PITTSBURGH — First the good news:
An iconic Pittsburgh sports franchise is being sold to a financially muscular corporate dynamo with an enviable record of accumulating championships.
Now the bad news:
It’s not the Pirates.
As of this column’s deadline, the Penguins of Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle were set to sell to Fenway Sports Group, operators of the Boston Red Sox and similar platinum franchises in multiple sports on multiple continents. The FSG board approved the deal unanimously Friday, and now it is sent to the NHL league office for approval.
Well, that’s wonderful.
Lemieux was said to be staying on as a minority ownership stake holder with primo seats, and Burkle — his L.A.-based cash source originally brought to the table by the late Pittsburgh super agent Tom Reich — was reportedly being offered a similar arrangement but might instead make a clean break. Either way, with a sale price expected to come in between $650 million and $900 million, he’ll be smilin’ like a butcher’s dog, to borrow a phrase.
Lemieux and Burkle bought the club out of bankruptcy in 1999 for a little more than $106 million.
The Penguins-Fenway Sports Group transition is historic in one sense, that being it’s an outlier in Pittsburgh’s long tradition of selling its pro sports franchises only during four alarm financial fires. Twice since 1999, the hockey team successfully traversed an economic tight rope with no net just to get the right cash flow bricolage in place to remain in the city.
Three times since the mid-80s, the Pirates managed essentially the same metaphorical stunt, moving from the Galbreaths into the hands of a consortium of Pittsburgh business titans who could hardly wait to unload it on Kevin McClatchy. McClatchy, even after successfully arm-twisting into existence PNC Park as the only way to field a competitive baseball team in the future (The House Untruth Built), eventually shoved it off on Bob Nutting, who agreed to everything except the competitive baseball team part.
Thus this Penguins sale is the first in memory around here not conducted fully under duress. Even the NFL was a notably rickety proposition when Arthur Rooney bought in for $2,500 in 1933. As he said many times, “they’d have given it to me for nuthin’ if I’d put up a fight.”
From all accounts, the Penguins, their Lower Hill development initiatives, the city, and the region all figure to benefit significantly under the corporate tent of Red Sox owner John Henry, who with a massive assist from longtime baseball exec and Pittsburgh-native Larry Lucchino excavated Boston’s star-crossed baseball team from a primordial muck of failed promises.
In Ken Burns’ encyclopedic PBS documentary series “Baseball,” a small passage mentions the first playing of The Star Spangled Banner at a big league ballpark, coming as it did in 1918, when the Red Sox won the World Series against the Cubs. Narrator John Chancellor then solemnly says, “They have not won another.”
That was 1994, but beginning in 2004, the Red Sox won the World Series again, and then again and again and again, and if you join the Red Sox and the Penguins at the hip, you’ll have seven championships between 2004 and 2018, the very profile of success that might make you want to ask the Fenway Sports Group, “Can we interest you in the Pirates? You know, Major League Baseball, sort of?”
Major League Baseball made owning two teams illegal more than 100 years ago, but the enchanted idea that some hyper-financed individual or corporate entity like John Henry’s, with its demonstrable talent and outsized baseball aptitudes, might sweep downriver and rescue this town’s Nutting Ventured, Nutting Gained baseball operation still exists in the hearts of the few thousand Pirates fans who haven’t completely lost interest.
Six weeks after a season in which they finished last for the third straight year, the disgraceful baseball franchise has done next to nothing again in the sport’s annually bustling free agent marketplace. A week ago, a reliable source on Twitter indicated that 13 to 16 teams were interested in free agent first baseman Freddie Freeman, including the Braves, who paid him some $22 million last year.
So do you think anyone in Pittsburgh looking at that tweet actually read the list of interested teams looking for the Pirates? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
They did sign Eric Hanhold, however.
Who?
Exactly.
The 110-loss Baltimore Orioles cut Hanhold a few days earlier, perhaps not finding his 6.97 ERA a hopeful indicator. The fact that he appeared in 10 big-league games despite a 5.19 ERA at Norfolk indicates the Orioles didn’t lose 110 times for nothin’. The Pirates are still working their way toward the 110-loss plateau, having lost just 101 last year, so Hanhold looked like a logical fit to them, I guess.
That’s enough Hot Stove news for today, fans.
And don’t discount the fact that it’s an immense credit to the Penguins, to the city, to the club’s management, and to the National Hockey League, a truly international sport with great demographics and a new TV deal with ESPN, to have attracted a prospective owner like the Fenway Sports Group.
Yeah, that’s wonderful. Really, good on you.
