The Producers
Max and Leo
Max Bialystock was the owner of a mediocre major league baseball club called the Houston Asteroids. “No matter how you talk them up to be in the spring,” Max used to say. “they always come crashing to earth by the Fourth of July. The only thing we’ve got right in twenty years is the name. They are asteroids all the way – and their reality is gravity. It gets them every time. I don’t know how much longer we can keep getting the fans to buy into this crap we pull every year. And now, worse than ever, we face going into spring with no prospects coming up and a bunch of over-paid and over-weight veterans who are almost too fat to walk over and pick up their paychecks, let alone pick up a bat with hits in it! – Mother of Mercy, what do we do now?”
Leo Bloom was the new President of the Asteroids, hired by Bialystock to work some kind of miracle for his beleaguered owner/boss. He heard his boss make that desperate statement and immediately felt the strong need to say something that would come across as both consoling and wise. “Well, Max, as I see it,” Leo said, “you’ve given Houston your very best for two decades – and now that effort has become a horse that’s finally brought you to a fork in the road.”
Max: “Fork in the road? Don’t serve me up a salad, Leo. What are you talking about?”
Leo: “You have to make a decision between one of two new courses because you now understand that you can’t keep doing what you have been doing. Nobody is going to buy the same old crapola for another season.”
Max: “And what are my choices?”
Leo: “Number One, you can sell the team. Find some rube who wants to be a major league baseball club owner and sell him or his group the club for about a gazillion dollars more than you paid for it.”
Max: “That sounds pretty good, but what else do you see?”
Leo: “Or you can do what it takes to put a winning ball club on the field, one that possesses the anti-gravity spine of talent that won’t allow them to fall to earth by mid-summer. You have the capital to do it, if you also have the will to let me run the show and pick the people who can get us there. And don’t be scared. Remember that there are always three gradient levels that define the phrase “winning team”: (1) Too good to lose. – This level’s almost unattainable. Only the Yankee Dynasty teams have come close to meeting the standards for perfection; (2) Playoff Competitive. – You build a club that can make it to the playoffs every year and hopefully crash the World Series once or twice a decade; (3) Fragrantly Competitive. – Now you’re talking. These are the clubs that smell like winners to the fans, even though they really aren’t. These clubs are the ones that hang close to August 31st every year, even though they have by then revealed a talent hole somewhere on the field that will keep them out of the playoffs. The challenge here is to do some personnel changes each off-season that are intended to look like improvement, even though they are mostly nothing more than a change of faces.
Max: “Those ‘keep the club’ alternatives all sound too expensive to me, Leo – and I’ve been doing this club ownership thing too long to run another sham on the fans. If I’m going to run a good sham again, I’d rather do it on a buyer for the club.
Leo: “I understand, Max, but wait a minute. I think I may have hit upon the fact that your mismanagement of things has kicked open a rare third alternative to sell or rebuild.”
Max: “What do you mean, Leo?”
Leo: (musing to himself) “Heh, heh, heh, amazing. I’ve been looking over your books for the past three years and it’s absolutely amazing, Max. But under the right circumstances, a producer/club owner could make more money with a bad club/flop than he could with a winning-hit operation.”
Max: (eyes open in wild excitement) “Tell me more, Leo! I’m all ears.”
Leo: “It’s simple. You’ve been getting people to the ball park, but you’ve been paying too many over-the-hill bozos way too much money. Here’s what you do: (1) unload the fat cats on the payroll; (2) tell the fans we are going to rebuild the team from the ground up, starting with the farm system; (3) only hire or promote minimum wage guys for the roster next year; (4) tell the fans that they we need their patient support for the next 4-5 years while the club is being totally rebuilt; (4) sell the hell out of advance season tickets, offering small discounts for multiple year purchases. – Forget the discount. Tell them that multiple season ticket buyers will be protecting themselves from future surcharges for new seating licenses; (5) make sure the local TV screw-up never gets fixed. Make people come to the ball park if they want to see our losers play. Lay off all the unnecessary people at the ballpark and put some seat watchers out there to record which seats are being sold and never used. (6) Take all the purchased seat locations that are never used and sell them again. There’s no point in letting a sale go to waste on a purchaser who never shows up to use what he or she bought. (7) Go this route and the Asteroids will make more money with a guaranteed low payroll loser than they ever made with a team that was designed to only look like a winner.”
Max: (dancing merrily in a circle around Bloom) “Leo, You’ve just convinced me – and you’ve just earned yourself a 5% stock option in the club, as well. Now let’s do lunch and then call a media conference to reveal our rebuilding plans to the world.”
The Pecan Park Eagle 
September 28, 2013 at 3:07 pm |
Nice sendup, Bill. “Springtime for . . . .” Oh, never mind–too many candidates for that. On May 27th, I went to Coors Field to see the American League Houston Astros play the Colorado Rockies. I was wearing a Colt .45s cap and Rockies T-shirt and was stopped by a fan who wanted to take my picture. “You must be crazy,” he said. I couldn’t argue with him. Houston won 3-2. I hate the DH, but can’t abandon the ‘Stros; I went to the third game ever played by the Colt .45s. The way I look at it, I still have a favorite team in the Senior Circuit and a “new” favorite team in the American League.
September 28, 2013 at 3:16 pm |
Well, I’ve had my smiles for Saturday morning! You are too clever! Fun reading.