MLB's Leaked Finances Creating a Stir

Last week, someone leaked private financial documents for MLB teams and the numbers therein proved that the owners for the Florida Marlins and the Pittsburgh Pirates have been lying about "losing money" while they got taxpayers to foot the bill for publicly-funded stadiums.

The info was so juicy and damning, particularly about Marlins owner Jeff Loria and his alleged dishonesty, that Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports penned a scathing column about it.

Meanwhile, MLB is investigating who leaked the information. Whoever leaked it, the report probably means that the upcoming labor battle between owners and players could turn really ugly for the first time since the '94 season, when Bud Selig made the most dubious kind of history by canceling the World Series.

The A's were not one of the teams whose finances were leaked. Those documents would be of interest to local sportswriters, such as Lowell Cohn, who has questioned why the A's keep crying poor when they're one of the richest ownerships in MLB.

We'll revisit this topic more and more in the coming weeks. Until then, check out Neil de Mause's analysis over at FieldofSchemes.com. Or read national sportswriter Dave Zirin, who offered his incendiary take on the MLB owners in question. This story fits right into Zirin's critical look at the greedy state of sports ownership today in his recently published book titled, Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love.

This is a story that will only get juicier in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.