Minor-league owners seeking $555m bailout already got $78m in federal PPP cash

With minor-league baseball owners looking to get a $550 million bailout from the federal government to repay themselves for pandemic-related losses — look, here’s a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article talking about how the money is needed to “save small-town baseball,” and here’s the Fort Wayne TinCaps president explaining why you should lobby your local Congressional representatives to pass the Minor League Baseball Relief Act — one faithful FoS reader with a desire to remain nameless and way too much time on their hands decided to look into exactly who the poor owners were who were being expected to cover their own losses. After digging into who’s behind various limited liability corporations that own a bunch of clubs, they came up with this spreadsheet, which shows that the roster of minor-league owners includes at least a few billionaires (Buffalo Bisons and Northwest Arkansas Naturals owner Robert E. Rich, El Paso Chihuahuas co-owner Josh Hunt, Salt Lake Bees owner Ryan Smith), a couple of members of the Baseball Hall of Fame (George Brett owns the Tri-City Dust Devils and co-owns the Spokane Indians, while Cal Ripken Jr. owns the Aberdeen Ironbirds), and Bill Murray, who is part-owner of the Charleston RiverDogs, Hudson Valley Renegades, and St. Paul Saints.

The most interesting part of the spreadsheet, though, is the “PPP” column, which indicates which teams already received funding via the Paycheck Protection Program, the federal program to help companies cover pandemic losses and keep their workers on payroll, even if that’s not always how the money was used. While that Post-Gazette article reported that “many minor league teams were ineligible for Paycheck Protection Program loans because they were owned by larger companies,” most, it turns out, got the money just fine: 86 of the 120 teams our peerless investigator peerlessly investigated received PPP loans, according to publicly available documents, totaling $78 million. Among the recipients:

• Sacramento River Cats owner Susan Savage, who inherited the team when her husband Art died in 2009 and who is set to be played by Felicity Huffman in an upcoming “baseball comedy” on ABC, collected the largest PPP check, $3.63 million. The last time Forbes did estimates of minor league baseball franchise values in 2016, the River Cats ranked as the most valuable of all, coming in at $49 million in worth on annual profits of $5.6 million, thanks to high attendance numbers despite “some of the highest-priced ticket options in the minor leagues.” (Presumably a revised Forbes ranking would need to include the value of an ABC option on the owner’s life story.)
• The Dayton Dragons, which finished third on those Forbes rankings with a $45 million value and had a minors-high $6.7 million in annual profits despite playing at the Single-A level, collected $1.73 million in PPP cash for owners Greg Rosenbaum, Nicholas Sakellariadis, and Mike Savit. Rosenbaum, a co-founder of the private-equity giant Carlyle Group who has since served as CEO of a couple of different companies, has close ties to Democratic Party leaders; he’s been the central figure bankrolling the Minor League Baseball Relief Act efforts, hiring lobbyists with ties to both parties to push for renewed bailout money.
• Larry Lucchino’s Worcester Red Sox, which just got around $150 million in public money for a new butt-ugly stadium so the former Boston Red Sox exec could move the team there from Pawtucket, collected $1.8 million in PPP funds.
• Mike DeWine, the Asheville Tourists owner better known as the governor of Ohio, collected $421,000.
• The Wichita Wind Surge, owned by the family of Lou Schwechheimer, a longtime minor-league baseball exec who died of Covid last summer, received a relatively small $518,000 but distinguished themslves by listing their industry as “Miscellaneous Intermediation” on their first cash request and soybean farming on their second.

There’s more — Bill Murray, if you’re curious, got a share of about $3 million for his ownership in multiple franchises, though it’s impossible to determine his cut without knowing how much of an ownership stake he has in each — but you get the idea. A bunch of not-super-duper-rich but still severely wealthy people got $78 million combined last year to help pay their staff, plus potentially other costs like rent and mortgage payments. (Though most of the MiLB money appears to have been initially designated for payroll, there’s nothing in the PPP rules preventing companies from changing their minds later about how to use it.) Those owners are now seeking $550 million more on the grounds that they’ll go out of business without aid, notwithstanding the fact that they’re already now back in business, and presumably on the road to those multi-million-dollar yearly profits again.

It would be great to see the books of some of these teams to see how much they actually lost last year and how it compares to the bailout cash they’re requesting — maybe that can be the next research project for FoS readers. (Or I can look into it once I’m back from vacation.)