The List — Owners To Save Stock Market

In venturing out of my sports-centric world, I found out the stock market is apparently imploding, or something like that. The Dow fell by about 500 points in a single session on Monday and financial companies are crumbling faster than a cookie in Charles Barkley’s hand.

We need somebody to save the market so that I’m even less poor when I graduate. We need somebody who will dig us out of the fiscal doldrums by employing a tight spending plan that will emphasize saving money and limiting excess waste.

We need, for the first time ever, a disgracefully cheap sports franchise owner.

Here are the five sports franchise owners that can save the market (and our money) by keeping up their trend of not spending a dime:

1. Stuart Sternberg, Tampa Bay Rays — Rare is the owner who is a penny pincher that wins. You’ve never heard of Sternberg before, but he has a team in Major League Baseball’s pennant race that has a lower payroll than Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s. I’d be worried, though, that he’d shorten the Dow Jones Industrial Average to just Dow Industrial Average if given the power.

2. Bill Bidwell, Arizona Cardinals — The frugal Bidwell has owned at least a part of the Cardinals since 1962, which is the year that Marilyn Monroe died, John Glenn became the first person to orbit the Earth and a stamp cost four cents. Since then, John Glenn has probably been in space more times than the Cardinals have been to the playoffs (four). He did, however, give Rod Tidwell a four year, $11 million contract, so maybe he’s not the tightest money wad.

3, Gary Bettman, essentially owner of NHL — At least you know Bettman, the commissioner of the National Hockey League, won’t give up on our economy and balancing the bottom line. We might have to all go on strike for a year or so, but it’ll be worth it in the end if it’s anything like the NHL. Or not.

4. Jeffrey Loria, Florida Marlins — Loria is running a team on half the budget half the size of Sternberg’s Rays. And his team STILL has a better record than the Detroit Tigers (maybe that’s skewed because the NL couldn’t hold the AL’s arm band, let alone its jockstrap). Loria used to own the Montreal Expos, so he’s up to speed on foreign exchange markets as well.

5. Donald Sterling, Los Angeles Clippers — Sterling, the long-time Clippers owner who probably tips wait staff five percent, would be higher on this list if he hadn’t drafted Darius Miles, Melvin Ely, Michael Olowokandi, Maurice Taylor, Bo Kimble and Benoit Benjamin, all with top-14 picks. How Chris Kaman is surviving out there is a mystery to me.