Rough diamonds: beleaguered owners Charlie and Dick Monfort may try to sell you on their baseball business model, but they're not selling the Colorado Rockies.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: Colorado Rockies Baseball Club Ltd.

Charlie and Dick Monfort without a doubt are the most reviled, despised, maligned, smeared and slandered businessmen in the Rocky Mountain region this side of Joe Nacchio.

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That is because the Monfort brothers run the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club Ltd., not an ordinary business. And it is because losing, like the Rockies, might be even worse than cheating, a la the deposed Qwest CEO.

Fans and the press have screamed for majority owners Dick and Charlie Monfort to sell the team and fire just about everybody, most notably General Manager Dan O'Dowd. Some even argue ownership has abused what amounts to a public trust in taxpayer-funded Coors Field.

And the sporting press, notably The Denver Post, has been merciless. A May column by Post scribe Mark Kiszla was headlined, "Rockies Owners Must Go ... Monforts Should Do the Right Thing and Sell the Rockies," one of many along that line. And this is not to mention the vitriol uncorked by frustrated fans on talk radio and the Internet on sites such as MonfortsMustSell.com.

And yet, in a rare sit-down in late July at their spacious Coors Field offices, the brothers Monfort seem positively buoyant, eager to talk about their business--within limits, of course, because while baseball is a public business it also is a very private business.

Chairman and CEO Charles K. Monfort fetches a cup of coffee and sits relaxed in a chair in his orderly office, energetic and entrepreneurial. He vigorously defends the Rockies' trajectory, mainly on the basis of management's focus on fiscal sanity and player development. Dick Monfort, solid and straightforward, seems like the sober numbers guy, a commonsense businessman who, incidentally, carries not an iPhone or other premium brand, but a Sanyo cell phone that not long ago Qwest gave away with new accounts.

Such frugality may have been a lesson learned.

The Rockies' 2000 signings of pitchers Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle proved an ill-fated attempt at a Yankees-style business model. Now that the team is no longer struggling under the weight of those two bloated contracts, the same critics still second-guess every single move, most recently the off-season trade of starting pitcher Jason Jennings to the Houston Astros--after ownership had said they'd finally assembled a stable of starting pitchers who would give them a solid foundation for years to come--and the dearth of moves at this year's trading deadline.

But the Monforts remain resolute: They say they are staying the course and not selling anytime soon, although "ever is a strong word," Dick says.

Charlie Monfort calls the Neagle and Hampton signings a result of going into a "panic mode," pushing the front office toward an American League East-style paradigm, that is, Yankees- or Boston Red Sox-style spending.

"We were starting to lose fan base," he says. "The honeymoon with Coors Field and the Rockies was wearing off. We felt that it would help boost up the market, and people would come to Coors Field again."

While some critics argue ownership milked the fans' jubilation dry during this honeymoon, the Monforts say a dip in attendance was inevitable, and the fact that it happened was more a result of overspending on payroll than not spending enough.

"The bottom line is that the dwindling fan base is always going to happen at some point in time, because we had an unreal honeymoon fan base at the time," Charlie says. "So it was just doing its natural progression, which is what it is doing still, but now we spend within our means."

But critics of this recent tightfisted strategy are just as numerous as those who look in the rearview mirror, at the team's signing of Hampton and Neagle to contracts worth a combined $172 million in 2000 (not to mention first baseman Todd Helton's $151 million deal, inked the following year).

"We overspent what this market can handle; we overspent what the Rockies can handle," Charlie says. "And we had a negative cash flow and a serious possible bankruptcy problem if we didn't start rectifying it."

Most professional teams operate at a smallish profit. A few, however, bleed losses every year. That means ownership has to dig into its own pockets to make up the deficit. That was not a scenario the Monforts and their partners could live with.

"There are a lot of teams that (lose money, so their owners) subsidize their clubs every year--all this is rumor--to the tune of $10 million to $40 million," Dick says. "Charlie and I are not financially in the type of shape that we can subsidize $10 million to $40 million per year. We were not going to do that. So we had to make some changes."

The team's financial future might have looked dire, but the brothers point out that bankruptcy in Major League Baseball is not like bankruptcy in the real world. Baseball's owners "go out and find other investors or get their investors to buck up some," Charlie says. "You have an entity where there are only 29 others. We probably would have looked for a buyer."

Yet in order to hold on, Charlie adds, the team had to defer payments to many of its players--Larry Walker will still collect a paycheck in 30 years--and make a capital call for $12 million from its various owners in 2003.

"Dick was really the one who saw the writing on the wall sooner than anybody," Charlie says. "He said, 'You know what, we've got to get back to the basics and get to where we spend what we take in. The fans will tell us how much revenue we have through their support.' It is pretty simple, basic economics if you think of it, but in baseball it gets a little crazy sometimes."

Dick, at 53 the older of the brothers by six years, describes it more bluntly. "It's better not to have these damn things (deferred payments and long-term contracts), but those days are gone. We got...