Well, in business, you're not usually facing 29 other competitors in every product you sell. Here we have 29 competitors. Secondly, people pay much more attention to how the team does every day than how a business does every day, as a general rule. And so therefore, you're going to be subject to more questions, criticisms, commentaries, and objections to what you're doing. Also, there's less you can really do to change the day-to-day or week-to-week output of a team than probably in a business. If a business isn't doing well, you can quickly bring in somebody else or you can change a strategy, you can do other things. It's much harder to change a baseball team mid-season. It's hard to trade sometimes and also people get injuries and you can't just get rid of the team overnight because they're not doing very well. So, it's much more difficult, much more challenging and produces much more gray hair, as you can see.
In the business world, and obviously professional sports is a business, people are measured by their earnings and ultimately what the profitability is when you sell a company, if you sell it, or how profitable it is if you hold on to the company. And you often measure by increasing every quarter the earnings and profitability you had from the previous quarter. In the sports world, you don't have that. You don't really measure yourself quarterly and so forth. So the people that do well are people that care deeply about the local community that they have. They're representing that community. They are not as focused on the quarterly earnings or even the profitability overall on a shorter-term basis as you would be in the business world. And that's a big difference. Generally in the sports world, you make the bulk of your profits, if you're going to make them, when you sell the team. You don't make the bulk of your profits on quarterly earnings distributions. Very few teams in baseball, maybe one or two, really make operating profits. Virtually every team in baseball does not make an operating profit. Yet people still want to buy these teams and people still like owning the teams and don't want to sell them all that regularly. So it's enjoyable. It's a little complicated. It's much different than everything else I've done at Carlyle.
You need to have a long-term mindset because very rarely do you buy a team and all of a sudden the next year you win a championship. Maybe that's happened occasionally, but generally it takes a long time to build the team on the field and off the field and to develop the attributes you need to win a championship. And so I'm now in my third year. I haven't done as well as I would like. The team that I bought, the year before I bought them, they were in first place in the American League East Division. I've managed to get them down to last place in the American League East Division. So going from first to last is not generally a prescription for success. This year we're still in the hunt for a playoff, but it'll be complicated to get there, but we're still trying to get there. It's frustrating, but the truth is people that buy sports teams, even though there are frustrations involved, they don't tend to sell that quickly. Clearly, the LA Lakers were just sold about a year after they were bought. As a general rule, people own these things for 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, or longer. The Yankees were bought by George Steinbrenner in 1972, and the family still controls it somewhat, 50 years later.
Private equity is interested in making money. I mean, private equity has other virtues perhaps, but making money for its investors is its principal claim to fame or principal interest. Over recent years, the prices of sports teams have gone up so much for reasons like I described that they'll go up so much more in the future that it is seen as an area of profitability. It used to be seen that sports team ownership was a vanity play by whoever bought it. It is now seen as an income-producing, profitability kind of venture. And that's why you see organizations like Arctos raising money to have partnerships that will buy minority stakes in teams. Increasingly you see private equity professionals buying these teams for their firm in some cases or for themselves. And it's because it's basically changed dramatically. And let me explain what I mean. When I was a boy in Baltimore in, let's say, 1957, there were no baseball teams west of Missouri. The westernmost team was St. Louis. Now, you have three times as many baseball teams and you have probably four times as many total football, basketball, hockey, and baseball teams as you had in the 1950s. So, there's more opportunities to buy things. Also the television revenues are so high, television and streaming, that it is expected that the increase in revenues and increase in earnings will be such that you can justify buying these things at relatively high prices. The Seattle Seahawks were sold for $9.6 billion. The LA Lakers were sold for $12.5 billion. The Boston Celtics sold for $6.1 billion. Jeff Bezos and some others just bought, I think, a 40% stake in Liverpool, valuing the team at, I think, around $7 billion. So these things are worth a lot more than they used to be and that attracts private equity. When you have private equity people like me who bought these things with personal money, it's not quite the same. But when you get private equity firms buying stakes in teams and the NFL allows private equity to buy up to 10% minority stakes, they are obviously interested in a profit within, I'd say, five, six, seven years or so. So yes, I'm sure you will see exits in five, six, seven years from the private equity firms that have invested in these assets. The owners who are private equity professionals buying the teams themselves, they're probably going to hold on much longer.
