Hall of Fame just another in long line of Cup mergers

With the announcement that Major League Baseball executives Jeff Moorad and Tom Garfinkel have purchased majority interest in Hall of Fame Racing, it has been confirmed: NASCAR is the place to be for American sporting interests.

The purchase, which makes original majority partners Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman a part of the minority ownership group, is the latest in a line of mergers and acquisitions that would make Wall Street faithful happy.

The transaction puts Hall of Fame Racing, which has Texas Instruments as a sponsor, with Roush Fenway, Gillett Evernham and Yates Newman Haas Lanigan Racing on the list of teams which will end the season with different names than when they started at Daytona way back in February.

Yeley to HOF

J.J. Yeley signed to drive the No. 96 car for Hall of Fame Racing, beginning next year.

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• HOF owners want team growth

This is not just a case of baseball execs seeing an opportunity to expand into NASCAR. Garfinkel, who is the chief operating officer for the Arizona Diamondbacks, was executive vice president of Chip Ganassi Racing. Moorad, the club's CEO, is best known for his player management (read agent) rule with athletes like Manny Ramirez and Aikman.

Rather, it's more along the lines of investment in a property that is able to deliver a pretty solid return on investment in the short term.

"One thing I know for sure is the growth continues," team owner Ganassi, who took over the existing Felix Sabates Racing team back in 2001, said recently of NASCAR. "We can talk about whether the growth is on-track, is it off-track, is the growth on the racing side or on the financial side ... the key there is we're talking about growth, period. That's a good thing in today's world.

"It's better than talking about decline. I am not going to be too disappointed that the growth is on the business side versus the racing side or vice versa. The good news is, being involved with all these different series does give me a perspective that I'm enjoying the fact that we're talking about growth anywhere."

It was Moorad's relationship with Aikman that tipped the baseball duo's hand into buying majority ownership in Hall of Fame Racing. Moorad and Garfinkel were reportedly looking at other motorsports properties -- just like every other professional sports team outside NASCAR, it seems.

"Certainly, people understand the value proposition in NASCAR," Ganassi said.

With the sale of majority ownership at Hall of Fame, that makes it four front-line teams who have new owners. It's starting to look like the old days of the AFL, when Lamar Hunt and Al Davis took on the NFL. These moves don't seem to be in direct competition with NASCAR, but the idea of a league is taking shape, whether it's intentional or not.

Are we headed toward the day where there are 10 four-car NASCAR teams?

"If we do I'm planning on being one of them," Ganassi said. "Where it's going, I am not the person to answer that. The person to answer that is Brian France or Mike Helton. I can't speak for them. I can only look at the cards I'm dealt every day and I have to play that hand the best I can."

That's what team owners in today's NASCAR are currently facing. The pay-to-play rationale of the other sports leagues has its advantages and its drawbacks, but NASCAR team owners have no league structure, other than that provided by NASCAR. In short, they are a collection of individual businesses, and businesses, if you've ever been part of one, need cash to capitalize.

NASCAR is a place where other businesses, whether involved in sports or not, can go to get involved without having to go through all the hurdles set up by the other professional sports leagues.

Steve Laulette, who was recently named president of Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates, spent 11 years with Miller Brewing Company, and he's seen all the things that impede businesses in those other sports, particularly in the area of sponsorships.

"If you are a company ready to invest in a sport and you want to be involved in the NFL, and you happen to be in Dallas, you'd go talk to the Cowboys," Lauletta said. "If you think you want to be involved in basketball because that fits your brand and your core market is Minnesota, you call the Timberwolves. If your brand fits NASCAR, there's 400 ways into the sport.

"One of those ways is a team, and our challenge is, what makes [that team] different than the other options out there? How do we differentiate ourselves, how do we tell our story beyond what happens on the track so that we can offer the value prop to sponsors both current and future that are going to keep this business growing."

The combination of sponsorship not being able to stretch as far as it once did and the ever increasing costs of personnel and technology are the agents which have spawned this current atmosphere of merger and acquisition.