Daiei has reportedly been looking for a purchaser for several years, but the company is no closer to finding a buyer for the Hawks than it is of making its supermarket customers feel like they're shopping at Harrods.
But if Daiei's floundering retail business emphasizes bargains at the expense of atmosphere, the company's ball club is as classy as any in Japan and likely the most profitable in the Pacific League.
That the irony. Shigeru Murata, the PL's secretary general, has long touted the Hawks as model for success in the less prestigious PL. And in a league where the parent companies are financial heavyweights compared to their Central League counterparts, the PL's strongest club is on the shakiest footing imaginable.
But if you're waiting to see who the Hawks' new owners will be and what their uniforms will look like, don't hold your breath.
"Daiei has no intention of selling," Murata told The Hot Corner by phone last Friday.
"All the talk about the Hawks being sold is just that, talk. Daiei's creditors are pushing it to sell its shares in the team in order to relieve the parent company's debt. The company owns 60 percent of the Hawks, but a sale is not in the works.
"For one thing, if the controlling interest in the team where transferred, the Baseball Agreement requires the new majority owner to put up ¥3 billion yen (as a deposit with the establishment). That's just one thing, but it makes it a lot harder to find a buyer."
Another problem with the sale, is the distinct possibility that Daiei will only unload its most valuable asset if a prospective purchaser also takes over the company's Hawks-related white elephants, Fukuoka Dome and the Seahawk Hotel next door to it.
The retractable roof makes the dome extremely expensive to operate and the hotel has reportedly had to fight an image problem--a first-class facility that was originally operated with all the panache of the baked goods section at your local Daiei supermarket. !!!
"Build it and they will come," says the other-worldly ballpark announcer in W.P. Kinsella's wonderful book "Shoeless Joe." And for all its embarrassing blunders, the Hawks' front office has done just that. The club has launched an unprecedented number of campaigns and promotions to get the people of Kyushu in to Fukuoka Dome.
Even with the bad publicity of tax-dodging players, the club's renting out the Fukuoka Dome for a convention on days it was needed for Japan Series games, and a sign-stealing scandal and subsequent cover-up, the team has thrived at the gate. The Hawks own Kyushu's hearts--except for those in Miyazaki, where the Yomiuri Giants train every February.!!!
Let's just hope that if the Hawks do go up for sale, Japanese baseball does a better job of managing it than Major League Baseball Inc., would.
Japan has a long tradition of trying to emulate major league trends, but the shady deals related to contraction and the discount sale of the Boston Red Sox appear to be setting new standards for major league corruption.
The owner of the Minnesota Twins, whose franchise has been diagnosed as chronically unprofitable by MLB owners, has been ignoring the calls of interested buyers.
Twins owner Carl Pohlad, who has been very generous in offering loans to fellow major league owners in the past, is now planning to liquidate the club for far more than it would fetch on the free market. The other owners, who insist on their right to operate baseball in a business-like fashion, have agreed to repay Pohlad's past kindness by buying him out for far more than the market will bear.
Without the Twins, who turn a modest profit like clockwork, that portion of the mid-west market will be ripe for exploitation by the next closest team, the Milwaukee Brewers. The Brewers, one of the teams that benefitted from Pohlad's generosity, are owned by the family of Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball and orchestrator of this grand buyout scheme.
Commissioner Bud, who recently went to Washington to plead baseball's case for poverty before congress, is now up to his neck in the kind of stuff he has been spewing for years. MLB is arguing that the Twins are an unprofitable business in an unprofitable industry.
Unfortunately, Bud's timing could not match with his mastery of the art of double talk.
The $660 million deal for the Boston Red Sox showed Bud's rhetoric for what it was, a smoke screen. If the majors were in anywhere near the kind of trouble that Bud claimed, existing owners wouldn't be able to sell their franchises for a profit.
But wait, there's more. The Red Sox sale price was a low-ball offer from a pair baseball insiders, the current owner of the Florida Marlins and the former owner of the San Diego Padres. In accepting the $660 million offer, the Red Sox's current owners turned down vastly more money from other bidders.
This makes perfect sense once one realizes that MLB owners are not in the business of developing a product and selling it to the public. No, the true business of a major league owner is extorting money from local governments.
Because a series of legislative and judicial blunders have left MLB with the license to operate a monopoly, current owners are allowed to pick and choose who gets to join their elite club and to decide how much competition is optimal. And since the demand for major league baseball vastly outstrips the supply, owners get to extort tribute from host cities. "If you want major league baseball, buy me a new stadium or I'll take my team and leave."
And like other organizations in the extortion business, take the mafia for example, the majors are picky about who joins the inner circle. After all, not everybody is cut out for the task of scamming millions of dollars from major metropolitan areas.
In order to prevent outsiders from polluting the talent pool with heretical thoughts about competition and other subversive notions, it is essential that the owners keep a tight reign on who gets into their club. It wouldn't do to let just anybody own a major league team. After all, they have a reputation to uphold.
The Hot Corner appears each Thursday in The
Daily Yomiuri .