Well, some teams have more injuries than others, and we've had a lot of injuries. Not the most, but close to the most. Clearly, there are some health prevention kind of things you could do. Maybe players could train better, or maybe players could not take risks off the field, or maybe players shouldn't do things that seem dangerous on the field, sliding headfirst in the first place, or running into a wall to catch a ball. They're things that maybe you can avoid doing, but on the whole there's no doubt that injuries are more significant than they used to be. We have a person still associated with our team as an investor named Cal Ripken. He played 2,632 games consecutively. Didn't miss a game for 17 years. Now, he played through some injuries, but still today, if somebody said they were going to play 17 years in a row without missing a game, you'd probably send them to a psychiatrist. They would say it's not possible. In the pitching phenomenon, what's happened is this. Young boys when they're in Little League are being taught how to throw curves and sliders and other kinds of balls that require you to twist your arm. When these young boys get into college and minor league baseball and even in high school baseball, they're told, 'If you're really going to be successful, it's nice to have the curve, nice to have the slider, but you need to throw the ball fast.' And so there's a big emphasis on pitching above 90 miles an hour. And so when you have your arm a little bit strained from learning how to twist it as a young boy and then you take that same arm and say, 'Now I'm going to throw 90 miles an hour for six or seven innings,' it tends to produce what we know as Tommy John surgery. So when I was growing up, there was no Tommy John surgery. Maybe had there been some Tommy John surgery, pitchers like Sandy Koufax would have played longer. But today, everybody seems to have like a rite of initiation as a pitcher to get a Tommy John surgery of some type or another. Now, also, we have better medical records, MRI techniques, CAT scans than we did 25, 30 years ago. And we can detect problems much better than we used to be able to. And maybe that's a factor as well.
Well, we're trying. We haven't succeeded in that yet. Clearly, some teams have fewer injuries than others. We've had among the most injuries ever. Baseball teams carry 26 players on the roster, but in the course of the year because of injuries, we had 71 total different people on the roster at one point. The major league record was 72. Not a record we really wanted to break. So, yeah, we've had a lot of injuries and they have lots of statistics that show you how much you're being affected by those injuries. And I think last year we were second worst in baseball in what's called WAR, wins above replacement. In other words, without the injuries, we would have won a lot more games, as much as anybody else in baseball. But we had a lot of injuries.
We are using AI to help analyze the statistics that we gather and AI is increasingly going to be an important part of baseball and basketball and football and I assume hockey analytics. So yes, now as I suggested in the book, if everybody's using the same AI software and everybody's using the same techniques, it may not give somebody an advantage. But inevitably some people are better at AI or better at analytics than others. So there probably is still some advantage. For a while the teams that did quite well in analytics were actually winning championships. Then everybody else caught up.
I think the quality is really, really good. One, you can compensate these individuals pretty nicely these days compared to what it was many, many, many years ago. For example, the person who runs the business side of the Orioles is a woman who went to Dartmouth, a very good school. She played soccer there. She then went to Tuck School of Business, which is at Dartmouth. And so, she has an MBA as well. And you're often increasingly seeing that the people in charge of business sides of the baseball business and other sports businesses have MBAs from really good schools. You also are seeing that people that are really good in business are now being recruited away from private equity firms or other money management firms or other operating businesses to come into sports. So yeah, I think the quality of management is much better than it was before in terms of business skill set because it's much more sophisticated. You need much more business analytical skills than before. I don't know whether McKinsey really loses people to the sports world or not. You lose people to lots of industries very often. I mean, after they spend a time at McKinsey, an excellent firm, people who do leave often go to other businesses. I recruited one of the best ones into my firm many years ago, Lou Gerstner, who had been a McKinsey partner, and a young McKinsey associate I recruited years ago named Glenn Youngkin, who later became governor of Virginia. So you have an extraordinary amount of talent.
