The Nutting Family, owners of Baseball's Pittsburgh Pirates, had recently purchased a western Pennsylvannia ski resort hoping to win one of two casino resort licenses available in the state. They had already designed and unveiled plans for a multi-million dollar casino at their existing Seven Springs Mountain Resort which had been expected to bring 300 new jobs to the area.
The undisclosed loopholes in MLB's gaming prohibitions that allow the Ilitch Family (Mike and Marian Ilitch) to own the Detroit Tigers and Detroit's MotorCity Casino, plus have additional financial interests in gaming ventures proved impossible for the Nuttings.
According to Robert Nutting, President and CEO of his family-owned Ogden Newspapers, Inc., the scheme worked out between the Ilitch Family and MLB in Detroit could not satisfy Pennsylvannia state gaming regulators.
12.05.06
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette". . . They also had a rough blueprint of how to go about owning a casino and a baseball team at the same time. In Detroit, the Ilitch family, headed by Mike and Marian Ilitch, purchased the Tigers baseball franchise in 1992. The patriarch keeps his name on the baseball team, while the matriarch now runs the Motor City Casino. But that wasn't doable in this case, said Mr. Nutting, because of the unique provisions of the state's 2004 gaming law.
"The main sticking point was that the law prohibits the casino and the umbrella resort from having different owners, which rules out any kind of arrangement by which the Nuttings could parcel out the casino to a different, but related, ownership outfit.
"I think the reason that was not doable is that the [resort license rules] are so unusual and so specific; they simply didn't have a lot of flexibility or latitude," Mr. Nutting said. Pursuing a divestiture similar to the one that was drawn up by the Ilitch family, and approved by Major League Baseball, would have required a full overhaul of the Pirates' ownership structure.
"The only other option would have been to keep the casino and sell its stake in the ball team, but that's something the Nutting family had no interest in doing . . ."
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