He is a swindler, possibly doomed as an all-time sports criminal. And before he reaches the point where he destroys baseball, in his wish to win three straight World Series championships, Mark Walter cannot continue as the primary owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The man is using multiple billions of dollars to keep the feds from breaking down his life, as he has begged a distressed insurer for $6.5 billion. He asked Charter Communications — you know: $8.35 billion for a 25-year TV contract — for a lump-sum payment, meaning a quick grab is more important than SportsNet LA. The stories are so blind to human rationale, Walter actually thinks he can save the Dodgers and is ready to take his place in history.
His fellow owners cannot let him die as the postseason nears, along with a Dec. 1 expiration of the collective bargaining agreement with the players. For years, I had praised Walter for preposterous expenditures — I wasn’t alone, if you’ve read Bill Plaschke at the Los Angeles Times — and believed he was smarter and shrewder than the rest. But once Walter sold the Lakers last week, it became apparent he needed the $12.5 billion to pay off massive loans through his insurance companies. He is accused of federal loan fraud and is tortured by a sweeping investigation.
The agents will not set him free. Thus, unless the sport wants to be ashamed in October, the other 29 owners and commissioner Rob Manfred will force him to sell — immediately. We’ve seen enough stories about Walter, including the Charter disclosure by Puck’s John Ourand, and if baseball has any chance of survival, the bosses can’t let Walter fight them while they are fighting the Players Association. Oh, so many of the other owners are cheap and don’t deserve a salary cap in ongoing negotiations. But when something is terribly wrong, they can decide a colleague is not acting in the “best interests of baseball” and is behaving “detrimentally.”
Walter qualifies. They ran out his Dodgers predecessor, Frank McCourt, when his regime collapsed into bankruptcy in 2012. They ran out Marge Schott in 1998 after she made too many racist and anti-Semitic remarks. Stu Sternberg was pushed out recently in Tampa Bay, where he couldn’t provide certainty about a new stadium. Officially, three-quarters of the owners can vote yes and dump Walter.
Why won’t they call an emergency meeting? A day doesn’t pass without another troubling move — the Lakers, Chelsea of the Premier League — and many of us have wondered if the Dodgers are next. Walter’s team president/CEO, Stan Kasten, says his boss will keep the team. But guess whose name is listed as CEO of Dodger Tickets LLC, which is part of the probe? Kasten.
Gone are the times when families ran sports teams. Today, too many owners should not be trusted. In most cases, I don’t trust stingy people in major markets. But Walter has blown out our faith in a magnificent squanderer.
And if he leaves? Someone in the entertainment industry would buy the Dodgers, just as Bob Iger roped in Josh Kushner to buy the Lakers. The other owners would make sure the new man wants a salary cap. They have no reason not to act quickly and definitively, though we still have many reasons to worry about an awful future.
Imagine how the Dodgers have been trashed by two owners in 14 years. Imagine how the Lakers have been trashed by one of those owners. What is happening to sport in the United States of America?
A man who wins championships did so recklessly.
Ship him away before he wins again.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host.
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