Right now, you can see most games, if not on free TV, subscribing to a regional sports network. So, you can sit at home and watch your game. Why do people come out? Well, because people tend to be more social animals and people like to take their children, their families out. It's a bonding experience. People like to eat food at stadiums. I've observed that when people say they're on diets, they kind of think that the caloric intake when you eat the food at a stadium doesn't count. So people are willing to eat all kinds of things that might not be all that low-cal at stadiums. People also like, as you probably know from the business world, new and free. Now when you have a game, you're having a new experience, a new game, and you typically attract people now by giving bobbleheads, Hawaiian t-shirts, all kinds of straw hats, these so-called giveaways. We sometimes will sell out the stadium if we have one of our Hawaiian t-shirt giveaways. We had a famous rapper who spent some time in Baltimore, Tupac, and we gave away a bobblehead of his and we had never seen any such demand for it. When they gave away a bobblehead of me, I don't think they could give away that many of them and people didn't want to. But when we had Tupac, everybody wanted a bobblehead. So that's another example of a fan experience. Also, you try to get as many fans to participate. We have somebody who's a fan sing the national anthem, honor a military veteran, do all kinds of things to get children on the field, let them have a little run around the field or something like that. Everything is designed to make people feel it's more of an experience than just sitting there and watching a team.
Well, there's no doubt there are different models. In some cases, the local stadium will be built by the state or a state authority or a local government entity. For example, Camden Yards was built by the Maryland Stadium Authority, as was the Ravens stadium. In some cases, people are wealthy enough to build the arenas that they want to have their teams in. They want some concessions of some type in the local community. Today people realize that if you have a good stadium and people come to it, you can really help a community if you have stores, theaters, other kinds of events that people can go to in the adjoining area. And if you have that, more and more people go to that area.
You obviously try to hire people who are talking to the players more regularly than I am about what's important to do to represent the city, represent the team, represent the community. Ball Four by Jim Bouton. This is a famous baseball book in which Jim Bouton, who was a teammate of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, wrote about what players do when they're traveling and it wasn't a pretty sight, talking about women and alcohol and other kinds of things. That by and large seems to have gone away, largely in the sense that players today, I'm told, when they go to their rooms, first of all, every player today in Major League Baseball has their own room and what they do in their room is they get on their video screens and play video games. To my amazement, that's what they do. And because in the old days you went out to dinner, now you don't go out to dinner, you have DoorDash bringing dinner, so people have the food delivered from their favorite restaurant, they're playing their video games or on their computers. And so they're not out carousing the way they apparently did 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. But generally a culture, as you know from McKinsey's work, the most important thing that keeps an organization vibrant and alive and going from one generation to another is a good culture. It's very hard to keep a culture that's really good, that's by a founder, to the next generation, the next generation, the next generation. But those organizations that can do so really have a vibrant organization that's going to survive. That's true in baseball as well and true in football and other major sports. If you've got a good culture and if it starts from the top and it permeates the organization, I think that's a good thing to do. But how can I create a good culture? Well, to some extent I want to be a role model myself. I don't want to be doing things that get myself in trouble. And I think that's helpful. And I also try to communicate with the players what the values are that I have and that I think the community has. Again, it's like raising children. You can give your children the right values, but sometimes something might go wrong and you can't quite explain it.
