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David Rubinstein joins us here.
He is a co founder and co chairman of the Carlisle Group, an owner of the Baltimore Orioles as well as Cal Ripkin Junior, talking about those O's Baseball Hall of Famer, founder and partner of Ripken Baseball. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us here. We've got a lot of sports people running around. We were talking about women's basketball, women's soccer. Let's talk a little bit of Major League baseball.
You guys are up a game in the win Colm on my Yankees, and it's going to be a great last few weeks of the year.
David, I want to start with you here. You own the Orioles. Here, What are you doing? Why are you buying a sports franchise?
Well, in this case, I grew up in Baltimore and I wanted to give back to Baltimore a bit, and I thought the team could maybe use rejuvenation in some way, and it's part of rebirth of Baltimore. Baltimore is trying to rebuild itself in many ways from some of the struggles it's had. I thought a new ownership group would
probably be helpful. So I did it for that reason, And obviously I hope to make my as well from myself and my investors, but it's more of a philanthropic thing on my part than anything else.
And Alex he's got a few partners there, including mister Bloomberg who owns this radio program.
Ah, how about that? How about that? About secular for us?
The exact ca all comes back together. Cal talk to us about the Orioles. Boy, Man, I'm a Yankee Finn so I'm looking at them every day.
Man, they look good. Tell us about this team.
It's an exciting young team to watch, talent all over the place. We've had little problems with injuries and our pitching staff, but when you have a deeper minor league system, sometimes when somebody gets hurt, you can it's an opportunity for someone else. So they're playing really well. And it's interesting when many owners come in to buy a team, the thing they have to fix is what's happening on
the field. In our particular case, that's the best part about the investment is that Michaelias has done a really good job of creating an environment of culture that knows how to win knows how to play, and he's put talent in the system. So the good part is you just take your hands off of and say just keep going and hopefully the luck factor with David will in the very first year will take that all the way to the World Series.
That's a really dumb question. Yes, why is investing in sports like a good business? And I say that because at some point we're going to reach the top, right, Like, there's so much money coming in.
How do you know that?
Well, over the last ten or fifteen years, it's been very difficult for somebody to buy a major league professional sport operation and lose money. People have made staggering sums. Now, of course that tends to track more money, and as
you suggest, at some point there's always a peak. But right now, the interest in sports is so dynamic that the live television despite your view and my view that live television should focus on interview shows, actually it focuses on live sports, and live sports is what's keeping television
alive really. So if you take a look at the NFL, for example, I think of the of the fifty most watched television shows last year, forty five of them were NFL games and now baseball sees a lot of people as a lot of people watching as well, so there's a view that the positive population increases and as other things seem to be less attractive, sports is still very, very attractive, and so the TV contracts are going up and as a result, for example, the NBA just negotiated
seventy seven billion dollars worth of contracts. It's expected in two years that the NFL will top that number. So that's what is driving. And also it's a global phenomenon that people now are buying sports teams, not only in their own country but everywhere in the world, and so it's really not just a US phenomenon.
So can I have a simple All you have to do is to look at the health of sports is to look at the salaries of the players. Yeah, and I guess I'd become one of those players saying, man, I wish I'd played in.
This always goes up.
I mean, I'm like everybody else. It's got to top out somewhere, Yet it just keeps going higher. Cal How has the game on the field changed the kids today that you watch at Canbin Yard. Still, by the way, I would argue one of the best parts in Major League Baseball twenty five years on.
But how's the game changed today versus when when you played well?
I mean, the analytics have taken over and all the data and all the information. And I was an analytical player and I took the data from but there's no way that I was getting all the sort of data that you can get now. And the trick is, and this is the fun part about learning the game hasn't changed much because the diamonds the same, the bases are the same, the mounds the same, The game is played
the same way. But with all this influx of new data, teams feel that they have an advantage when they extract some of the data and then use that to help them play in the game. But the secret is how do you give the data to a player to make
them a better player. And that's the part that I'm having fun with is learning what the data affects the philosophy of how you play the game, and that's changed, and positioning on the field, you know, different old philosophies have kind of gone out the window because they've been proven not to be effective. So it's interesting to watch the game from that perspective. But it is all about the data, the numbers, they track everything that moves on that field.
It's amazing and that's AI.
That's big data coming into sports and ouse I'm sure you know this, but I mean, just cal has he has a little record out there.
He played a lot of games in a row.
He never took a day off, and that's that is something that just it'll never be broken up.
I wish I was wearing probes or something that could figure out how I could do that, because I'm asking all the time, how in the world you play all those games in a row, and I don't know.
Well, I guess my question would be with the analytics, that's never going to happen again, not even close.
