Atlanta Braves parent company Liberty Media: can we hold a dollar?

The Atlanta Braves are owned by Liberty Media as most of us already know. Liberty Media is a HUGE corporation that owns the likes Sirius XM Radio, a portion of Barnes and Noble, and the Starz movie channel.

Liberty Media owns a ton more than that as well. The bottom line is at last check Liberty Media has around $40 BILLION in total assets. Heck, their sports interests go beyond the Atlanta Braves: they even own the whole Formula 1 Racing series and was recently asked if they would be interested in NASCAR if it was on the market. The answer was yes.

So as you can see, and probably already knew, this company is not hurting for money. So why therefore are the Braves not spending with the likes of the Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, Dodgers, or Nationals for that matter? Let’s try to look at some reasons and figure this out maybe.

First, the higher ups that the Braves front office have to answer too, are based out of Colorado. They don’t live and work anywhere near anything that the Braves operate. Therefore we don’t know the names and faces of the people that have final say on anything that goes for the team we all love.

It’s so much different than anyone who watches the Falcons and see’s Arthur Blank firmly involved on the sidelines celebrating….yeah, you wont see that with the Braves.

We all kept hearing leading up to this offseason the Braves were gonna have tons of money and money wouldn’t be a factor at all. This of course led to speculation about Bryce Harper and Manny Machado. Those aren’t happening and maybe that’s a good thing? And before we go any further into this…lets not forget that the Braves have shelled out $25 million already this winter.

But now we are spending the money more safely. Maybe it’s just Alex Anthopoulos doing his best to honestly try and build a perennial winner and not throw money around like the Phillies have said they might. However, something in the back of my mind says this is fishy and Liberty Media is pulling back the reigns.

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Most teams raise payroll after opening a new stadium due to all the “new” money coming in. The Braves fans most likely thought this would be the case after Suntrust Park opened and especially when Liberty Media reported a $124 million revenue increase in 2017. That didn’t happen though. In fact, payroll went down. To be fair though, the Braves made moves to save money for this offseason.

Maybe all of this wouldn’t be a bad deal if we weren’t promised and told things that led us to believe we would see a massive uptick in spending. The whole point of the Battery and all the other fancy things to go along with it were promised as ways to expand payroll exponentially. But then, when it was all finished, we all of a sudden remembered we would have to pay back debt and all other things that go along with building huge expansions. Therefore again, the Braves were handicapped to not being able to spend much.

The following was a direct quote from Braves chairman Terry McGuirk made last winter.

McGuirk said the Braves have “cleared the deck for next year” in the payroll area.

So yeah, why are we now acting like money is hard to find in those Liberty Media vaults in the Rockies?

Look, again, maybe Alex Anthopoulos is being 100% honest and is just not going to spend a penny more than he thinks a player is worth. Maybe I’m just being a disgruntled fan/writer and tired of teams like the Twins, Royals, and Brewers spending more than us. The Atlanta Braves and their fans held up their end of the bargain and showed up down the stretch filling every seat of Suntrust Park in September and October. In my opinion, it would be nice if Liberty Media returned the favor and kept their word and didn’t use as a statistic and a resource to pad their bottom line.