Lakeland, Fla. — The minute the words came out of his mouth, even he had to know they were going to come back to bite him.
Toward the end of a 30-minute press briefing in a resort hotel outside of Disney World Thursday, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred was asked if owning a big-league baseball team was a good investment?
Manfred replied: “We actually hired an investment banker, a really good one, actually, to look at that very issue. If you look at a purchase price of franchises, the cash that’s put in during the period of ownership, and then what they sold for, historically, the return on those investments is below what you get in the stock market, with a lot more risks.