There used to be a time (OK, the 20th century) when the champions of commerce also owned the local sports champs. Chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. and his family ruled the Chicago Cubs for decades. In St. Louis, August Anheuser “Gussie” Busch Jr., who built the Anheuser-Busch Companies into the largest brewery in the world by 1957, oversaw the baseball Cardinals.

But those days have gone the way of the hit and run in baseball – distant memories in a landscape of sports franchises owned by families, corporations or billionaires who left the corporate world for the wide world of sports.