Hal Steinbrenner's pathetic defense of the Yankees is leading MLB into a lockout

Won't someone spare a thought for the poor, downtrodden New York Yankees? Sure, they're arguably the most storied franchise in North American sports, with an $8.2 billion valuation (more than $1 billion more than MLB's next-closest competitor) in the richest market on Earth and a logo recognized around the globe. But have you considered that they also have to spend money? Sometimes a lot of it!

Lest you think I'm just doing an extended bit, this appears to be the actual argument that Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner expects us all to believe. "It's not fair," Steinbrenner told reporters on Monday, when asked how he felt about fans' assumption that his team — which is, again, the literal New York Yankees — was profitable.

"Everybody wants to talk about revenues. They need to talk about our expenses, including the $100 million expense to the city of New York that we have to pay every Feb. 1, including the COVID year. It all starts to add up in a hurry. Nobody spends more money, I don't believe, on player development, scouting, performance science. These all start to add up. If you want to go look at the revenues, you got to somehow try to figure out the expense side as well. You might be surprised."

It should be immediately obvious to everyone over the age of five that Steinbrenner's full of it here. If you can't make money owning the Yankees, you should probably find another line of work. But this is about more than just magical math; this is an object lesson in everything wrong with MLB right now, a breakdown in good faith that's going to plunge the sport into a lockout in 12 months' time.

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Hal Steinbrenner's plea for sympathy should fall on deaf ears

Before we get there, though, let's reiterate: Steinbrenner is hardly shooting straight here. For starters, that "$100 million" he claims the team pays to New York City each year is actually something like $84 million, and it's actually a bargain: It comes from NYC's PILOT program, which essentially fronted the team a loan in order to get the new Yankee Stadium built. Rather than pay the same property and related taxes everyone else does, Steinbrenner is only on the hook for the interest on the loan, which saves him roughly $40 million each year.

But beyond the details, whether the Yankees strictly speaking operate at a loss isn't actually the question here. But "the Yankees" as a going concern go well beyond baseball-related revenue and expenses. The team also owns a 26% share of the YES Network, the most lucrative regional sports network in the country, as well as a share of Legends Hospitality, a company that handles concessions, merch and other operations at a variety of venues — and is currently valued at over a billion dollars.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Steinbrenner wants everyone to believe that the Yankees are still just a mom-and-pop shop, a baseball team that runs its business like anyone else. The reality, though, is that New York has long since diversified its portfolio. It can be both technically true that the Yankees don't turn a profit and also that extrapolating from that in the way Steinbrenner is doing here is wildly misleading.

Of course, being wildly misleading is sort of the point, both for Steinbrenner and the rest of the league's owners.

MLB owners want to cry poor, but there's one very big catch

I want to focus on the end of Steinbrenner's statement for a moment. "If you want to go look at the revenues," he chides the media, "you got to somehow try to figure out the expense side as well."

Gee, Hal, wouldn't that be nice? Except there's a problem: Steinbrenner, in his own words, "doesn't want to get into it", and neither does anybody else around baseball. Owners spend lots of time crying poor to the press, explaining to fans why they couldn't possibly spend more money than they currently are and why a salary cap is vital to the continued solvency of the sport. But when that same press, or the MLBPA, asks those owners to open their books so the world can take a look, the response is always the same: take a hike.

You can't have it both ways. If you want to insist that we all have the wrong idea about the economics of running an MLB team in 2025, that's fine, but you can't expect us all to simply take your word for it. You need to prove it with actual evidence ... except owners can't, because doing so would expose their financials to scrutiny they're not prepared to bear. If Steinbrenner did want to get into it, everyone might realize just how much money he has to play with, and the extent to which he's running the Yankees as a business rather than a civic entity. Which wouldn't be very good for the bottom line.