“Golf’s Merger–Winners-Losers”

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Birdies-Bogeys-Big Money-Bad Feelings.

That sums up the first 12-hours of reaction after the golf world was broadsided by the merger of the PGA Tour, the enemy LIV and the DF-European tour.

No one saw this coming and now suddenly the villain that was Greg Norman, has been replaced by the villain that is now, PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan.

But what just happened, this matchup of hated rivals becoming business partners is shocking, because this is more than just a dollar deal, it also involves values in society.

This involves more than golf and prize money.

This is about who the PGA is doing business with, the Saudi Public Investment  Fund, money poured in from a country with a history of horrid human rights violations, murder, discrimination, and humiliation of its own women.

Monahan spent the last year and a half condemning all things that the crown prince and his country stand for.  Now they will be linked together as business partners.

The PGA Commissioner stood strong as LIV golf began its raids of the big names on the tour with outrageous signing bonuses, by standing next to the 9-11 Families United group.  You should not forget the hijackers of those jets that hit the towers, the Pentagon and that Pennsylvania farm field, were an attack by Saudi extremists.

He intimated ‘things change-this was a business deal’.  Tell that to the families mourning dead family members.    Now what Monahan felt two years ago, is seemingly no longer important.

How do you explain to Rory McIlroy, Xander Schaufelle, Jon Rahm, your current stars, who passed up 100M bonuses to stay on the PGA tour, why this U-turn in business philosophy happened?

And now the PGA is willing to lift the suspension, readmit the big names who bolted, Koepka, Mickelson, DJ, DeChambeau?  They got their payday, hurt the tour that gave them a career, and will now be allowed to return with no penalty?  How is that fair?

Monahan held a heated 1-hour conversation with tour players in Toronto at the Canadian Open, and he took some hostile criticism for his public stance.  He accepted the brutal comments, like dishonorable, turncoat and hypocrite.

There are some who will say the formation of the LIV was sports-washing at its worst, the Sauids spending that money to try and change the global opinion of how they operate and how they treat people in that country.

The Saudis are buying their way into other sports.  Can you say Olympics, Newcastle United soccer, and F-1 teams.  Guess a price tag is attached to everyone’s values now.

But others will tell you the absurd money paid to players to jump, triggered the PGA to create additional big prize money, not just increased purses, but the formation of 8-elite tournaments with historic prize money.

The bitterness is extensive, with comments like ‘they had no sponsors, no TV deals, no fans on the course, and you bring them into a partnership?”

Rumors were flying the LIV was bleeding money.  They lost 863M in their debut season.  By the time they finish this year’s schedule, the 2-year losses will amount to 1.8B.  The backers of the fund were shopping the tour, and thought they had a 1B-deal just last week with a European investment syndicate, Endeavour, which instead backed out.

Talks with the PGA began 7-weeks ago in London.  Monahan led a 4-man negotiations team, meeting with a 2-man Saudi team.  It took 4-meetings to come to a conclusion working together was better than the costly court fights straight ahead.

And no one wanted to talk about the anti-trust lawsuits, the legal costs, the potential damages, and what would show up in discovery.

Trust me this bitter argument is not over.  The PGA prided itself it was run by the players, but they were in the dark till 10am on Tuesday.  Monahan violated his own bylaws to do this deal.  The ‘tight circle of information’ excluded the most important people, the players and the Tour Policy Board.

The structure of the deal has Monahan becoming the CEO of the new syndicate.  A Saudi banker will lead the Board of Directors.

The PGA will run every facet of the ‘golf operation’ between the lines, the tourneys, the rules, the global schedule.

Shocking is the fact the new the Public Investment Fund will become a major corporate sponsor of the tour, will help operate the European corner of golf and guide business investments abroad.

The Grand Slam events, the four majors, will operate as usual.

The LIV ‘team concept’ will likely be part of the European schedule.

The big names stars, who took their pay days and bonus money in a yearly schedule, will see Saudi money end at the end of this year’s LIV schedule.

No penalty for guys violating their Tour card and leaving?  No penalty for the LIV guys who tampered with the PGA players?

What happens to the TV contracts the PGA has and will there be a demand for increased rights fees now that there is global peace?

What happens to the LPGA Tour, whom both Monahan and the Saudi’s were offering assistance?

Phil Mickelson and friends come back to the tour, having to earn their way.  Still to be seen will be whether there are cut-lines and how they reinsert the Global Points rankings for 2024, all part of the PGA way of doing things.

