Interview #51: Al Galdi, DC Radio Host
The Unique Characteristics of the Baltimore/DC baseball market
Al Galdi is a longtime radio host in the Washington DC sports market and a huge baseball fan. He has been part of national and local radio for over 20 years, mainly involved with the Washington Nationals and Washington Redskins Football Team Commanders.
Al was part of one of my favorite radio shows, The Steve Czaban Show, which would air in the early mornings on the east coast. I used to run a paper route, so this was on the radio at 3AM when I was driving through neighborhoods setting off car alarms by hitting them with the Contra Costa Times. I’ve followed that crew through various forms and podcasts over the years and I was excited when he agreed to chat, as he is the resident baseball nerd in that radio market.
A little pre-reading for those that don’t remember, but for a long time since the Nationals moved to Washington, DC, the Orioles owner, Peter Angelos, refused to come to a mutual agreement over TV rights on the local sports channel, MASN, which aired both teams’ games. This locked the Nationals into an unfavorable deal with the Orioles, harming both access to games on TV and ownership’s ability to monetize their TV rights. As someone working with both teams throughout his career, he provided a lot of inside info into this unique baseball market.
You can find Al’s podcasts and social media at the following spots:
Baseball Fandom
You’re from New York?
My dad is. He's from Queens. He was born in 1950, so as a kid, he's seeing the Mets and he experienced ‘69. And then when I was a little kid, my first sports memory of any kind is being in bed with him seeing the ‘86 Mets celebrate. I have vague memories of that. The first game I ever went to was a Mets game in 1987.
But I grew up in DC. I've always lived in DC. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, so we had Redskins, Capitals, Bullets, Orioles. The Orioles were really the team of DC, even though Baltimore's not DC, they're two different markets. It's kind of an odd thing to explain to people who don't get it. There was no Washington, DC MLB team for a long time, 1972 through 2004, and so the Orioles were kind of DC's team. They got covered like a DC team. They were on the DC sports channel.
So it's always been kind of an amazing thing that DC got another team, like we never really thought that that was going to happen. It was never really talked about. It's still pretty amazing to me that we've had the Nats, it's been almost 20 years now. So it's a cool thing.
You're an Orioles, Nats, and also a Mets fan?
Well, I'm not. My dad is. I do follow the Mets because of him, and my grandfather was a big Mets fan. I grew up an Orioles fan, and then when the Nats came, I liked the Nats. But I grew up with the Orioles. I'd say Orioles and Nationals are the two teams that I follow the most and care about the most.
So you grew up an Orioles fan because that's what you had. Did you go to a lot of games, I guess back then it was Memorial Stadium, right?
I did. And then Camden Yards opened up in ’92. Another thing that has helped the O’s is getting to Camden Yards from the Washington, DC area is pretty easy. Camden Yards is right off I-95, so that has benefited them. Went to a good amount of O’s games and watched Cal Ripken break the streak and all that. Those were some of my favorite sports memories as a kid was going to O’s games and watching, even though they weren't very good.
Yeah, they were good in the 80's, the early 80’s.
They won the World Series in ‘83 and then did nothing till ’96, ’97, and then did nothing from ‘98 to 2012. The last like 40 years have really not been that good for the O’s; since they won the ‘83 World Series they have not had a lot of success.
Did you play baseball?
Yeah, I did. I played Little League and then I played in high school, but never beyond the JV level. I think that was a big part of being a fan too, is that most kids play baseball at some point. And so that sort of feeds into being a fan of the sport.
Yeah. Did you play any other sports?
I played basketball. I played soccer when I was really young, but baseball and basketball were my two sports.
Do you have kids now?
Yeah, I have a seven-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter.
Are they getting into baseball or sports at all?
A little bit. They'll play it. They don't watch it, necessarily. We took them to a game for the first time Memorial Day weekend. They lasted ‘til the 7th inning and then they were like, alright, it's time to go.
That's pretty good.
This is where the pitch clock I think is huge because the way it was going was terrible and it was turning people off with how long these games were. I think you still could argue games are too long, but at least it's more manageable now. I mean, it was brutal up until two years ago. You can love baseball, but geez, these three-plus hour games on the regular were not good for the sport; no one's got that kind of time, 162 times a year to invest 3 plus hours in something. The pitch clock has been a godsend. And I know Manfred takes a lot of heat for stuff, but this, to me, was a stroke of brilliance. That's the kind of thing that can make it appealing to younger people.
