BusinessWeek Finds A Weird Way To Kick Steve Cohen When He's Down
As many of you know, a lifelong dream of Steve Cohen's has been to own a Major League Baseball team. Last year he tried and failed to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers. The year before that he tried and failed to buy the New York Mets. While did eventually acquire a small stake in the NY team, obviously it's not the same as being the majority owner, free to dictate a change in uniform fabric from polyester to fleece, demand private dances by Mr. Met, and fire every player on the team if they're down by more than 15 games at the All Star break. His pride has thus far prevented him from bidding for a third franchise, because even Cohen knows that the odds of a successful acquisition, at this point, are slim to none, even if said franchise were the Toledo Mud Hens. He knows it, we know it, the Pepsi Party Patrol knows it. We're pretty sure the editors at Businesweek know it, too, but they reached out to several experts to confirm the suspicion anyway.
“I would hazard a guess that it would be very difficult for him to get a team,” Fay Vincent said in a telephone interview. “People like (Chicago White Sox owner) Jerry Reinsdorf, who is very important and a strong keeper of that tradition of vetting owners, would be a very major obstacle.”
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“The two words that ownership and commissioners hate the most are investigation and deposition,” Andy Dolich, a former executive in multiple U.S. sports leagues and a member of another group that unsuccessfully bid on the Dodgers, said in a telephone interview. “Deposition is probably more feared than free agency.” Courtney declined to comment on Cohen’s chance of owning a team. “The reality is, it’s not good,” said Bob Caporale, chairman of Game Plan LLC, which represented McCourt when he bought the Dodgers from News Corp. and who has handled sales of limited interests in baseball’s Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees.
Steven A. Cohen’s Baseball Dream Strikes Out in Hedge-Fund Plea [BusinessWeek]
Related: New York Times Finds A Weird Way To Kick Steve Cohen When He’s Down
