Стив Балмер нэг жилийн хугацаатай эрхээ хасуулж, спортын эздийн “Муу эздийн алдрын танхим”-ын хэлэлцүүлэг өрнөж байна

In the past week, Arte Moreno decided to give up ownership of his beloved Los Angeles Angels of Annual Losing, and Steve Ballmer got suspended for a year after his Los Angeles Clippers were busted by the NBA following the Pablo Torre-induced Kawhi Leonard salary-cap circumvention scandal.

Throw in Dodgers owner Mark Walter’s shocking sale of the Lakers and his related business problems, it’s been a tumultuous few weeks for Los Angeles sports owners.

Does anyone know if Bruce McNall still owns the Kings?

Moreno’s run with the Angels began auspiciously in 2003, the year after the Angels won the World Series. He cut the price of beer and started spending money on free agents. When the Angels lucked into Mike Trout, Moreno signed him to a lucrative extension. When the franchise signed Shohei Ohtani, they let him be a two-way star.

But he spent plenty of bad money and didn’t make the right kinds of investments in the organization, and in the past decade, his decisions caused the franchise to plummet.

By the end, Moreno was as despised by his fanbase as any owner in baseball. I’m surprised there wasn’t a parade down Disneyland’s Main Street to celebrate his exit.

Moreno’s tenure will end with 11 consecutive losing seasons. He has been a punching bag for years and deservedly so.

Ballmer does a lot right and spends a ton of money, but he hasn’t yet figured out that money and unbridled enthusiasm don’t automatically equal success.

The Kawhi Leonard deal, and the financial malfeasance that came with it, has crippled the franchise. Ballmer once bragged about how many toilets are in the Intuit Dome, and that feels like a metaphor for the state of his Clippers.

Every fan wants their team’s owner to be competitive and willing to spend money. No one wants an owner to make the fan experience worse.

If there were a Bad Owner Hall of Fame — let’s say it’s located in Cleveland, home to a few of the worst of the worst — would Moreno and Ballmer get inducted today?

It’s an easy yes for Moreno, and we’ll wait and see on Ballmer.

But what makes a bad owner? To paraphrase a famous line from Tolstoy: all good owners are alike; each bad owner is bad in its own way.

Some are bad because of moral reasons: they’re racists, sexual harassers and cheaters.

Some are uncaring 1-percenters, cheap, penurious, greedy, whatever word you find in the thesaurus. They buy a team, which should be treated as a civic institution, and act like it’s their birthright and a piggy bank.

Some are heartless and move a team to make up for their failures as owners.

Some are just born dumb with a famous last name.

Others succeed in one business and assume it’ll translate to sports.

Some are just egomaniacs.

Most are some combination of the above.

Where do Moreno and Ballmer fit among their peers? To figure this out, I created a tiered system for our Hall of Fame. It’s certainly not complete, and fanbases with subjective biases will have plenty of names to add. That’s what the comments section is for.

Since I cover Chicago and regularly bash and belittle Jerry Reinsdorf, it’s probably an upset that he didn’t make the list. He’s certainly worthy of discussion, given how he’s mismanaged two franchises over the years. But he misses the cut when compared to his peers. He’s loved by many of his employees (he once fought his fellow owners to keep pensions for non-uniformed personnel), but he hasn’t always been a good steward of strategic moves, despite decades of practice. While he’s made plenty of indefensible and dumb decisions over the years, he’s just not as bad as the rest of these bozos.

I could also add the Bears’ George McCaskey (and the McCaskeys in general), whose awful on-field (and off-field, if you include a protracted stadium debacle) tenure as chairman of his family business has been saved by the hiring of Ben Johnson. George is a better youth baseball umpire than an NFL owner.

And a special shoutout to Jed York, the 49ers owner who was recently in the news after his arrest for allegedly trying to pay $160 to an undercover officer who was posing as a prostitute.

Their own wing

Dan Snyder and Donald Sterling: These unanimous selections were forced to sell their teams after their respective leagues had been angling to push them out for years. The NFL and NBA just needed the right moment to make it happen.

Snyder started off spending big in Washington, but it quickly became apparent he had no clue what he was doing. Even worse was his behavior. The tales of his nastiness are manifold. He ran the franchise into the ground, and things looked so dire that he preemptively changed the franchise’s offensive team name to try to save face. It didn’t work.

Sterling is the Michael Jordan of bad owners; he was the best at being the worst. He was racist, cheap and creepy (he used to bring friends into the Clippers locker room to watch players shower). He was an egotist, a meddler and an incompetent.

