As I said in my post about the 10 best, picking the 10 best is harder than picking the 10 worst. Once again, I'm going to limit it to the last 100 years, 1920 to 2020.
10. Stephen W. McKeever, Dodgers, 1925-38. (That's as controlling owner. As at least part-owner, 1912-38.) Steve McKeever was not a bad guy. But after the deaths of Charlie Ebbets and his brother Ed McKeever within days of each other in 1925, he was the owner of a team that never had any money.
There were times during the Great Depression that the Dodgers could have gone out of business. The team was terribly. And Ebbets Field, built in 1913, was already in a state of disrepair, because McKeever couldn't afford to maintain it. The Brooklyn Trust Company controlled Charlie Ebbets' estate, and hired Walter O'Malley to oversee their one-quarter ownership of the Dodgers.
Steve McKeever died in 1938, and that led to the other owners hiring Larry MacPhail away from the Cincinnati Reds, and that ended the Dodgers' danger of becoming the 1st MLB team to go bankrupt in the 20th Century. That ended up never happening, although the Seattle Pilots came pretty close in 1969 and '70, before being sold and becoming the Milwaukee Brewers.
Steve McKeever was a tragic figure, so I can only place him at Number 10. Most of it wasn't his fault.
9. Leon Hess, Jets, 1968-99. (That's as controlling owner. As at least part-owner, 1963-99.) Also not a bad guy. He was a good businessman, in his case the energy business. And he was very generous with charity. He was liked, and he was respected. Jet fans usually did not blame him for the team's failures. But they should have, because he didn't get it done. Hess is not on this list for reasons of personality or scandal. It's strictly business.
When he became majority owner of the Jets, business was booming, thanks to the partner he'd bought out, David "Sonny" Werblin; the head coach that Werblin had hired, Wilbur "Weeb" Ewbank; and the quarterback that Werblin had drafted, Joseph "Broadway Joe" Namath. The Jets won Super Bowl III on January 12, 1969.
For the rest of Hess' life, he owned the Jets, and they reached only 2 AFC Championship Games. (Had he died 4 months sooner, it would have been only 1.) In 24 years after firing Ewbank, he hired 8 head coaches (not counting interim ones), and none got him back to the Super Bowl. Walt Michaels came within 1 game in the 1982-83 season. Bill Parcells came within a half in the 1998-99 season. But that was it.
The worst one was Rich Kotite. A Staten Island native, who'd been a decent tight end for the Giants, and had coached the Philadelphia Eagles into the Playoffs, he seemed like a good fit. On January 4, 1995, Hess told the media, "I'm 80 years old. I want results now!" Here's the results he got: 3-13 in 1995, and 1-15 in 1996.
Kotite quit before he could be fired, and Hess begged Parcells to leave the New England Patriots and come home to New Jersey. It came close to working. And then Hess died. And then Vinny Testaverde got hurt in the next season's opening game, and was out for the season, and the chance to win one for Hess was gone.
8. Mike Burke, Yankees, 1966-73, and Knicks 1973-81. (More accurately, in terms of seasons, he was the Yankees' "owner" 1967-72.) Another guy who isn't on this list for reasons of personality, or for the amount of effort he put into trying to win.
Edmund Michael Burke was a genuine hero of America's effort in World War II. A great businessman. A man who loved sports. And, along with Mayor John Lindsay, the man who saved the original Yankee Stadium for an additional 2 generations. We should thank him for those things.
But while he loved baseball, he didn't know how to run a sports team. Granted, the Topping-Webb regime left CBS, and their handpicked team president Burke, a pig in a poke, basically a brand name and nothing else.
But he didn't do much with it: When the team finally won the whole thing in 1977, only 4 players were left from before George Steinbrenner owned the team: Roy White, Thurman Munson, Sparky Lyle and Graig Nettles. I think when George came in, and then bought Burke out, it was a great relief to Burke.
