Private equity did not buy the Boston Red Sox; it bought the rights to evict us from our own Saturdays. As Main Street Independent reported, Senate candidate Graham Platner bought airtime during a Red Sox broadcast last weekend, ran a one-minute ad accusing the team’s owners of treating the franchise like a leveraged portfolio asset, and watched the regional sports network — owned by the team’s parent company — pull the spot off the air midway through the game. Platner defended the ad after its removal, declaring: “We ran an ad during last night’s Red Sox game exposing how private equity is making everything in our lives worse, and it got pulled midway through the game by a station owned by Red Sox ownership.” Boston blew a four-run lead in the same broadcast. The erasure was the indictment: the men who run the franchise do not care about the team, the fans, or the Saturday afternoons generations of New Englanders built their weeks around. They care about the yield, and they will pull your ad, fire your ushers, and bleed the concrete out of the stadium to get it.
The candidate is a Democrat from Maine, and his politics are not mine, and he is plainly happy to be the man with the megaphone on a Saturday night in May. He will have a fundraising email out of this before the week is out. That is what candidates do. But the proper conservative response is not to defend the network. The proper conservative response is to notice that the indictment survives the indictment’s messenger, and to ask how a community let one of its essential organs become a private fief. Stewardship and ownership are not the same word. One of them has a soul, and the other one has a lawyer.
A baseball team is, among other things, a piece of common inheritance. Not in the legal sense — Fenway is private property and has been for a long while. But in the way a courthouse or a covered bridge or the local Catholic church is private property that nonetheless belongs to the people who live around it, the Red Sox have belonged to New England for a century. The team my grandfather listened to on a transistor radio in Bangor was, in some real and felt sense, his team. So was the team my uncle drove four hours to watch in the years when they never quite won. The seasons rolled on, and the relationship was not bought and sold. It has been bought and sold.
To be fair to the architects of the modern sports monopoly, the honest steelman runs this way: a Major League franchise in the twenty-first century requires billions in capital. The old wooden bleachers and local syndicates cannot fund the payrolls, the global scouting networks, or the billion-dollar stadium renovations required to remain competitive. Aggregated, institutional wealth is the only thing that keeps a legacy franchise alive in a global entertainment market. Without the Wall Street funds, the team would either wither into irrelevance or be dragged to a sunbelt city with a larger tax subsidy. The modern game demands modern capital.
But capital without root is extraction. The current ownership did not arrive in Boston to take stewardship of an inheritance. They arrived to deploy capital. Baseball franchises, like water utilities and hospital chains, had been reclassified somewhere in the last thirty years from civic institutions into asset classes, and the math of asset classes is patient enough to absorb a few losing seasons if the underlying equity appreciates. The network, the team, and the regional sports monopoly are not three separate businesses; they are one business, organized vertically, answerable to a single balance sheet, and the balance sheet is the only voter they recognize. When the landlord owns the network, the network serves the landlord. To the abstracted capital that bought the team, the fan is not a neighbor. The fan is a line item. A consumer of a bundled media package. A tenant who can be evicted when the yield drops.
The conservative tradition — from Burke’s intergenerational trust to Chesterton’s distributed property — teaches that wealth is legitimate only when it is tied to stewardship, to a place, to a people. The men who hold the debt and the equity do not live in the shadow of the Green Monster. They do not know the specific, shared grief of a blown 4-0 lead, or the cheap seats where a machinist from Lynn and a schoolteacher from Roxbury sit shoulder-to-shoulder. They have taken a civic commons and turned it into a luxury box for the very class that priced out the machinist. I used to trade agricultural futures in the pits; I know precisely how little the men in the glass towers think about the men in the field who actually grow the crop. The men in the luxury boxes at Fenway operate on the exact same grammar. The ad was pulled not because it was false, but because it named the mechanism.
We watch the same movie play out here in Adams County, just on a smaller scale. The corporate irrigators buy up the family dairy farms, consolidate the land under center-pivots, and grow potatoes for the snack-food giants. The local feed store closes; the county seat hollows out; the VFW hall thins as the veterans die off and the young leave for wages the town can no longer pay. The rentier does not hate the town. The rentier simply does not see it. The team is the seam being mined, and the town is the seam being mined, and the difference is only one of scale.
The cure is not to ask the federal government to nationalize the Red Sox. The concentrated state is the same disease in a different coat; asking Washington to micromanage the roster is to trade the absentee landlord for the absentee bureaucrat. The cure is subsidiarity. The cure is the distributed, local answer. It is the Green Bay Packers, owned by the community, answering to the people who actually sit in the frozen bleachers. It is the Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative right here in Friendship, which brought power to the sand plain when the investor-owned utilities looked at the density and said no. It is the mutual, the credit union, the community land trust. When the people who use the asset own the asset, the yield is measured in social cohesion, in shared memory, in the survival of the place itself.
The earth was given for all, and the commons were built for the people who show up. The men who bought the Red Sox think they own a franchise. They do not. They own a lease on our Saturdays, and the lease is expiring. Not an ad was pulled off the air on Saturday. A community was.