John W. Henry took a backward ballclub in a dilapidated park and transformed it into a two-time World Series champion that is one of baseball's model franchises.
As the owner of The Boston Globe, he will try to turn around a newspaper that ? like many other major metro dailies ? is shedding staff, subscribers and advertisers as it makes the transition into the Internet age.
Henry agreed to buy the Globe along with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and the Boston Metro for $70 million, a fraction of the $1.1 billion The New York Times Co. paid 20 years ago. Henry apparently made this deal without his Red Sox partners, though he said in a statement that more information will soon be available "concerning those joining me in this community commitment and effort."
The son of southern Illinois soybean farmers now worth an estimated $1.5 billion, Henry was a minority owner of the New York Yankees and the sole owner of the Florida Marlins when he led a group that bought the Red Sox for $660 million in 2002. (The original group included The New York Times, which sold the last of its 17.5 percent ownership last year.)
They soon set out to preserve Fenway Park while taking a wrecking ball to most everything else that had mired the franchise in failure for more than eight decades.
Henry, who made his money by taking a mathematical approach to the commodities markets, brought a similar method to the baseball diamond, hiring the statistically savvy Theo Epstein, then 28 years-old, as the youngest general manager in baseball history. They hired statistical pioneer Bill James as a consultant, putting the Red Sox at the forefront of the revolution that had just begun to take hold in front offices long dominated by old-time and hidebound scouting types.
But, perhaps more importantly, the new owners turned what had long been a stagnant family business into a revenue spigot.
They took NESN, which had been almost exclusively an outlet for Red Sox and Boston Bruins games, into a full-fledged sports network. (Not every effort ? like the sports-themed dating show "Sox Appeal" ? was a success.) And they spent more than $285 million turning the once-doomed Fenway Park into a modern ? well, as modern as a 100-year-old ballpark can be, anyway ? sporting venue.
With seats above the Green Monster and a roof deck in right field, a high-tech scoreboard and new concourses and concessions, Fenway sold out 820 consecutive games ? by official count, anyway ? the longest such streak in professional sports history. Thousands more file through the turnstiles 12 months a year, paying up to $16 just to see the park when it is empty.
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