While jumping around baseball cyberspace, this juicy article from 1996 was brought to my attention by Doug Pappas, who in turn credits a Primate for the link.
This is the story of how a lowly member of a 22-person ownership group rose to control the Milwaukee Brewers, before moving on to play Commissioner.
Here's one interesting paragraph (remember this was written in 1996):
"Yet even with these tremendous earnings, the team has so much debt to retire that it won't be able to pay truly competitive salaries to ballplayers. The latest pennant winners, the Yankees and Braves, have, respectively, a $67 million and $54 million player payroll. By the year 2004, even if salaries grow much slower than they have and even if some form of revenue sharing is finally agreed upon, the Yankees could easily be paying as much as $80 million to ballplayers. The Brewers' projections show that they plan to pay just $39.8 million to ballplayers in 2000 and will gradually increase that to $47.7 million by 2004.
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20040316045826999