that team for two decades, to the point that the MLB had to tell them to spend more money, since they were simply pocketing revenue sharing money. Theyre awful megalomaniacs who deserve to go to prison for what theyve stolen from Miami-Dade County.

On a related note, the whole business of leagues bilking local governments out of huge money is not a new thing. Jeff Passan described it as the system Reinsdorf invented, which only makes me hate that man even more. The biggest example of such corruption, in my mind, is the new Soldier Field. It cost 600M+ of almost all city funding to build, and it seats the fewest of any stadium in the NFL...

Required viewing for those interested in learning more about how leagues attempt to strong-arm municipalities is Sonicsgate, which (despite continuing the obnoxious trend of adding 'gate' to the end of all stories involving corruption) details how the NBA broke a whole bunch of its contracts with Seattle and Washington, committed numerous underhanded business deals with the Sonics' ownership, and stole the Seattle Supersonics from the City of Seattle. It is extremely infuriating to watch, but is an incredibly well done film.

It's free to watch, but a bit long. Still worth it

http://sonicsgate.org/movie/