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On Thursday in bankruptcy court, Nolan Ryan and Pittsburgh lawyer Chuck Greenberg outbid Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and Houston shipping and energy magnate James Crane.  For their trouble, Ryan and Greenberg get the Texas Rangers for a little more than $608 million.  Mark Cuban was uncharacteristically gracious in defeat, starting a blog post with “First of all, nothing but the best for Chuck and Nolan.”

Ryan and Greenberg had thought they’d bought the Rangers last summer for just $525 million, but the team owes money to an awful lot of people — including Alex Rodriguez and Mickey Tettleton — and the creditors weren’t cool with last summer’s deal, which eventually led to the Rangers declaring bankruptcy.  Cuban’s squad had originally outbid Ryan’s by $25 million in the opening round of bidding, but didn’t want to go higher than $581.2 million.

Why did Cuban want the Rangers in the first place?  According to his blog, Cuban had visions of a Texas YES Network starring the Texas Rangers as the Yankees and his Mavericks as the Nets:

the Rangers TV deal ran out in 4 years.  Combine that with the Mavs TV deal running out just a few years later and it could either form a foundation for a new sports network, or preferably cause Fox to pay an ungodly amount of money to keep the teams on FSN.  Fox had more to lose from a competitive sports network being formed, particularly in Texas,  than a new network had to gain from being created. So the leverage of owning both teams was enormous.

Cuban also claims he was not worried about MLB rejecting him as an owner if he had won the auction:

It seems to be a fun media sport to talk about how there is no way i will ever get approved  buy MLB to buy a team.  At the hearing yesterday it was mentioned that our group only had a 50/50 chance of ever being approved.  I tend to never look at the glass as being half empty or half full. I look to see who is pouring the water and to deal with them. Not the media.  I am pretty confident we would have been approved.

The last time an MLB team was auctioned off, Peter Angelos won the Orioles in 1993 for $173 million.  The Orioles lost in the ALCS in 1996 and 1997, then started a streak of consecutive losing seasons that will hit hit 13 this year.