This week’s web pick highlights Biz of Baseball’s coverage of the drawn-out sale of the Texas Rangers. 

It’s a topic that will particularly interest some baseball fans in the UK because the villian of the piece is well-known to football followers: one half of Liverpool FC’s American dunce duo, Tom Hicks.

As Maury Brown put it in one recent post:

“Well, this is a fine mess you’ve gotten baseball into, Tom Hicks. The owner of the Texas Rangers (as well as the NHL Dallas Stars and half of Liverpool FC of the English Premier League), overleveraged himself to the tune of $525 million, and now, Major League Baseball is being shoved around for it”.

Sounds familiar, don’t you think?

Hicks had to put the team up for sale after defaulting on a $525m loan.  A group called Rangers Baseball Express agreed a $570m (£390.334m) deal with Hicks Sports Group back in January and was expected to complete the acquisition of the Texas Rangers by opening day, but the creditors are not happy with the deal that’s on the table and are holding up the sale.  

The situation was discussed at an owners’ meeting in New York this week and it’s now looking likely that MLB Commissioner Bud Selig will be left with no other choice but to invoke the ‘best interests of the game’ clause and take control of the franchise to push the deal through.  Any deal also has to be approved by at least 75 per cent of the MLB owners.

A lot of the press coverage concerning Liverpool’s ownership struggles has focused on the nationality of the owners, throwing around the oft-used argument of ‘foreigners’ not understanding football.  This goes to show that the ‘foreigners’ argument is wide of the mark; Hicks is quite adept at getting his sports teams into a complete mess regardless of the sport in question.