What’s kept you a lifelong baseball fan? Like you said, the Orioles have had a lot of rough stretches. The Mets had a lot of lean years as well.
The O's were my team, so I did have a team. If you grew up with it and your dad is a fan of it, there's a tendency to like it and be into it. My brother was into it and he ended up working for the Phillies. I'm big into analytics. So that aspect of baseball, when I discovered that as a kid, and started reading Bill James, and then “Moneyball” came out. That took my passion for baseball to another level because that makes it so much more interesting. I mean, this became my career so that helped to fuel my fandom. I think the game has gotten more interesting as time has gone on.
How so?
Again, I think because of the analytics. Look, everyone's different, right? But when I discovered Bill James and I discovered these ideas and these theories and these stats and you begin to understand certain things and you could differentiate between random things versus things that make more sense, and stats that are more telling, and stats that are overrated. I think that that makes it so much more interesting as opposed to the way it was back in the day, which is, “why is it this way? Well, because it just is.” Well, OK, but should it be? Can we do better?
I think some of the best critical thinking in sports has happened in baseball. The analytics movement started in baseball, and now all these other sports are following. Baseball started this, and I think baseball should be proud of that. I know the analytic stuff doesn't appeal to everyone. I understand that. And I think sometimes it probably works against baseball, but I know for me specifically, it's helped me love the sport even more.
Before the stat movement, you were still hooked. What hooked you as a kid? Was it a slow burn like some people? Or was it just an immediate grab?
It was immediate. I knew I wanted to get into sports broadcasting even as a kid. So I used to get into, not just the games, but the announcers. I used to love watching SportsCenter and seeing the highlights. It's not just the game itself. It's the things attached to the game that were appealing to me. I was a big fan of Cal Ripken. He wins the MVP in ‘91, he breaks the streak in ‘95. I think all of that was a part of it.
It was interesting to hear about his personal baseball story. Al has his childhood team, his father’s team and now his new team to juggle. He was born in 1980, so too young to remember then 1983 Orioles World Series. Then the Orioles were a bottom dwelling team (including the infamous 1988 team that started the year 0-21) until two ALCS appearances in 1996 and 1997. Then from 1998 to 2011, only one season did they finish higher than 4th place in the AL East. Attendance went from 3,711,132 in 1997 to 1,755,461 in 2011. Meaning Al only saw two good Orioles teams before he turned 30.
I wonder if the Orioles being apathetic and terrible for so long, seemingly just coasting on using the beauty of Camden Yards to get people through the turnstiles, helped the Nationals gain a foothold when they arrived in 2005. Al certainly has grown into a huge Nats fan as a DC native.
As you’ll see, he’s very passionate about the development of DC into a baseball town.
A Tale of Two Markets
The Orioles, from what I've heard, they weren't embraced too much in that gap period (1972 to 2004) by Washington fans.
It depends. So everyone's kind of different. I'm 44; most people I know in their 30s and 40s are Orioles fans, they're not Nats fans. It kind of depends. If you were around for the Senators, then you probably did not embrace the Orioles. There are some people who weren't around for the Senators who just did not embrace the Orioles, but everyone I went to high school with was an O's fan. Most people I know between, like 30 and 50, they're O’s fans. I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is Nats territory, in theory. I see as much Orioles gear as I do Nats gear. So it's an odd deal. Most Nats fans hate the Orioles because of the MASN dispute, understandably so.
But in the Washington, DC area, there really is a split. It's not like it's all Nats fans. There still are a lot of Orioles fans. I think it's kind of a cool, unique aspect to baseball in this area. But it is difficult to explain to people because, again, DC and Baltimore are not the same market. They're two different markets. You don't talk about the Commanders and Ravens being in the same market, but with the Nationals and Orioles, it's a different deal because of the very odd history that Washington, DC has with baseball, with having had three different Major League teams.
This latest version, the Nationals, arrived suddenly from Montreal. What was that like in 2005 when they came to town?