Upon leaving the Yankees, he was named President of the Madison Square Garden Corporation. But that did him no favors on this list, either. Once again, his timing was terrible: The Knicks had just won 2 titles and reached another Final in 4 seasons, but the key players were getting old. He proved unable to replace them. Finally, in 1981, he sold out, and retired to a farm he'd bought outside Galway, in his ancestors' homeland of Ireland, living there until his death in 1987.
7. "The Secaucus Seven," Nets, 1978-98. Led by Joe Taub and Alan Cohen, these guys got little to work with, and they made less out of it. Having to pay $8 million -- and, as the late sportswriting legend Bert Randolph Sugar would have said, these were Jerry Ford dollars, not Donald Trump dollars -- just to get into the NBA following the collapse of the ABA and to pay off the Knicks for "territorial indemnification" -- the Nets had to sell off their best player, Long Island native Julius "Dr. J" Erving, and a year later trade their next-best player, Bronx native Nate "Tiny" Archibald.
In other words, just to remain in the Tri-State Area, the Nets had to dump 2 of the men who would be named in 1996 to the NBA's 50th Anniversary 50 Greatest Players. (Even as we approach the NBA's 75th Anniversary, Doc is probably still one of the game's top 20.)
So how many times did the Nets make the Playoffs in those 20 seasons that the S7 owned them? 10. Which isn't actually all that bad. But how many Playoff series did they win? One. That was in 1984, against the defending World Champion Philadelphia 76ers -- with Erving -- before falling in 6 in the next round against the Milwaukee Bucks. How many Playoff games did they win? 9, with 5 of those coming, as I said, in '84.
It's not so much how often they made the Playoffs, it's how bad they were when they didn't. And the bad draft picks... Dennis Hopson, Ed O'Bannon, Yinka Dare... Maybe the Nets weren't as big a joke as the other "little brother" team in the NBA, the Los Angeles Clippers... but even when they were a good team, 1982-86 and 1992-94, they didn't exactly sell out the Meadowlands. Partly because the established, glamorous Knicks were also good at the same time.
The S7 sold the Nets in 1998, and in 2001 new ownership made the trade for Jason Kidd and the team made 2 NBA Finals, reaching the Playoffs 6 straight seasons, before Bruce Ratner bought the team and put their breakup and move to Brooklyn into motion.
Despite a 20-year record of ineptitude, I can't rank the S7 any higher, for 2 reasons: There were 7 of them, not any 1 that was more responsible than any other; and the Nets have always been the 2nd basketball team in a 2-team town. Sometimes 3rd, when you consider St. John's.
In fact, counting all the area's major league teams, they're the 9th team in a 9-team town. And, frankly, counting the Liberty and the Red Bulls may not be doing the Nets any favors, either. The owners since have done them no favors, either.
6. Fred Wilpon, Mets, 2002-present. (That's as controlling owner. As at least part-owner, 1980-present.) When Freddy and Nelson Doubleday were co-owners, the Mets reached the Playoffs 4 times, winning the 1986 World Series and the 2000 NL Pennant. Since Doubleday sold out in 2002, and Fred became sole owner and gave his son Jeff Wilpon effective control of the team, it's been 3 Playoff berths, 1 Pennant, and 2 shocking regular-season collapses.
Okay, things happen. Teams have injury crises. Teams simply get beat by better ones. Teams have runs of bad luck. All of these have happened to the Mets since the Wilpons started running things on their own. And while many Met fans were sad to see Shea Stadium go, Citi Field is a much better ballpark, and that was Fred Wilpon's idea.
But the Wilpons trusted Bernie Madoff with their money, and that crippled the Mets financially for the 1st few Citi Field years. And they hired field managers and general managers who didn't know what they were doing. Omar Minaya and his "Los Mets" didn't work: It left Met fans feeling so tortured, it might as well have been called the "Spanish Inquisition."
Willie Randolph got the Mets to within 1 run of a Pennant in 2006. Given what happened in 2007 and '08, with mostly the same players, that may have been the biggest "miracle" in Met history. Jerry Manuel was not the answer. Ask Met fans if they won the 2015 Pennant and the 2016 Wild Card berth because Terry Collins was the manager, and they'll say no, they won those in spite of Collins.