In the history of sports, the NFL was challenged by the AFL, and when the upstart league started stealing quarterbacks, a merger took place leading to the bonanza business the NFL and its Super Bowls became.

Basketball had the ABA and its wild rules challenge the NBA for a short term, before the salaries sank it, but the ABA sent alot of good young players to the NBA.

The WHA took NHL stars and went for 9-years before it ran out of money and 4-WHA teams came on board.

The governing auto racing body of CART ran the Indy 500 and the sport until the upstart Indy Racing League was formed that nearly led to the death of open wheel racing.

This war lasted 18-months in golf and we have not heard the end of it.  But we know this for certain.

It was called a ‘Landmark moment for golf’.   Others think it was lousy moment in sports history.  A big day is likely a sad day, the PGA doing business with the shameful things the Saudi nation stands for.

Why does it feel like Jay Monahan should be called a Judas.

The fans will get to see all the stars who left, plus the new young guns the PGA discovered the last two years, but this day leaves a dark feeling on your soul.

Wonder what Jack Nicklaus thinks?  What Ben Hogan, Sam Snead or Arnie Palmer would from the grave?  Waiting for Tiger Woods to tell us his thoughts.

Money over morality, that’s what this day in golf looked like.

‘Blood Money’ now part of the conversation with birdies, bogeys, big shots.

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“BASEBALL NOTES”

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Spraying shots to all fields covering baseball:

PADRES CROWDS…20-sellouts already at home-superb, but fans have started booing the Padres at home, and there were a ton of Cubs fans in the stands, meaning Padres fans are selling off their tickets.

PITCHING STAFFS…Some dominant starts of late, some dazzling outings from Darvish-Musgrove-Wacha and even Snell.  Wait to see if this becomes the norm with this rotation.

BULLPEN..Alot of calls to the pen already for Steve Wilson and he’s been really reliable.  But way too many games already.  Candidate for dead arm.

DEAD IN CENTER…Trent Grisham was hot and cold in Milwaukee. He has been mostly AWOL in San Diego when hitting.  That’s 9M a year for a guy to hit (.133) the last group of weeks, and (.193) for the season and (.198) since 2021. Gold Glove yes, tarnished bat for sure.  What to do.

CRONE ZONE…Jake Cronenworth is hitting (.200) and scouting reports have found holes in his game.  Does play great defense, including the move to first.  But he seems lost at the plate.  Pitchers have caught up to him.

GARY SANCHEZ…Flashing home run power like he did as a young catcher with the Yaniees.  But that all disappeared as he moved to 3-other teams.  The Twins didn’t see it, the Mets did not, the Giants couldn’t find it.  If he can hit a few homers and throw guys out trying to steal, maybe you can accept him hitting in the low 200s.  Alot better than those (.160) averages he had other places.

UNSUNG HERO…Ha Seong-Kim keeps doing it msot nights…grat defense…timely hits…and urging from the sellout crowds “Go-Kim-Go”, somehthing akin to fans at Toronto hockey games, where they yell ‘Go-Leafs-Go”.

WOUNDED ELBOW…Just don’t think we will ever see Drew Pomeranz pitch again.  The recurring forearm elbow flareups have happened three times this season.  They gave him some 35M to sign despite a history of arm problems and he’s had more shutdowns hee.  A decent career as a starter into a reliever, robbed by injuries

HURTING FOR CERTAIN..It’s been a challenge with injuries to the bullpen brigade.  Luis Carcia the latest to go down with arm problems.  Adrian Morejon is not back yuet.  Robert Suarez has been gone since week two spring training. Jose Castillo’s career has stalled, injury after injury. And the same for Michel Baez.

GOOD TO SEE…3rd base coach Matt Williams, coming back from cancer surgery, going thru all this chemo, and still being in the clubhouse and the 3rd base coaches box.  Attacking the disease like he hit in the batters box, all heart.

TV…Good to see Mike Pomeranz-Mark Sweeney remain in the mix doing streamlined pre-post game shows.  The Padres though are missing the mark.  Way too much emphasis on geek stats,velo, launch angle, pitching staffs trends.  No coverage at all of the out-of-town scoreboard.  No reason they cannot utilize their talent to do score updates in the 3rd-6th-8th innings.  So many other games each night, and all we get is non stop Padres filler content.  Cover the other 15-games each night.  Serve all the baseball fans.

