MLB Baseball Betting for June 16, 2016
Easy winner on Wednesday as the New York Mets whipped the Pittsburgh Pirates behind a dominating performance by Noah Syndergaard. A short card of baseball for Thursday with a total of ten games including three day games:
MLB BASEBALL BETTING FOR JUNE 16, 2016:
CINCINNATI REDS AT ATLANTA BRAVES:
Relatively speaking, the Atlanta Braves had a decent day on Wednesday. They beat the Cincinnati Reds 9-8 in 13 innings and Freddie Freeman became the first MLB player this year to hit for the cycle (single, double, triple and home run in the same game). The sad thing is that when it’s all said and done this win and Freeman’s cycle could be *THE* highlight of 2016 for the franchise formerly known as ‘America’s Team’.
These are trying times for the Braves in what will be their final season in Turner Field. Atlanta will move into swanky new SunTrust Park in suburban Cobb County. The geographic move makes sense as that’s the way the population of the Atlanta metro area is growing. The new stadium admittedly looks beautiful but it wasn’t met with universal acclaim. The primary beef was–surprise, surprise–the Braves extorting $397 million out of Cobb County taxpayers to help bankroll the venue.
And who can blame them? The taxpayer funding of stadium construction has become the biggest scam in sports business. The citizens of Cobb County made it pretty clear that they had an issue with picking up the tab but obviously no one in county government cares what they think. That’s how government works. The Cobb County residents might hold some ill will against their new neighbors since subsidizing the Braves park has decimated the city’s financial coffers and resulted in a tax increase. Keep in mind that the current ownership group (Liberty Media) bought the team in 2007 for $400 million. Earlier this year Forbes magazine tagged the Braves as being worth a mere $1.1 *Billion* dollars.
Making the fiasco all the worse–Liberty Media could care less how the team performs on the field. The Braves’ payroll relative to the rest of the league has dropped precipitously during Liberty Media’s ownership. There are some that think they’re decimated the franchise to the point that they should be forced to sell using the old ‘good of the league’ argument that the NBA used against former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling. That’s not going to happen for a number of reasons, one being that Major League Baseball has no interest in a legal bloodbath with Liberty Media. The NBA was willing to stand up to Donald Sterling–an aging Lothario worth a mere $1 billion and more interested in who his estranged wife was sleeping with than anything else. Sterling, of course, made out like a bandit selling the team to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion. Yep, that was his punishment for dropping ‘N-bombs’ and other racist slurs on tape. The NBA went ‘all in’ with Sterling correctly perceiving that the lure of a massive return on investment (Sterling bought what was then the San Diego Clippers for $12.5 million in 1979) and general disinterest in a legal battle would convince him to go quietly.
Liberty Media and fiery CEO John Malone would most definitely *not* go quietly. You don’t have to do anything when you run a company with a $6.23 billion market cap. It would be a tough battle for the MLB in any circumstances and other than the displeasure of Braves fans they don’t have much of a case. Cutting payroll to make a team profitable is a tough thing to implicate even if it does have significant ramifications on the talent the Braves put on the field. Making a case that Liberty Media is running the team into the ground for profit is even tougher to make since Atlanta has had only three losing seasons (and this will make number four) in the ten years under their ownership. True, it’s not the level the Braves are used to but lofty expectations after 14 divisional titles in 15 years aren’t Liberty’s fault.
The fans aren’t happy but most likely they’ll be back if and when the Braves start winning. Or will they? This is where it gets interesting. There are plenty of upsides to having a fiery, media savvy CEO like John Malone but there are also downsides. For one thing, they talk a lot and Malone has made it pretty clear that the Atlanta Braves aren’t so much a sport business as they are a real estate business. Liberty just pocketed $300 million for selling Turner Field to Atlanta based Georgia State University. It wasn’t a bad deal for the school and not really a bad price for the real estate. But that would defray a large chunk of the outlay by Cobb County for the new stadium.
Malone took some heat for a comment to Braves shareholders (that’s another story for another time) that essentially validated the ‘we’re not a sports business but a real estate business’ narrative saying “The Braves are now a fairly major real estate business as opposed to just a baseball club.” There’s nothing wrong with diversification of revenue but it’s a tough sell when the team is losing. The Braves/Liberty Media have also reportedly extracted nearly a half billion dollars from random small towns throughout the Southeast for ballpark construction. As REASON magazine observed:
The Braves’ modus operandi is consistent: they court a downtrodden city’s political class, then threaten their current host city with leaving, and pit the two against each other as the cities offer up public money they don’t have in order to keep or import a Braves minor league team.
It’s bad enough to pull the ‘taxpayer financed stadium scam’ anywhere but despite some short term fiscal issues places like affluent Cobb County can afford it. Places like Pearl, Mississippi not so much. Pearl, Mississippi is a town of 25,000 or so billed as the ‘Trailer Park Capital of the South’. It’s obvious why the city was desperate to keep the Braves farm team–they’ve got little more than a prison (the ‘public financed stadiums’ of the law enforcement world), a dangerous alligator population and based on a Google news search a disproportionate amount of the gunplay under bizarre circumstances that characterizes the rural South.
Surprisingly, there’s very little media outcry over the Braves extortion tactics against downtrodden Southern towns. I had no clue about it until I read an article in the Libertarian political magazine REASON. The biggest affront to longtime Braves fans–Liberty has gutted the minor league system that was once the best in baseball.
Translation–Atlanta is awful and could be for the foreseeable future. That means years, not just this season. Bet against them any time you can do so at a reasonable price.
BET CINCINNATI REDS -115 OVER ATLANTA BRAVES