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Rogers Pondering Sale Of Blue Jays As Another Media Company Whiffs With Baseball

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Partnerships between baseball teams and media companies rarely seem to go as planned.

When the Columbia Broadcasting System bought the New York Yankees for $13 million in 1964, the Bronx Bombers were about to make their fifth consecutive appearance in the World Series, and CBS was a big player in sports broadcasting.

It was a marriage that seemed to be made in heaven. Years of mediocrity ensued, and George Steinbrenner purchased the team in 1973 from CBS for $8.6 million. Today, the Yankees are baseball's most valuable team, worth $3.7 billion.

Three years later, Ted Turner bought the losing Atlanta Braves for $10 million. Given the man's genius, it's not surprising Turner was tremendously successful.

Turner, who also started CNN, used the Braves to underpin the TBS Superstation. The Braves became the best team in the National League during the 1990s. Turner made a bundle selling Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner in 1995. Time Warner sold the Braves to John Malone for $450 million in 2007.

In 1981, the Chicago Cubs were sold for $20.5 million by William Wrigley to the Tribune Company. Sure, televising the Cubs enabled Tribune to turn WGN into the first Superstation.

But the Cubs were losers under Tribune, which neglected the team. In 2008 Tribune filed for bankruptcy and in 2009 the Cubs, Wrigley Field and 25% of a regional sports network were sold to the Ricketts family for $845 million. 

In 1998, Walt Disney bought the Anaheim Angels for $150 million.

As the New York Times reported, when Disney bought the Angels, "Disney executives thought they could own a suite of sports entertainment assets, which included the N.H.L.'s Anaheim Mighty Ducks, that it could exploit on television, in movies and at its Disneyland theme parks. Those investments, though, failed to pay off for Disney and proved to be money losers."

Disney sold the team in 2003 to Arturo Moreno for $180 million.

Not to be outdone, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought the Los Angeles Dodgers for $311 million from the O'Malley family, which had controlled the team since Walter O'Malley bought a majority interest in the then-Brooklyn Dodgers in 1950. 

But, as Variety reported, the Dodgers lost a pile of money under News Corp and were not too good on the diamond. "Murdoch’s group became so desperate to discard the team, in fact, that they quite literally paid someone to take it off their hands. In 2004, Fox sold the Dodgers to a rakish Boston real-estate developer named Frank McCourt. Not only did McCourt not put down a single dollar of his own money, but Fox lent him much of the $420 million price tag."

McCourt made out spectacularly with his investment in the Dodgers.

Now we have Rogers Communications announcing it is considering the sale of the Toronto Blue Jays. Rogers purchased the team for $165 million in 2000. Like Disney and News Corp, Rogers was looking for synergy.

In 2011, Rogers partnered with BCE Inc to acquire Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, owners of Toronto's Maple Leafs, Raptors and Air Canada Centre, for $2-billion. The deal provided Rogers with a lot more guaranteed content for its sports channels and wireless platforms.

Now Rogers is not getting the ROI it was looking for which, by the way, was something I warned about over four years ago.

Something about these darned media company-baseball hookups that just never seems to work out. Sure, some media companies have sold teams for more than they paid. But the synergies for combining their broadcasting, entertainment and sports assets never materialized.

For Rogers, the good news is the Miami Marlins recently sold for $1.2 billion. That means the Blue Jays have to be worth at least.............Ah, your guess is as good as mine.

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