Mickey Callaway was not the answer. Jeff Wilpon hired Carlos Beltran to manage, and he had to have been aware that there was already an investigation into Beltran's activities with the Houston Astros. So now, Luis Rojas is the manager.
Firing Minaya as GM led to the hiring of Sandy Alderson, but his health became an issue, hamstringing the Mets further. Brodie Van Wagenen has been a fool, trying to dictate to his managers how to run things every bit as much as Brian Cashman seemed to do in The Bronx to Joe Girardi and now to Aaron Boone.
It now appears that the Wilpons may finally be about to sell the Mets to Steven A. Cohen, a billionaire hedge fund manager with a company history of bigotry, misogyny and crooked dealings. When the other option was... Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez.
That's the Mets for ya. As their former manager Jeff Torborg once said about ways to catch the knuckleball, there are two theories about how to run the Mets, and, unfortunately, neither of them work. As was proven when they were owned by...
5. Lorinda de Roulet, Mets, 1975-80. Joan Payson knew her baseball, and that's a big reason why she was a member of the board of directors of the baseball New York Giants. She was the only board member to vote against the move to San Francisco in 1957, and that's a big reason why she was offered the chance to buy into the National League as the 1st owner of a new team for New York, the Mets.
Mrs. Payson owned the Mets from their laughable 1962 beginnings to their 1969 World Championship and their 1973 Pennant. Then, in 1975, she died. Her daughter, Lorinda de Roulet, inherited the team.
She knew that she knew nothing about baseball, so she trusted the team's president, M. Donald Grant. He was cheap. Not because the Mets weren't making money. And even if they weren't, it wasn't his money: Mrs. de Roulet was a de Roulet by marriage, and both a Payson and a Whitney by blood. She was richer than George Steinbrenner. She could afford to spend whatever she wanted.
But she trusted Grant, and he thought baseball players were beneath him. He had what Marvin Miller, director of the players' union, called "a plantation mentality." When he pulled a dirty trick that led to Tom Seaver, "The Franchise," demanding a trade in mid-1977, hardly any of the '73 Pennant winners were left. After the season, he got rid of Bud Harrelson, the last remaining player from the '69 titlists.
Mrs. de Roulet finally fired the old buzzard in 1978. By that point, attendance at Shea Stadium was so sparse, it was being called Grant's Tomb: It had gone from a City record 2.7 million fans in the 1970 season to under 800,000 by 1979 -- or, per game, from 33,000 to 9,740. The Mets were bad, and not even interesting. They had bottomed out every bit as much as the Yankees had in 1966, and without the history to back it up.
Not until 1980 did things begin to turn around at Shea. That was the year when Lorinda sold the team to Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday. They hired Frank Cashen, who helped build the Baltimore Orioles team that dominated the American League from 1966 to 1971, as general manager. His drafts and trades built the Mets into a contender by 1984, and a World Champion in 1986.
In 2003, the last remaining original Met broadcaster, Bob Murphy, retired. Among the former Met personalities invited back to Shea Stadium for a pregame ceremony was Mrs. de Roulet. Along with Mayor Mike Bloomberg, she was one of only two people booed that night. I had a close enough seat that I could see the look on her face, and she seemed puzzled as to why people were booing her, 23 years after she sold the team.
New Yorkers have long memories: If they could still hate Walter O'Malley 46 years after the Dodgers were taken away from him, hating her after 23 years was a piece of cake.
Lorinda de Roulet is still alive, age 88, but hasn't been involved in professional sports since selling the Mets, 40 years ago.
This may come as a shock to Met fans of a certain age, but there have been 4 team owners in New York sports that were worse than Lorinda de Roulet and Fred Wilpon.
4. Bruce Ratner, Nets, 2004-10. How to screw up a good thing. The New Jersey Nets had reached the NBA Finals in 2002 and 2003, and the Knicks were terrible. For the 1st time, really, the Nets had the chance to be the Tri-State Area's most popular basketball team. They were already its most successful, at least recently, despite the Knicks' 1994 and '99 trips to the Finals.