Well, I think they're predicting now, at least in a medical sort of way, when that you might be inclined to have an injury, you know, and so if they start to think that you might have an injury, then they put you on the list a little early, the injury list a little early, and they're they're looking at the long term as a the short term.
But I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
There's the one thing that's hard to measure is what's inside your heart, your guts, and how you go out about playing a game, how you compete. That's not measurable right now. And I think that's what drove me is when you're an everyday player. The definition of an everyday player when I played was every day. I had the body type in which to do it. I healed really
well and I could play through pain. And when you find out that you can play through being less than one hundred percent, because I would argue that even if you play one hundred and forty games, you're still playing at less than one hundred percent. Maybe the only time you're one hundred percent is the first day of spring training and then you end up moving towards the year. So that's the hard part where that's not measurable.
Yep.
And I like to see players that push through and force themselves to play every game to see too.
You don't see that too much anymore, hey, David. And aside from the Orioles, you've got a day job here co founder, co chairman of the Carlisle Group. Perfect time to ask you this question. I know you bought the Orioles as an individual's part of a partnership right now, private equity. The NFL has allowed of it equity. That's mean as part ownership. What do you think about that?
Well, Carlisle is one of the groups that's permitted, so I make it for it. Yes, I think that it was inevitable because the price of NFL teams are going up so much that it's very difficult to find somebody by himself or herself who can buy a team anymore longer. The last team that was sold, the Washington Commanders, went for six billion dollars. It's a large amount of amount of money. Very few people can buy that by themselves. You need to have consortium of people to do this, and private
equity is a big pot of capital sitting there. But the deals are ones where you have to be ten percent, no involvement in the day to day management, and you have to hold for at least six years. So NFL's experimenting. We'll see how it goes.
So Cal you have had minor league investments, but this is the first time that both of you have had major league investments. How did this come about? Like, how did the partnership come about? Has it going there?
Well, the owner of the team for the last thirty years was the Angelo's family. I had talked to them over last summer about a possible sale and it came to be. But I wanted to have people in the consortium that were more connected to Baltimore and baseball than maybe I was. I haven't grown up in Baltimore, but I haven't lived there for a while. So I talked to a number of people in Baltimore and some of the people who are also connected with the Oriols, and
obviously the first call I made was cal Ripken. They said he would like to invest and also help us in other ways what he's doing. So I think it's worked out quite well and win win for Baltimore and for for that.
Was like no brainer for you, Yeah.
Absolutely, absolutely no brainer. I felt like I've been an oriole through and through my whole life. I mean, I grew up in and around the Baltimore area. My dad was in with the Orioles the first fourteen years of my life. He was a minor league manager. And then you have a dream to be a player, you get drafted by the team you want to get drafted by, you play your whole career with that team. So I know that I went off for a little while, and you know, you buy minor league teams, you learn about
business in other ways. You put your head down, you don't pay much attention to what's happening at the Oriols. Though, when David called, it was an opportunity to get back in, to look at it from the inside looking out, And I'm really surprised that I'm way into it now. I used to think the whole world revolved around baseball, and then you get out and you realize it doesn't. But then now it seems like the world revolves around baseball again.
Of course, And to put it in context for those who don't know the record, Lou Garrick played in one and thirty consecutive games. People thought that was the unbreakable record. Cal Ripkin did twy six hundred and thirty two games over seventeen years, not missing one day. And all of us who work day to day for living in non athletic things, can you imagine going to work seventeen days and or seventeen years I rope without missing Oh.
Totally exactly, Cal.
What do you think the Oils need to work on over the next couple of years? Here again, I'm looking at the record. Your record is great. What do you think they need to work on? Is it minor league?
Is it?
No? No, we have a minor league that's stocked with talent, and you can only I mean, if you develop three shortstops in the minor leagues, you can only play one of them.
Yep.
So many times the talent that you have in the minor leagues is used to trade to get to get the pieces that you need at the big league level. And the Ools are in good position for that. They have young players that are going to be superstars, that are already superstars, and maybe the biggest challenge in the future is how do you keep them?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean no salary cap here, so tough to keep the star players.
Right, Yes, Unlike football or basketball, there's no salary cap in professional baseball, so you can get contracts that are as high as seven hundred million dollars, and so it's hard for smaller cities to compete in that domain. Somewhat.
All right, Well, have to see how that plays. I really appreciate you too, gentlemen. Stopping by David Rubenstein. He's a co founder and co chairman of the Carlisle Group. He's now the owner of the Baltimore Oils and Cal Ripken Junior D Cal Ripken Junior Baseball Hall of Famer, founder and partner of Ripken Baseball