It was a weird deal. So, for many years there were these teases that MLB could be coming back to DC. The Astros almost came to DC at one point. It got to a point to where DC was without an MLB team for so long and so many of these teases had not come to fruition that you kind of gave up hope. There always was this pie-in-the-sky thought of, hey, what if MLB came back to DC, but as time went on, again, you're talking about 1972 through 2004, so 32 years. At some point you move on. And the Orioles were pretty well entrenched as a team with at least a decent following in the DC area. There was an Orioles team store in Washington, DC. There's a famous McDonald's commercial from the 1980s featuring Redskins and Orioles players down by the Washington Monument.
(note: I found the commercial… I can’t believe this exists)
Washington, DC was sort of, I don't know if you want to say embracing the Orioles, but the Orioles had a footing in DC, for sure. And then when the Nats came, it was incredible and people were thrilled. I was thrilled. I thought it was awesome that that was happening. Today it really is almost comical. The Washington, DC market is a top-10 media market. The fact that it was without an MLB team for 32 years is absurd when you think about it. Washington, DC has a lot of wealth, has a lot of people. MLB should be in a market like that, and it wasn't for so long. Now we're kind of in this stage of, the Nats have been here for 20 years, have had a lot of success, a lot of people are Nats fans, but there still are a lot of people who are Orioles fans.
New York, as you probably know, has this very rich, intense baseball culture. And I always have wanted that for DC. We've never really had that. New York is one of the few areas of the country where you really can argue that baseball is bigger than football. In most markets now, football is bigger than baseball, including in the Washington, DC market if we're being honest. In New York, I don't live there, so I don't know, but my sense is that baseball is still #1 in New York. And the way that it gets covered, the way that people care about it, I know New York fans could be crazy, but I think that there's a lot of good to that and I have always wanted that for DC; for there to be that kind of passion and intense scrutiny.
I hope as time goes on we do get that because I think that's how you really build something up: people care about it and they get into the minutiae and they scrutinize things and argue about things and they debate things. I've always had a lot of respect for the New York baseball culture because, as maniacal as it can be, I think there's a lot to respect about it.
So there's no Mad Dog for the Nationals.
No, there isn't. And there’s a lot of things that have happened with the Nats that if they happened in New York would have been covered a whole lot more. I don't know if you followed the CJ Abrams thing from a few weeks ago, but that was not covered with a lot of intensity in DC. If that kind of thing happened in New York or say, Chicago or Boston or LA, Philadelphia, that would have been a massive story that would have been talked about for days, and debated for days.
And instead, here, we talked about it a lot on the Nats Chat podcast, but it did not get the kind of intense examination that I think it would have gotten in other markets. I think the Nats have benefited from the lack of scrutiny. With them being a bad team these last few years, they have been able to sort of fly under the radar in a way I think in other baseball-obsessed markets they probably would not have been able to do.
That's interesting because if you think about the Nationals, especially the last 10 years, they've had a lot of big things happen in the baseball world. You've got the Stephen Strasburg draft hype, the shutdown and now retirement situation. Harper leaving, Soto getting traded. The 2019 World Series. Max Scherzer’s prime. They've had a lot of stuff, and I feel like that was a blip on the radar nationally for a week or two. But the Mets bring Grimace to a baseball game, or Pete Alonso adopts a “Playoff Pumpkin”, it’s in the sports headlines for weeks. The Nationals are a pretty impactful organization over the last decade with the players they've had, and with the championship they won.
Now that we’re 20 years in and had a generation that grew up with them, do you think it's getting a little more traction as far as becoming a baseball market?
I do. That's the thing. You really can't judge this until you are 20, 30, 40 years into it. The temptation to pass judgment 5 years into it or 10 years into it, it's kind of silly because these things take time. DC has had a very strange baseball history where you have had two incarnations of the Senators, each of which had nothing to do with the other, each team left, and then you went 32 years without a team. And then you get back a team. It has a first season, 2005, that was surprisingly decent.
And then the team was horrible 2006 through 2010, decent in 2011, then has this run of eight straight winning seasons 2012 through 2019. Wins the World Series in 2019. And then the team completely falls off the cliff in 2020 and 2021 and has been rebuilding ever since. I'm not one of these people who's like, DC is a bad baseball market. I think you just have to give it time to develop. One thing that I think speaks very well for DC is that the Nats attendance, since the team got good, has been good. And even with the team being bad these last few years, attendance has never cratered in the way that I think some people thought it would.