Former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling (above) and former Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder are in a tier of their own. (Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty Images)

Hall of Famers (alphabetical order)

Harold Ballard: I don’t know how many non-hockey fans know of the former Maple Leafs owner, but in 2022, famed journalist Brandon Walsh (OK, actor/director Jason Priestley) made a documentary about him. He went to jail for fraud and ruined the Maple Leafs for decades. One of my favorite details from a 2022 story about the documentary: “He hired a boat mechanic he liked as team trainer.”

Norman Braman: Notoriously cheap Miami art dealer who owned the Eagles and reportedly charged his players for socks and equipment. He once fired Buddy Ryan and hired Rich Kotite as coach. After he sold the franchise to Jeffrey Lurie, he said, “I live in Miami, and traveling the 16 weeks in the fall — well, there’s more to life than the National Football League.” Maybe he had a point.

Harry Frazee: The infamous Red Sox owner sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. What else do you need to know?

Robert Irsay: Sure, his greatest sin was moving the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis in the middle of the night, but that’s not the only reason he’s on this list. “He was perhaps the most oppressive owner in league history — vicious and vindictive, tight-fisted and tyrannical,” The Athletic’s Zak Keefer wrote. His son Jim had his own demons, but he generally learned from his father how not to act.

Jeffrey Loria: What can you say about this lout, who bought and ruined the Montreal Expos, traded them for the Florida Marlins, got public funding for a new stadium in Miami, and then stopped spending. His favorite character in “Major League” is Rachel Phelps.

George Preston Marshall: A known segregationist ownerwho had to be forced by the federal government into signing Black players for his Washington football team; the last to desegregate. “I am surprised that with the world on the brink of another war they are worried about whether or not a Negro is going to play for the Redskins,” he once said. Marshall inspired the famed Washington Post columnist Shirley Povich to write his famous lede: “Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.”

Frank McCourt: It wasn’t long ago that the Dodgers were a laughingstock who went into bankruptcy. McCourt, like a lot of bad owners, got paid handsomely to leave sports.

Art Modell: Any good he did was outweighed by moving the Browns out of Cleveland, a decision so offensive the NFL immediately gave the city an expansion team.

Marge Schott: The late Cincinnati Reds owner can be described as cheap, racist and antisemitic without fear of exaggeration. Baseball finally had an excuse to exile her for good after Rick Reilly profiled her for Sports Illustrated.

Ted Stepien: He was so bad in Cleveland that the NBA created the “Ted Stepien Rule” prohibiting teams from trading their own first-round picks in successive drafts.

Bill Wirtz: “Dollar Bill” refused to air Blackhawks home games on TV because he believed it devalued season tickets. This was still a thing when he died in 2007, even though he co-owned the Chicago RSN. His son Rocky immediately rectified this affront, and the Blackhawks took off after he died.

Harold Ballard ruined the Toronto Maple Leafs for decades. (John Mahler /Toronto Star via Getty Images)

New York wing

Everything is bigger in New York, including the owners’ egos.

James Dolan: For decades, Dolan did everything wrong while turning the NBA’s marquee franchise into a laughingstock. But he’s coming off a historic NBA title after allowing former super-agent Leon Rose to run the show. But just to prove he’s not washed up as a Bad Owner, he’s also using facial recognition technology to ban people from Madison Square Garden.

George Steinbrenner (1980s version): The “Me Decade” was a black mark in Steinbrenner’s fascinating tenure running the Yankees. After the Bronx Zoo 1970s, the Yankees started the ’80s strong, but his meddling turned him into a punchline. He deserved getting chewed out by Frank Costanza. The 1990s were much more successful for “The Boss.”

Fred Wilpon: The Mets were mostly a laughingstock under his reign, especially in recent years, before he and his son finally sold the team to Steve Cohen. The Wilpons didn’t have the money or the brains to run a New York team, even before the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scam hampered their payrolls.

Woody Johnson: Frustrated Jets fans have to hope Woody’s son Brick is grinding hard on Madden to prepare to take over one day. In Johnson’s first decade as owner, the team made the playoffs six times. In his last 15 seasons, it’s had 11 double-digit losing seasons, including six in a row.

New York Jets owner Woody Johnson has presided over a frustrating run of futility. (Ed Mulholland / Getty Images)

On their way

These two active owners are padding their resumes, but they’ll be shoo-ins.

Jimmy Haslam: The Deshaun Watson contract alone will eventually make Haslam a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

John Fisher: He moved the Athletics out of Oakland, and his lack of foresight has them playing in a minor-league park in Sacramento until their Las Vegas stadium is done. Notoriously cheap, a throwback to the days of inept MLB owners.