Is Rogers the richest ownership group/conglomerate in MLB? If not, they've gotta be close.
Blow everybody else out of the water. Offer him $650M for 9 years. Game over for everybody else. IMO, the Jays, as a franchise need him more than all the other franchises. They've all won WS fairly recently and are all accepted as legitimate big time players. The Jays need to join the group of big boys. Spend more of that dough you've made off of all of us.
They might well be the richest, but that is because they are a public company which has some inherent limitations as well. As a public company, current profitability is also more important to them than many other teams. Only two teams are publicly held in baseball - Toronto and Atlanta. And Atlanta is less of a spender than Toronto and that isn't changing.
Other privately owned teams (the majority of MLB teams0 might be more willing to take on losses for long term growth or less profit, or just view things as a "toy" and might look more at market value of the team in terms of justifying investment Unfortunately those market value gains in the Jays can't be reflected on Rogers P&L until its actually sold.
But the good thing with Ohtani is he should drive additional revenues in many other sectors of Rogers outside of the baseball team, which I suspect is why the Jays are still in this and coming up with big$$. None of the combination of players we spend $50M on this winter would come anywhere close to contributing to revenues within the entire Rogers group as Ohtani does. Someone the other day said the Jays have two budgets for this winter -- "X" without Ohtani, "X+Y" with Ohtani.
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