That speaks to what kind of a market DC is for baseball; that with the team being bad these last few years, that's when you really find out what's the baseline level of attendance in a fanbase. It has not collapsed the way that we've seen it collapse in other markets. Heck, the Orioles have had attendance problems even with them being good. Now, Baltimore's had a lot of problems as a city. DC's in much better shape than Baltimore but still, the Orioles have been a really good team these last few years and their attendance still is not outstanding. So I don't take for granted that the Nats still draw reasonably well all things considered, and I think if/when the Nats get good again, you're gonna see that attendance go right back up because there are a lot of people here who care about the Nats.
Does the transient nature of DC being a government town help or hurt?
It's not ideal. Ideally you have people who are here, who live here, who pass it down one generation to the next. Baseball, especially, seems to work that way. You do get people who are not Nats fans who come to DC and adopt the Nats. So there is some of that that does happen. But when you have people from out of town living in the city, that is going to work against you to a point because they may have already picked up on an MLB team who they like.
We talk about the Washington Nationals. But in this area, it really is about what's called the DMV: DC, Maryland, and Virginia. Washington, DC only has so many people. So the Nats, for them, it's not just about the people in the city where, like you said, it is very transient. It is about the suburbs in Maryland, the suburbs in Northern Virginia and trying to really cultivate those areas because you have more people in those areas. You have some very rich counties in those areas so you have people with disposable income. So not so much in Virginia and DC, but in the Maryland suburbs, you do have a real divide of some people are O’s fans, some people are Nats fans. There is this territorial battle that goes on with the Nats and the O's of grooming that next generation to be fans.
But the Nats have plenty of fans. Like I said, their attendance has done well. We don't get a lot of data on local television ratings, but the times that we have gotten data, the Nats rate pretty well, they do a good job in that regard. I think people are just waiting on them to be good again. And a lot of questions about ownership, so I think that's part of it, too, waiting to see if they'll spend again. But people care about the Nats. DC's lost a team twice. That's not happening a third time. The Nats are here to stay. I think everyone feels confident in saying that and it's just a matter of how much can we grow this thing.
Other two-team markets seem to have different makeups of their fanbases, especially white vs. blue collar types. The White Sox and Cubs, Mets and Yankees, A’s and Giants. Is there a difference in fan base between the Orioles and Nationals?
If you have to say which fan base has a higher average income, I guess Nats fans. But a lot of that is just because the DC area is a rich area. Montgomery County, Maryland and Fairfax County, Virginia, Loudon County, Virginia, they're three of the richest counties in the country. There's a tendency, especially for the Virginia counties, to lean toward the Nats. Montgomery County is kind of split between Nats and O’s. I don't know if affluence matters, but if I had to guess, I'd say probably the Nats win out in that regard. I'd say Orioles fans are more blue collar. But every fan base has a little bit of everything. I hate to paint with too broad of a brush.
The advantage the O’s have is that they've been around a lot longer. The Senators left after 1971. So if you grew up in the 70s or the 80s or the 90s, there's a good chance you're an Orioles fan. That's a benefit that they have. Now 20, 30 years from now, it'll be a different conversation. You'll have people who were Nats fans as kids, and their kids are Nats fans. When it comes to the Senators, they've been gone for so long now that you really have to be in your 50s or 60s to have any memories of the last incarnation of the Washington Senators who, oh, by the way, were really bad. That's the other part of it. The Senators were atrocious. The only real success the Senators had was with Walter Johnson, the first incarnation, and that's going back like 100 years. There’s basically nobody left from that time period. So if you do remember the Senators, what you remember are a lot of bad teams.
And the teams ended up not drawing well. So that was always a thing, well, DC can't hold a team. The DC market has changed a lot since then. A lot more people, a lot more money. DC is a top-10 media market now; it's a different scenario. Those Senators teams had some really bad owners too. There's a lot that went into why DC twice lost the Senators. If you go on Baseball Reference and you look at the Senators year-by-year, I mean it's really not good. There was not a lot to be excited about as a DC baseball fan. They did have multiple stadiums, they did bounce around.
How much has the contentious relationship between the Nationals and Orioles over media rights affected the fanbase and access to watching them?
You can get access. The network MASN, the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, it's run on the cheap. It televises Nationals games and Orioles games, but from a Nats perspective, the Nats almost always take a backseat to the O's. And beyond the actual broadcasting of the games, there's not a lot of ancillary programming. So it's infomercials, ESPN News, and the games. The pregame and post-game shows are short and quick. The network is owned essentially by the Orioles, and it's run on the cheap.