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“Padres Question Worth Asking”

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If you dropped a nuclear bomb on Petco Park, the fallout from the radio activity would be devastating.

Have the Padres been hit with a nuclear bomb and how bad will the after-effects be?

No one wants to talk about the Padres loss of their TV contract when Bally Sports went dark, and Diamond Sports, the parent company went into bankruptcy refusing to pay the rest of the 60M owed in TV rights this year to San Diego.

As we have marched from day-to-day since MLB seized the TV package last Tuesday night, the damage seems to be growing.

Diamond Sports Group told a bankruptcy judge  in the midst of a 20-hour hearing at the end of the week, they were losing 20M per season on Padres telecasts.  In essence, they grossly overpaid in annual rights fees, and the 60M price tage was choking them.  They found San Diego was not as big an advertising market to generate the revenue they needed.  Now they have walked away.

Now we find out that MLB ‘bribed’ the Padres into walking away from Diamond-Bally, by agreeing to use MLB money to give the Friars 32M-of what was owed by Diamond as a trade off for being the first one thru the wall in forming MLB-TV streaming.

But that 32M-added to the 20M-the Padres got in their only Diamond payment, is for this year only.  There is no promise for next year..

There is no MLB payment for 2024.  There is no 60M-rights fee payment for Diamond and Bally will go dark.

Here’s the radio active fallout from what we have just seen.

The Padres will be shorted 420M from what they were still owed on the final 7-years of the Bally TV deal.  How do you make that up?

The other story is that the Padres top 6-players, from Macado-to-Tatis-to Bogaerts-to-Darvish-to-Musgrove-to-Cronenworth, are owed 1.25B, contracts that in some cases run 10-to-14 years in the future.  How are the Padres going to pay those deals, some of which contain big back ended salaries.

And I have not included how they might be able to sign Juan Soto if his price tag becomes 50M per year.  Any solutions here?

MLB wants to invoke ‘Team 30-Streaming’.  They want to establish the rights to own the streaming for all 30-teams and be able to sell big time ‘Network rights’ and charge big time ‘Network fees’ to advertisers.

But they have a problem.  The Yankees-Mets-Red Sox and Dodgers, have lucrative TV deals now.  They don’t want to give all that up to MLB, forfeit all that money.  So ‘Team 30’ might be a good idea, implementing it might be really difficult.

It drives home the reality, San Diego is a mid-sized advertising market.  The Padres have been, up till recently, a small market team.  Now Peter Seidler’s spending spree has created a real issue.

How much more can you charge for ticket prices and parking and food, having raised seats 38% over the last two years?  Maybe that’s why they are furiously going to develop Tailgate Park as another revenue stream.

And as part of the sale of the franchise to the Seider-Fowler group, they also took on 20%-ownership of Fox Sports-San Diego, that became Bally Sports, and now it’s like owning an empty building with no way to rent out space.

I’d be really worried.  The Padres spent so much on future contracts, back-end loaded, because their TV deal was back end loaded so there would be increased money coming in to fund all that.

But if the Padres don’t become dominant, don’t become the Dodgers, and win the pennant race year after year, how do they bankroll all they have committed to?

And all of a sudden that ugly word has raised its head in the conversation.  All winter long, people in baseball questioned the viability of what Seidler and AJ Preller were spending.  And now there is a significant problem with money owed vs money that won’t be coming in.

This is a problem in other places too, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Houston, Texas, but it seems a more serious problem in San Diego because of the way the Padres check writing off seasons have gone recently.

All of a sudden the word ‘sustainability’ has resurfaced, triggered by the collapse of Diamond-Bally and the Regional Sports Networks.

Now the question is not just will Manny hit, or how many games you going to win, or what would an Ohtani-Soto in the lineup look like?

Now the real question, how you going to pay for all this, with a TV deal payday that has gone away?

The sports-business website ‘Sportico’ did an evaluation and interviewed former owner John Moores, who cast doubt on what the franchise has become since he sold it.

Not finishing 1st, or losing to the Dodgers, or getting booed at home with all these losses early in the season, might be the least of your problems.

Hope that’s not a nuclear cloud on the horizon.  But these are questions worth asking now as we learn more day-by-day.

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Hacksaw’s Podcast:

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‘News & Notes Around Town’

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PADRES TV..Quite a day and a half in a Houston bankruptcy court,before a judge told Diamond Sports they must pay the full broadcast fees owed to the 5-teams they still control.  If they don’t,  MLB can foreclose on those rights and take them over like they did with the Padres.

