A corporate owner with no ties to baseball doesn't want that kind of risk, however. A corporate owner with no ties to baseball looks at last year's revenues, last year's expenses, sets a budget that locks in a certain amount of profit, and runs away. For years, men and women owned baseball teams and ran them as businesses, but they also acted in a way that acknowledged the truth about the job, that owning the team carried intangible benefits that owning a factory or a grocery store or a car dealership didn't. Owning the team provided a level of attention that had value, and owning a winning team made that all the better. Liberty Media, however, isn't going to bask in the glow of ownership or success, so there are no intangible benefits. Liberty Media doesn't even own the Braves because it wanted to add a baseball team to its portfolio; it owns them because there was a tax advantage to taking them in exchange for their Time Warner stock. I think A. Bartlett Giamatti wrote a poem about this back in the 1980s.

It's not that we should be surprised by Liberty's behavior. It's that we should be shaming Bud Selig for allowing this to happen on his watch. Time and again, Selig has made it clear that he doesn't want owners he cannot control, owners who will put winning above adhering to an industry-wide effort to tamp down labor costs. Just to name one example, he has repeatedly worked to keep Mark Cuban from owning a team, while blithely allowing a Liberty Media into the fold. Can there be any question but that Cuban would be a better owner, for both the fans of a given team and the industry as a whole than Liberty has been? Selig prefers the latter, which tells you so very much about how he views baseball.