When the NFL and the AFL merged, they basically had a concept where they'd have one nationwide television contract and everybody in the league, big city or small city, would share ratably in that. And whatever number of teams they had then, each one got their pro rata share. Baseball went in a different direction. It had regional sports networks and each team developed their own kind of television contract and there were some national television contracts but they weren't the bulk of the games. Now Major League Baseball is moving in the direction of the NFL. We have one nationwide contract. Obviously it's got to be worked out. There's some details and it probably won't happen until 2028 or so. But I think that would be a good thing for baseball, which is to have a nationwide TV contract where everybody's sharing ratably in it and therefore the big cities don't have a benefit over the smaller cities.
It's an issue. It's arisen most recently, I think, in the NFL because the NFL, when they did their merger with the AFL, more or less to get Congress to agree to it, said that most of the games would be on free TV. Now I believe the statistics are maybe only 50% or 60% of the games are on free TV and that another 40% you have to subscribe to. That produces more fan concerns. And so in baseball, we want to have the best, fairest deal for everybody and that's something we have to work through. But it is a challenge because everything is about economics. And in the end, the economics are sometimes such that you might have to pay rather than just everything's for free.
I think they should put the next All-Star game in Baltimore. That would be good if they would do that. I'd be happy with that. Obviously, as you know, there is an ongoing negotiation between the players' association and Major League Baseball on a collective bargaining agreement. I'm not involved in that. No owner really is. The Major League Baseball commissioner is really leading that effort. We're hopeful that we'll be able to get a resolution that would enable baseball to go forward next year uninterrupted. We just don't know yet. I think everybody would say it's challenging. I'm trying to be very guarded because the commissioner would prefer that the owners not talk about this so much. So I would just say the commissioner is working on this. Hopefully, there'll be a resolution before the season starts that everybody will be happy with.
I bought the team with a partner, Mike Arougheti, who is 20 years younger than me. And so, when I am unable to do what I'm doing now, and I expect I'll be able to do this for a number of additional years, three or four maybe, Mike will inevitably be my successor. I didn't want to make it a family business because my children all have their own occupations. They all live in different parts of the country. It's just not something that was realistic. It's not a family enterprise.
Well, I did gain 10 pounds. I'm now in the process of trying to lose it. It's hard to resist the food they have in owner suites and so forth. But leaving that issue aside, it has reconnected me with friends from Baltimore. This weekend, I'm hosting about 10 of my friends who I grew up with 60 years ago, and I've seen people that I just hadn't seen in 60 years. One young woman contacted me, I wrote about in the book, who was in my sixth grade class. I haven't heard from her or seen her since that time and now I've met with her. A person who gave me the application form to apply to Duke University, where I went to college, that person met me at an Orioles game by happenstance and now I've stayed connected to him. It has connected me also with the community in Baltimore. I make a lot of speeches in Baltimore now and am getting more involved in philanthropic things in Baltimore. So, on the whole, it's been a good experience for me. I enjoyed it. I wish I had done it when I was younger, but when I was younger, I was afraid that my investors would say, 'You're supposed to worry about our investments and not worry about sports teams. You're not focused on our investments.' Until I gave up being the co-CEO of Carlyle, I didn't really feel I could do this.
Well, there's no doubt the country is bitterly divided, but clearly the idea of bipartisanship is not a very common thing in Washington anymore. It used to be good legislators were seen as good legislators because they could do bipartisan legislation. If you're seen as too bipartisan today, I'm not sure you're going to advance in your own party. However, as divided as some communities are, when a sporting team wins, it does bring people together. So you saw when the New York Knicks won their first championship in, what, 50 years, it reunited the city in really a terrific way. And it didn't solve all the social problems of New York and it didn't eliminate divisiveness, but it does show that sports can play a role in bringing people together and hopefully for more than just a couple of championship celebrations.
Someone asked me to invest in a deal, which I didn't do. I thought it was expensive, but it was to buy a major cricket league team in India, which got sold for a billion plus or so, and it seems like cricket is among the more popular sports in the world. My son once said to me that he thought a good opportunity was to invest in cricket and there was going to be a cricket league in the United States, but I didn't really believe it. But I was wrong, as I often am.
