NY Mets sale: pro sports ownership still almost exclusively a white man's game

Hedge fund titan Steve Cohen just vanquished the Jennifer Lopez/Alex Rodriguez/(Walmart CEO) Marc Lore group in acquiring the New York Mets baseball club. This wasn’t just a massive missed opportunity for the MLB and pro sports, it was an outrage. Especially given the racial discord and, supposedly, increased white awareness of our racial inequalities, across our country.

While in the NBA, nearly 81% of players are people of color, in the NFL, players of color make up almost 73% of the league and roughly 43% of Major League Baseball club players are minorities, almost no teams in those leagues are owned by African Americans or Latinos.

NBA Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan is the only African American majority owner of an NBA, NFL or MLB team. Former Yankee great Derek Jeter is a minority owner and CEO of the MLB’s Miami Marlins. But white investment banker Bruce Sherman is the controlling owner.

Part of the problem is that pro sports teams rarely change hands. And the white owners and league executives inhabit an ol’ boys’ club that rarely looks beyond its color line, except when it comes to enlisting players.

Pro sports teams aren’t, of course, the be-all, end-all for African American and Latino economic advancement in our country. But they are a huge symbol that could inspire young African Americans and Latinos that success in sports can extend beyond the court and field. And black and Latino owners would certainly provide a crucial perspective as pro sports teams grapple with boiling-over racial issues in our country. In addition, more minority ownership might increase the sparse number of black and Latino team executives and coaches and could enhance opportunities for minority-controlled vendors.

Right now, the federal government gifts the pro sports leagues with highly lucrative antitrust exemptions not accorded any other industry. They’re the equivalent of automakers being allowed to band together to purchase steel or television news networks having the ability to establish a binding salary cap for anchors and reporters.

These valuable federal government dispensations should be made contingent on MLB, the NFL and NBA each having at least three teams controlled by members of U.S. Census-defined racial groups with below average income and household wealth within five years. Any league that doesn’t achieve that goal would automatically lose its antitrust exemptions.

Currently, those racial groups would be African Americans and Latinos. In the future, of course, the ethnicity of low income/wealth groups could change, so this is not a racial quota that would run afoul of SCOTUS rulings greatly limiting racially-based government programs.

As a carrot to go along with the stick of the potential loss of their leagues’ antitrust exemptions, pro team owners who sell to minority-controlled groups – such as J-Lo’s and A-Rod’s – should be allowed to defer the capital gains taxes, provided they’re invested in the Trump tax reform law’s Opportunity Zones in distressed communities.

This is a rational and eminently fair public policy approach, given the urgency of overcoming our country’s horrific racial legacy and dramatically accelerating African American and Latino economic advancement. It doesn’t penalize sports teams – it merely requires them to help achieve a crucial societal objective in return for the unique governmental favors they’ve been granted.

Were such a law in place now, A-Rod and J-Lo would probably be the new owners of the Mets.