Donald Trump wanted to buy the San Francisco Giants

Does anyone know of Trump's attempt to create a new baseball league?

Donald Trump wanted to buy the San Francisco Giants

Grant Brisbee@mccoveychron
Aug 4, 2017,

I usually stay away from politics on here for obvious reasons. They’re too divisive, and this is supposed to be a place about sports, a safe haven. But I think the one thing we can all agree on is that Donald Trump is a dangerously ignorant man-child, the wriggling embodiment of the seven deadly sins, each of them competing against the other for supremacy at all times. I don’t think it’s too controversial to suggest that he is a collection of humanity’s worst impulses, someone who is both an existential threat to the world and definitive proof that people don’t deserve to exist in the first place.

And he wanted to buy the Giants.

Deadspin took a long look at Trump’s attempt to create a new baseball league, which I knew absolutely nothing about, and they included the following tidbits:



I ... I need a minute.

While I can’t figure out if he wanted to buy the Giants to get his foot in Major League Baseball, or if he wanted them to somehow dissolve its shell and use the skeleton as the basis of his pre-doomed USFL of baseball, this is terrifying. I know that people are fond of saying “this is the darkest timeline” (meaning that of all the parallel universes, we sure got stuck with a blem), but I believe that we are not in the darkest timeline, and this is proof.

While MLB owners are famously protective of who gets to join their little club — that’s why Mark Cuban doesn’t own the Cubs, for example — I could see Trump getting approved back then. He was famous, and baseball needed publicity coming out of the ‘70s, and Trump wasn’t yet known for ruining everything he touches for everyone involved except for himself.

Here’s the relevant snippet from the New York Times wire service article referenced in that Deadspin piece:



Scenario #1: Trump buys the Giants, moves them to New York, ruins the team, and sells it at a profit

This is the likeliest scenario, though it would have involved getting league approval for the move, which wouldn’t have been easy. I would think the other two New York teams would have raised an unbelievable stink, even if the city can most definitely support another team.

On the other hand, I’m not sure how much power George Steinbrenner wielded among the owners back in those days, or how well he was liked. I’m guessing there would have been a few owners who would have been happy to stick it to him, but that’s just a guess.

Scenario #2: Trump buys the Giants, tries to move them to New York, fails, ruins the team, and sells it at a profit

Unless this is the likeliest scenario. I’m not sure how he would convince the league that it was in their best interests to move to New York instead of Miami, St. Petersburg, or Denver at this point, so he might have been a huge pain for a couple of years before giving up and moving on, leaving an acidic slime-trail of broken promises behind him.

Scenario #3: Trump buys the Giants, keeps them in San Francisco, turns them into a winner, and is finally at peace with himself, receiving enough love and praise to fill the bottomless pit in his soul

I mean, sure, okay.

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https://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2017/8/4/16097944/donald-trump-san-francisco-giants