Worst Owners in Sports (past and present)

Perhaps. But the White Sox had an even longer drought. As have the Cubs.

You can place more of the blame on Joe Cronin and Eddie Collins (early) and Mike Higgins (late) for many of those all-hit, no-pitch -- and all-white -- rosters.

As I said, Yawkey was a spoiled brat who inherited a shit-ton of money. Cronyism, I'll grant you; but there's no evidence that he was a racist himself, except that he was passive about integration. You of all people should know how complex the story of the Red Sox's integration is.

He certainly doesn't belong on this thread, that's for sure.

 

Weak sauce?

1966 average attendance: 10,014 (8th out of 10 AL teams in total attendance)
1965: 8,052 (7th out of 10)
1964: 10,905 (5th out of 10)
1963: 11,783 (4th out of 10)
1962: 9,280 (7th out of 10)
1961: 10,501 (6th out of 10)
1960: 14,674 (5th out of 8 )

I ain't cherry picking the numbers or looking for an outlier to back up my point. They were on the edge of irrelevance before '67.

And plenty of evidence suggests Yawkey was, at the very very least, complicit in the construction of these all-white rosters. I don't care how spoiled and clueless he was. There is NO excuse for him overseeing a franchise that took that long to intergrate. None.

 

This is worse than a Steelersjack.

 

No, they weren't. Attendance sucked everywhere during that era, especially for losing teams.

Take a look at the Yankees in the same time period and beyond -- and with a much bigger ballpark, too:

1973: 15,582 5th of 12
1972: 12,550 4th of 12
1971: 13,219 4th of 12
1970: 14,036 4th of 12
1969: 13,350 4th of 12
1968: 14,459 3rd of 10
1967: 15,360 5th of 10
1966: 13,715 5th of 10
1965: 14,621 2nd of 10
-----------------------------
1964: 16,119 1st of 10
1963: 16,362 2nd of 10
1962: 18,670 1st of 10
1961: 21,577 1st of 10
1960: 21,134 2nd of 8

Were they "on the edge of irrelevance," too? They were averaging 16K during pennant years!

 

And they were still first or second in the league in attendance and drawing nearly twice as many fans per game as the Sox. Even by the standards of a depressed market, the Sox weren't drawing flies.

Yawkey doesn't deserve to be on the list of worst owners, especially given some of the winners listed herein, but he was nowhere near any good and I firmly believe he did more wrong than right.

 

You couldn't be more wrong. Yawkey had his flaws, no doubt -- and there's no excuse for their appalling stance on race relations -- but he saved the franchise from real irrelevance, and possibly extinction.

(Now, if you want to say any dope with as much money as he had could have done the same, I won't argue. ... But he's the dope who did it.)

 

Or maybe the Sox were the team that was destined to survive in Boston, b/c the park was nicer and better suited for baseball and more popular and in a more profitable location than Braves Field. That dope had a lot of money, no doubt, but I think the Sox would have survived there anyway.

 

This chap in particular:

 

Yes, but the difference is the Yankees were winning all those years.

 

I think Stepien begins and ends this thread. And Connie Mack would have to be up there. Always selling off his best players. No way Al Davis, perhaps the main reason the NFL had to merge with the NFL, belongs in this convo.

 

Peter Angelos has personally run the Orioles into irrelevancy in major league baseball. Extorted Selig on guarenteed resale price for his team and is the only owner to own the broadcast right of his main competitor, The Nats. Owns the single worst regional sports network, MASN, which has all the production values of a middle school morning announcement. Has averaged a new GM & manger every 3 years of his tenure.

Fired the Manager of the Year, Davey Johnson the day before he received the award. Fired Jon Miller as a broadcaster. Alientated Cal Ripken Jr and Brooks Robinson.

As an attorney, he was hired by the State of Maryland to represent the State in the Tobacco Company settlements, hired temp lawyers at $40.00 an hour and billed the state $400.00 an hour for their time.then ripped off the state for hundreds of millions in fees for little work in the tobacco cases.
An supreme ambulance chaser, whose real reputation in the Baltimore legal community is shit.

 

Mack had to sell off players because unlike a lot of owners, he had no income outside of baseball. And one of his "fire sales" was during the Great Depression, so I give him a bit of a pass on that.