I think that has harmed both teams. Years ago I had DIRECTV, so I got to watch sports networks from other areas. And I saw in New York, SNY for the Mets, and YES Network for the Yankees, and in Chicago, what was then NBC Sports Chicago, and you see on those channels, they don't just carry the games, they have all these other shows about the teams. So these networks are 24/7 pounding into your brain the team and discussions about the team and the history of the team, and that's how you really grow fandom. With MASN, you get the games and that's basically it. I think that has hurt both teams big time.
You're a Nats fan now, but could you describe how you transitioned into becoming a fan? Did you feel a rivalry or like they're on our turf now?
I'd say the Orioles are still my number one. I always looked at it as, if I was born 10 years later, I probably would be a Nats fan. Again, they're two different markets. The two teams play in two different leagues. The players themselves could not care less about this rivalry. The rivalry has been about the ownerships, which now are different with the Orioles, and so there's not this fierce feeling between the two ownerships like there was in the past.
I wanted DC to have a team, because I think more teams are good. So I've never had that animosity. There are a lot of people who are Nats fans who hate the O’s, and I get it because of the MASN thing. But to me, the MASN thing is much more about MLB than it is about the Angelos family, which was the ownership before the death of Peter Angelos and the sale of the O’s within the last year. What Peter Angelos did in setting up this MASN situation, he did what any other owner would have done. Now I'm not saying it was a good thing, but these owners, they're like gangsters, right? They have their territory and they're going to do what they can to protect it. The onus was on MLB to tell Peter Angelos no and to figure out something that didn't screw over the Nats. MLB was not strong enough to do that.
Bud Selig was the commissioner at the time and he did not stand up to Peter Angelos enough to where this MASN situation was avoided. So I've always looked at it as, you can be mad at Angelos and the O’s. That's fine, I get it. But I think if you're really being honest about it, MLB was the parent. MLB should have been the one to say, hey, this is what we're going to do. MLB did not do that. So of course, Angelos is gonna try to set up something that's favorable to him, who wouldn't? The Lerner family, which owns the Nats, would have done the same thing. That's how these owners are, they act in self-interest. They don't act for what is in the best interest of the entire sport and certainly in the best interest of a team that's 45 miles away.
The teams and certainly the players don’t really have a rivalry. Is there any animosity between Baltimore and DC fan bases like there are in other 2-team locations?
No, it's two different markets. With DC and Baltimore in football, when the Colts left Baltimore in the mid-80s, Jack Kent Cooke, who owned the Redskins did to Baltimore what Angelos did to DC. Cooke didn't want an NFL team to come back to Baltimore because he was starting to get some fans in Baltimore to be Redskins fans. Baltimore did get another team back. Each city has kind of done it to the other city in its own way. They're different markets. Each one can do well at the same time, we have seen that. You just gotta put out a good product. If the Nats get good again, they'll draw just fine. They're not at the mercy of like, if the O's are good, that hurts the Nets in terms of business or attendance. I don't think that at all. I think there are more than enough people in this area, there's more than enough money in this area to support these two teams. To me, that's not an issue.
(note: right after this interview, the Ravens fan beating up the Commanders fan and getting arrested went viral: Ravens fan indicted for brutal assault)
Is the attendance struggle for Baltimore solely city related?
So there are a lot of theories. In 2015, there were these riots, the Freddie Gray riots. A lot of people will tell you that the attendance has never been the same since then. If you look at the numbers, that actually is true (the above chart shows a sharp dip in 2015). I don't think it's as simple as that. People really disliked the Angelos family, which up until this past spring owned the team. The team went through this horrible rebuild that took a long time. But the fact that attendance hasn't just spiked since the rebuild ended, since the team got sold, does tell you that some of this is the city. Not so much that people are fearing crime or anything, but I think you have people in the city who don't necessarily have the disposable income to be going to games; games are not cheap. Certainly there are wealthy people in Baltimore, but I don't know that you have the kind of wealth there that you have in other cities.