Enter Ratner. Emphasis on the "Rat." A real estate developer, he could have led the move to build a new arena for the Nets and Devils, so they could leave the Meadowlands in style. Instead of joining the Devils in the building of the Prudential Center, he wanted to build an arena in the Atlantic Yards section of Brooklyn, and move the Nets there. New Jersey basketball fans finally had a great team, and, instead of helping, the new owner stabbed them in the back, right through the heart.
For reasons I won't get into, the Barclays Center project dragged on. And on. And on. Even the Montreal Expos were not a lame-duck franchise as long as the New Jersey Nets were. Finally, in 2010, Ratner had had enough: He sold the Nets to Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, so that he could concentrate on finishing the Barclays Center project. He did, and it opened in 2012.
Nets games have not become a big happening in Brooklyn. Really, the people of the Borough couldn't care less. As bad as the Knicks have been in the 21st Century, they are still more popular in Brooklyn than the Nets are. And Prokhorov, who promised big things for the franchise, also failed as an owner, and has sold out.
In the 6 seasons that Ratner owned the Nets, they went from Atlantic Division Champions in 2004, and Division Champions again in 2006, to 12-70 in 2010. And he killed their fan base, and failed to build a new one where he was moving them to. He packed as much ugliness into 6 years as Fred Wilpon has in 18 years.
3. Walter O'Malley, Dodgers, 1950-57. (That's as controlling owner. As at least part-owner, 1942-57. Counting Los Angeles, 1942-79.) Did he have anything to do with the Dodgers' success in the 7 seasons between his buying out of Branch Rickey and his move of the team? Not much. The biggest move was in hiring Walter Alston as manager in 1954 -- and even that may have been more of him being convinced by general manager Emil "Buzzie" Bavasi.
Let's get it out of the way right now: If you think the move of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles was a bad thing, the person most responsible for it was Walter O'Malley.
Robert Moses, who controlled construction of pretty much anything in the State of New York at the time, refused to condemn the land that O'Malley wanted for a new stadium, which would have been built in Atlantic Yards, where the Barclays Center was eventually built. Moses offered O'Malley a stadium he wanted to build in Flushing Meadow, but O'Malley didn't want to own the Queens Dodgers, so he turned it down, and started looking elsewhere. This was the stadium that would eventually become Shea Stadium.
O'Malley has been called a "visionary." But his "vision" only seemed to succeed when it could benefit him, not the fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers. If he was such a visionary, then he should have found a way around Moses. He could have gone to Mayor Robert Wagner. If Wagner refused to help, O'Malley could have gone to Governor Averell Harriman.
If he refused to help, O'Malley had other options. The City of New York was electing a Mayor in 1957. How the hell Wagner got elected to a 2nd term after losing the Dodgers
and the Giants, I don't know. Get-out-the-vote efforts by the City's Democratic machine, I guess. O'Malley could have financed a candidate to beat Wagner.
Failing that, the State of New York was electing a Governor in 1958. O'Malley could have helped Nelson Rockefeller beat Harriman, which did happen. Rocky would have had no qualms about overruling Moses on the stadium, because he went on to overrule him on other things, and finally removed him from power in 1968.
But O'Malley, who had already forced Branch Rickey, Red Barber and Jackie Robinson away from the Dodgers, chose not to find a way around Moses. He moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles after the 1957 season.
It wasn't because Los Angeles was potentially a great market for baseball. If he thought he could make more money staying in Brooklyn, he would have. If he thought he could make more money in San Diego, or Hawaii, or Japan, or Antarctica, or on the Moon, that's where the Dodgers would be playing today. Walter O'Malley was about Walter O'Malley, and that meant that he was about money.
2. Horace Stoneham, Giants (baseball), 1936-57. (Counting San Francisco, 1936-76.) It was no contest. And not just because he owned the team for 22 seasons and won just 1 World Championship. That's not that bad. They did win 4 Pennants. Throw in what happened after he left New York, and that's 5 Pennants, for an average of 1 every 8 seasons. I know, it doesn't work that way. But it makes him look somewhat competent.
