Worst Owner in Sports History?

For me, it's Oren Koules.

One of the more trivial reasons:

 

McClatchy was nothing more than the face of that clown show, with the Nuttings owning the controlling interest since about 2002.

My nominees go to the Nuttings, Howard Baldwin, Tose, Stepien (motherfucker has a rule named after him) and Georgia Frontiere.

 

Bill Wirtz. Five years ago Blackhawks home games weren't even on TV.

 

Jacobs' teams have won 14 division titles, been to the Cup Finals five times, and won a Cup under his watch. Putting him in the same list as Donald Sterling is laughable.

 

Jacobs should be nowhere near this list.

The shortlist should be Ballard, Wirtz, Sterling, Ford.

 

Treating your players so shabbily that they threw a World Series shoud put Charles Comiskey at the top of the list.

The city of Chicago has probably had more shitty owners than any pro sports town in North America.

 

Bob Irsay. He screwed Baltimore (although being an Indy native, I'm rather pleased our city got an NFL team, but it shouldn't have been one of the league's centerpiece franchises ... and Baltimore then righted that wrong by stealing Cleveland's team, which should put Modell on this list, too). Once they got here, the team was a disaster until he passed away and his son hired people who knew what they were doing to run the team.

In the longevity division, Donald Sterling. The Clips have been run like a minor-league team since the beginning of time.

 

Canadian football division: The Gliebermans. Screwed over Ottawa at least once, maybe twice, and are at least partially responsible for the crashing of the American experiment with their incompetence in running the Sherveport team.

Horn Chen isn't thought of well in Canadian football and minor-league hockey.

 

Bob Irsay. In a SI piece several years ago, his mother called him "The Devil on Earth."

 

Despite Eliot Asinof's best efforts, that wasn't the reason at all.

Comiskey deserves plenty of blame for his efforts to cover up the scandal and, like most owners, turning a willful blind eye to gambling in the previous decade. But he really played no part in why the players decided to fix the Series.

 

Jack Kent Cooke and Charlie Finley deserve to be on the list. Bob Irsay, Marge Schott and Donald Sterling are/were horrible people in addition to being horrible team owners.

 

People will defend Finley because the A's won three championships and he was a shrewd evaluator of talent at times.

But the truth is that once the rules weren't stacked in his favor, i.e. the end of the reserve clause, he was exposed as the threadbare faux-robber baron he was.

Remember, this is a team, while in its heyday, that had an organization comprises of under 10 people and that had a broadcasting deal with a college radio station. The A's have had some good times and bad times by the Bay, but Finley set the tone for that franchise being a collective afterthought. (The only time it wasn't was when it was owned by the Haas family).

Finley is also partly responsible or accelerated the demise of the Memphis Tams of the ABA and the Oakland/California Seals in the NHL. He's high on my list.