Camden Yards is still a great stadium, and Baltimore as a city still has a lot of good qualities. I've been to Baltimore many times, my sister used to live there. I think it's a great city in a lot of ways. But there are parts of it that are concerning, and so I think that works against people going to games. I still want to give this more time. I'd like to see, over the next two years, do they still struggle in attendance? Attendance was up this year, it just still is not at a very high level. The O’s drew 2.8 million people in the 2024 regular season. That was their highest regular season attendance since 2015. That was good, but that still isn't very high. And the O’s have been a good team for a few years now, so I think there's still a disappointment of 2.8 million like, can't we do better than that? The stadium is still really good. The team has a lot of great young players and Baltimore still does have a lot going for it, even with some of the issues the last few years. I'd like to think that attendance will get back to being good. But the truth is it has not been good for about a decade now and that's not a tiny sample anymore.
They’re still young, so maybe some of the personalities haven't come out, but the Nationals had big time personalities for a long time, like stars of the game. And these kids are good, but it doesn't really seem like they're a draw yet. Does it seem like that?
Yeah, there is something to that. Gunnar Henderson's a great player, but he's not necessarily nationally known like a Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg was. Baseball is kind of funny in that, I don't know how many marquee stars there truly are. There are some, but I think the selling point for baseball is more the history and team success as opposed to in the NBA where the selling point really is the individual. There aren't many true superstars in baseball. What you say is not wrong. The Nats did have in Harper and Strasburg and Max Scherzer, very recognizable names in the sport and really across all sports. And the O's, at least as of now, do not have that.
That’s like here in Arizona. I mean, attendance is kind of seasonal because nobody wants to go outside when it's 115, but still, good young players and pretty anonymous.
Yeah. That's been something that's worked against baseball drawing well nationally is that it does well locally, but national ratings have not been great for a while. And part of that is that if your team isn't playing, I don't know how many people are following other teams or caring about other teams, in part because it does take a lot to know about another team. Like in football, you know the quarterbacks at the very least. In the NBA, you know, some of these faces and some of these marquee names. Baseball is a little different than that.
I don't think that's a bad thing, that it's regional. Hockey is pretty regional, too, and it leads to intense local attention. When the team's going good, it's incredible. Whereas I feel like sometimes with football, a team can be good, but it doesn't feel organic. San Diego right now, that city has embraced the Padres more than they ever embraced the Chargers over the last 15-20 years before they left.
It depends on what you value. So if you care about how baseball rates nationally, then you do care about this stuff, but that's more of an MLB thing to care about. Like, if you're a fan, I don't know why you are all caught up in national television ratings, right? One of the things that always is kind of a humbling thing this time of year, when an NFL regular season game goes head to head with an MLB playoff game, the NFL regular season game destroys the MLB playoff game. There was a time when that didn't happen. That happens every year and it's been happening for a long time now because there's more of a national following for the NFL.
I think a big part of that, like I said, is people get into the quarterbacks. Also the NFL's a lot easier to follow. Baseball, it's work to follow a baseball team. A lot of games. There's a lot to be thinking of. The NFL is an easy follow; 17 games, once a week. It's an apples and oranges thing. Baseball is in a very healthy spot, so I'm not one of these people that thinks it's all gloom and doom. I think the sport is actually doing very well. But again, if you do want to see the playoff games do big numbers, you do want to see stars out there. And there just aren't many of them.
It was interesting to hear the history of the DC market since the Expos relocated to town. Despite a rough start (the infamous “Natinals” era), the Nationals return to DC has been largely a success. They’ve won a World Series, made the playoffs 5 times in the 2010s, had a one-team superstar in Ryan Zimmerman who played 1799 games, all for the Nationals, they’ve had top tier talent like Bryce Harper, Juan Soto, Alfonso Soriano, Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg. And at the same time, the Orioles were largely an afterthought. They couldn’t even luck into a playoff spot one time in a 14-season span.
While the Nationals ownership has mostly committed to a winning product (despite the rebuild, they did put a lot of money into the roster that was so successful from 2012-2019), the Orioles largely did nothing. They operated on a tight budget and alienated fans with the MASN dispute. They had a generation to capture a huge swath of territory and basically fumbled it. It’s just more proof that baseball is an incredible sport with a rich history and charm that will always attract fans. If you fail as a franchise, it’s almost always because of terrible ownership. And as franchise values keep skyrocketing, that further dwindles the pool of billionaires who can even afford a team, meaning it’s harder and harder to keep the worst owners out.
Anyways, thank you to Al for his time. We did this interview shortly before the World Series, but November got a little busy and I got sidetracked. Back to more interviews!