Red Sox Nation, Indeed

Fenway Sports Group -- a corporate sibling of the Red Sox -- is opening an office in San Diego:

The reason that Fenway Sports Group, a subsidiary of New England Sports Ventures
LLC, which owns the Boston Red Sox baseball team and the park it plays in, Fenway Park, as well as 80 percent of New England Sports Network — which is similar to ESPN — wants a West Coast hub “is to better leverage their lines of business and create new revenue streams that they don’t have to share with Major League Baseball,” said Pat Connors.

By that, Connors — tabbed this month to be senior vice president of FSG’s local office — means marketing, sponsorships and company acquisitions not connected to the ballclub.

Of course, even if it's not defined as sharable revenue under baseball's rules, its not like the piles and piles of money FSG makes isn't going to the same folks who hold the Sox' purse strings. In some ways, this is an old story. Ted Turner, George Steinbrenner, Anheuser Busch, and countless other previous baseball owners used money from their outside ventures to help subsidize baseball spending.

But there is a difference with FSG, isn't there? In a recent feature story on the business, Mike Dee -- FSG's President and the Red Sox' CEO -- made it pretty clear that, even if the revenue comes from selling ads at Boston College games, NASCAR partnerships, and all manner of other things, FSG's business is really about extending the Red Sox' brand. They're getting the opportunities they're getting because of that brand, and that brand is really part of Major League Baseball, isn't it?

I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with this necessarily. Other teams can try to do this too, though I'm sure only a handful have the capital to get such a venture going. But anytime you see one member of a group doing well, you can assume that the response of the majority will not be an emulative one. It will be jealousy, and everyone will want to wet their beaks, as it were. "Why isn't the revenue from a race car with the Sox logo on it sharable?" David Glass might ask. "The Red Sox don't exist without the other teams to play," notes Bob Nutting.

This is all worth watching because, as the years go on, it is apparent that the real business fissures in baseball are not between the players and the owners as much as they are between the big owners and the little ones. That certainly accounted for much of 2002's acrimony, and assuming bad times eventually hit baseball the way they're hitting the rest of the economy, these David vs. Goliath fights will crop up again.

Will the the game itself be affected when a group of the little guys try to make a grab for the FSG money? We shall see.