He wasn't. He inherited the team from his father Charles (who owned the team from 1919 until his death in 1936), and saw them win Pennants in 1936 and 1937. But the rise of 2 teams built by Branch Rickey -- first the St. Louis Cardinals and then the Brooklyn Dodgers -- saw what had been the most successful sports team in North America become the 3rd-biggest baseball team in New York City.
He never spent much to rebuild the team, or to maintain the ballpark. As the neighborhoods -- Harlem to the south, Washington Heights to the West -- deteriorated, so, too, did the Polo Grounds. When he made the decision to move, he was asked about the young fans he was abandoning. He said, "I feel bad for the kids, but I haven't seen too many of their fathers lately."
The fathers didn't want to risk their cars and sit in a rickety old stadium. It was 46 years old at the time of the move, but already in worse shape than either Ebbets Field, or Shea Stadium, or the original Yankee Stadium ever got.
The Giants then had the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association as their top farm team. There were going to move to Minneapolis for the 1958 season. It would have been the cheapest option. Then, O'Malley told him of the plan to move the Dodgers to Los Angeles, and said, Why don't you move the Giants to San Francisco? It would keep the rivalry going.
Although the move to the City By the Bay paid off financially and competitively at first, things dropped off, and by 1976, Stoneham nearly moved them again, to Toronto, before finding a buyer.
The thing is, it didn't have to be this way. Moses had offered O'Malley the Flushing Meadow stadium. Had he offered it to Stoneham, the Giants probably would have moved into a new stadium there by Opening Day 1960, and might be playing in Citi Field today.
And, all that time, New Yorkers would have still gotten to see Willie Mays, and also Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, Gaylord Perry, Bobby and Barry Bonds, Jack Clark, the unrelated Will Clark, Madison Bumgarner, Buster Posey, and, with no hard feelings, Jeff Kent.
There would never have been a Mets, so they wouldn't have had Tom Seaver or Mike Piazza. But they still might have had a "miracle" title in 1969 (the Giants finished 2nd in the NL West, and would instead have been in the NL East, and might've beat the Chicago Cubs out, and then all bets would have been off). There wouldn't have been a title in 1986, but there could have been Pennants in 1989, 2002, 2010, 2012 and 2014 -- and the Giants did win their Division in 2000, before losing to the Mets, so, in addition to 1962, there could have been at least 1 other Subway Series between the Giants and the Yankees.
All Stoneham had to do was ask Moses for help. The plan was there, waiting for a team to take it. But Stoneham was the biggest fool who ever owned a New York sports team.
But not the worst owner.
1. Charles Dolan, Knicks and Rangers, 1994-present. As the owner of Cablevision, Dolan bought the Madison Square Garden Corporation. He sold Cablevision in 2016, but kept control of the Garden Corporation. It should have been the other way around.
He became controlling owner of the teams just after both had made the Finals in their respective sports, the Rangers winning, the Knicks coming within 1 game of doing so. 26 years. 2 teams. 2 berths in the Finals. 2 Finals games won. That's it.
Yes, more of the blame can be laid at his son James, the actual operator of the Knicks and the Rangers. But when Mike McCaskey ran the Chicago Bears into the ground, his father Ed "took the keys away." And when it became obvious that William Clay Ford Jr. was never going to turn the Detroit Lions around, his mother, Martha Firestone Ford -- making Bill Ford a great-grandson of both auto titan Henry Ford and tire mogul Henry Firestone -- removed him from power.
Charles Dolan continues to let James Dolan run the Knicks and the Rangers. Charles is 93 years old, making him the oldest team owner in New York sports history. As far as I know, he is not in ill health. Even if he were, James is 65, and could run the teams for a long time to come.
Telling Knicks and Rangers fans, "It can't get any worse" will be no comfort to them. They've seen it get very bad. They know that things can get worse, even than they are now.
James Dolan recently tested positive for COVID-19. He recovered. It would be wrong for Knick or Ranger fans to wish death on him. But I'm sure there were a few who were happy to know he suffered.
