Chuck Greenberg & Nolan Ryan Defeat Cuban/Crane, Own Texas Rangers (?)

What a night for Texas Rangers fans!!!!!!!

Because it is my way, but there might not be the downside for Stars fans that I thought there would be.

We’re going to talk about it tomorrow, and probably do a podcast to boot.

Pending final approval, of course. There’s still a confirmation hearing in the morning..

But I doubt there’s an appeal. The sale price is just way too high.

Until 2017 for good measure.

Maybe this means that Cuban will be more strongly into bidding on the Stars so he can basically control all the revenue from the AAC and will have more money to do so since he is no longer into acquiring the Rangers.

I guess we’ll see.

Let’s hope the Stars sale goes much smoother.

This is kind of a nice, feel-good story with Nolan Ryan owning the Rangers and all. Nothing against Mark Cuban, who I’m sure is a swell chap, but I’m happy with this result.

Really wound up paying off for them. Not only did they reduce the value of Cuban’s bids by over $40 million, he was forced to bid in $10 million increments, while they did $2. That probably helped more than anything to make Cuban think it wasn’t worth it to invest in a baseball team.

Ultimately, I think it came down to passion about the sport, rather than the amount of cash that Cuban had… I think he backed down knowing that G&R simply wanted it more.

As far as this affects the Stars, I don’t think there’s anything negative about this at all. Cuban won’t be putting the rangers and mavs on their own network, so hopefully FS won’t feel obligated to try and buy the Stars. That removes the faceless corporation problem we’ve been worrying about. For the creditors, the highest bid won, and the value of the team went up $80 million (which now all goes to Hicks, of course). Having seen everything that’s gone on in this process, I bet that the Stars sale will go much smoother than this did, with the highest bid winning immediately.

Plus, word is that Liverpool is close to being sold to a group of Canadians as well (Looks like Hicks will pocket an additional $300 million from that sale). Hicks could theoretically be out of the sporting world by the end of september, depending on the Stars sale. But now that the Rangers mess will be over in a few more days, you can bet that the creditors will start turning their eyes to the Stars to try and get this thing done!

It sounds like they really were discounts, and not some financial googly moogly that we thought. Read This.

So apparently what happened was they got rid of Cuban’s discounts at some point, and that was the turning point for G&R

Supposedly means that Hicks is not involved with this at all any more. Not even that 1% deal that would have kept him barely linked to the team.

As long as it means we can move on with the Stars in a couple of weeks, I’m happy.