PADRES REVENUE STREAM…Yes baseball is going to pay the Padres 80% of their unpaid rights fees, that amounts to about 32M but that is just for this year.  It means the Padres will be out 60M in rights fee money next year.  This streaming proposal has merit, but can you bill up to 60M in streaming rights from fans?  I doubt it.

DOWN ON THE FARM…All eyes on Lake Elsinore where 16-year old bonus baby catcher Ethan Salas has started his career in the California League.  He went single-double-walk in his debut on Wednesday.  Thursday was an (0-3) night with 2-strikeouts.

DODGERS-YANKEES…Some weekend series in LA.  Wonder if they draw  150,000 in the three game series vs Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and  Gerritt Cole.

DODGERS PITCHING…They have problems, injury problems.  And a decision to be made on Noah Syndegaard, who has lost his fastball, and cannot regain the mechanics that made him a dominant  pitcher with the Mets.  The rotation looks threadbare now with no Dustin May, an ailing Julio Urias and injuries to two of their top pitching prospects, Ryan Pepiot and Mike Grove.

ANGELS…This is a historical season for Shohei Ohtani.  He is on the mound Friday night in Houston, and the ace has a (5-1) record, a 2.94-ERA and 90-strikeouts in 65-innings so far.  And he becomes a free agent in November.  Stay tuned for the bidding war.

ANGELS BATS…Mike Trout is healthy and hitting home runs.  So is Ohtani.  A few from Hunter Renfroe.  Virtually nothing yet, for the second year in a row fro oft-injured Anthony Rendon.  Another big check for an under performing bat.

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Money-Root of All Evils”

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Some 48-hours in San Diego.

The Padres damaged by the loss of their TV rightsholder.
The Holiday Bowl damaged by what UCLA did to them in 2021.

The implications of what just happened are pretty serious.

MLB seized the Padres TV-rights after Diamond Sports-Bally Sports failed to make their 2nd rights fee payment for this year, 20M that was due over the weekend.  Baseball has taken control of the Friars telecasts and will make the broadcasts a streaming purchase for fans.

There are all types of dollar implications here for the Padres future.  They were in the middle of a 20-year TV contract with Bally Sports.  They were getting 60M per season in rights fees.  All that is gone now.  And the fact they owned 20-percent of Bally Sports, means they are holding stock in a worthless business now in bankruptcy court.

Yes baseball’s idea is to create full season streaming for Padres fans.  Subscribe on any of 5-platforms, including MLB-TV, Direct TV, ATT-Uverse.  But how many 19.99-per month subscriptions do you have to sell to make up for the 60M revenue stream lost by the Bally Sports bankruptcy.  13-other teams who had similar contracts, are asking the same question.  The math does not equal out.

The Padres called the changes ‘groundbreaking’.  I call it ‘earth shattering’.  Don’t know how you replace that revenue stream..all 60M of it each year.

Losing 60M-a year is a huge financial hit.  And how much can you put on the fans pocketbook, considering the Padres have raised ticket prices 38%-combined over the last two seasons.

The Holiday Bowl bitterness over the antics of UCLA coach Chip Kelly are legitimate.  He badly hurt a bowl game that operates with the thinnest of margins, and he seemed to do it with no remorse.  And UCLA new AD seemed to have no remorse either.

The Holiday Bowl is not suing for damages, just to be compensated for what they lost.  Dragging Oregon into this, by refusing to pay the Ducks share in last year’s bowl game seems a bit of a reach, and could further damage the relationship with the Pac 12.

The Holiday Bowl was damaged when the 2020 game was cancelled at the height of the Covid crisis.  You don’t want to see a heritage event be put in jeopardy by what UCLA’s belligerent coach and leadership allowed to happen.

Like North Carolina State’s coach said, ‘we were lied to by UCLA’.   Those feelings are probably alot deeper here in San Diego and by bowl officials because the damage done is pretty deep too.

The Conference of Champions must think they can walk away from a business deal by invoking masse-jeur, citing an uncontrollable event (covid) for leading to the cancellation.

So we wait and see where all this goes.  This is a massive dollar issue for the Padres to have to work thru.  This is a critical court case that is part of the life-line for the Holiday Bowl.

Not so much about the games as money that allows the game to operate.

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