I'm willing to take what the team is saying at face value, I'm just not willing to be okay with ownership's unwilliingness to absorb the losses and dip into their personal wealth to get through it.
Because A) they will be okay in the end, both after this pandemic/economic crisis ends and in the long run and B) Because the team they built needs $ to be competitive now.
Middleton says he spent $100 million of his own money, well, if he wants a watchable baseball team for the next two years, he might have to do it again. Especially since he bears a fair amount of the responsibility for the current payroll, even if his baseball people also failed to construct a better and more financially efficient club.
And CBP is another reason - while it was less odious than a lot of stadium deals, it still involved public funds, and that huge rent break (while freeing the team from the downside of owning the property), and I imagine there are still many tax breaks too. Owners want to run these teams like a normal business, but it's more of a private/public partnership, and a public trust too.
(Of course, non-sports businesses - including Comcast - get a lot of those breaks too, and ironically people don't even get as mad about that.)
And of course the lost money from not having 102 Comcast games is still a lot less than the player salaries they didn't have to pay.
