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Per the Baltimore Sun, Major League Baseball’s ownership committee voted to approve the sale of the Baltimore Orioles to David Rubenstein, which is not the same thing as the sale of the team being approved. For that to happen, at least 23 of the owners would need to vote in favor, but it’s also difficult to imagine any reason why this particular deal would be shot down. Well, alright, maybe a bunch of small-market owners would be upset about another owner coming in to spend more than the current O’s owners do, but this same-ish group of men also let Steve Cohen buy the Mets, so they don’t get too worked up over that sort of thing. Outside of trying to keep Mark Cuban out of their club, anyway.
Sources previously told The Sun that the sale is expected to be approved on a quicker timeline than most — perhaps before opening day March 28 — given Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group and a Baltimore native, is a well-known public figure who has long eyed buying an MLB club. Such approvals — involving scrutiny of buyers’ backgrounds and their financing — typically take several months.
In late January, the Angelos family reached an agreement to sell the Orioles to a group led by Rubenstein in a deal that values the club at $1.725 billion. In 1993, now-ailing family patriarch Peter Angelos, 94, bought the club for $173 million. Rubenstein’s net worth is $3.7 billion, according to Forbes.
As explained here back in January, the sale won’t be a 100 percent completed transaction right away, because the Angelos family has a bunch of capital gains taxes it wants to avoid paying. It’s cool how rules don’t really exist for the super wealthy, isn’t it? At least Peter’s kids will be gone from baseball, though: as much as I’ll miss being able to make fun of John Angelos any time he opens his mouth, not having him speaking is also neat.
The A’s finally released those renderings they had been promising for months, and they certainly come off like a project that’s extremely late from someone who just wanted to say it was done. I’ll let Neil deMause take it from here:
The “five overlapping layers” “inspired by traditional baseball pennants” turn out to look more like someone picked up the Sydney opera house and dropped it on a baseball stadium. It’s definitely visually striking — how it would work in terms of engineering, how much it would cost to construct, and how it would fit on a teeny nine-acre site are all excellent questions.
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Fisher gave an interview to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser that will be remembered for his quote that “the armadillo is an underrated animal,” but is mostly notable for his admission that even after putting in $500 million of his own money and borrowing another $200 million, he’s still missing $500 million that he expects to come from unidentified “equity investors” in … the team? The stadium? The roof? Slusser apparently didn’t ask, nor did she ask if a $1.5 billion price tag for this madness is really realistic.
Renderings are just renderings and not promises or plans, so getting too worked up about them is a little silly, but it is fitting that John Fisher’s A’s are making a big show of something they can’t possibly accomplish despite their promises. You know, just like the entire Vegas plan itself.
Stop covering Trevor Bauer. Just stop doing it. No one has to interview him so he has air time to try to figure out the correct combination of words that will make people stop being mad at him and let him be employed again. No one has to send a reporter out there to write some piece about him striking out minor leaguers in spring training and then giving him air time to talk about how he’s still got it or whatever. And yet, these things keep happening, and at national outlets, even. Just quit it! He’s not news unless an MLB team signs him!
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