Carl Pohlad, owner of the Minnesota Twins, passed away Monday. I expected to find a sort of celebratory eulogy on ESPN.com yesterday; instead I found a Jim Caple piece that is critical of Mr. Pohlad. Fair enough. A person’s merits aren’t altered by his or her passing. But if I were to decide to be critical of someone who has recently passed on, I would make damn certain that my criticisms were justified.

In this piece, Caple takes the late Mr. Pohlad to task over his sometimes-miserly handling of the Twins. He laments that Pohlad, a billionaire, failed to retain Johan Santana and secure a retractable roof for the Twins’ new stadium, among other supposed misgivings. This graf, placed within a context of negative connotation, displays the locus of Caple’s misunderstanding:

He was ever the banker and ran the team as one.

Indeed, Pohlad had the gall to run his business like a business. Mr. Caple isn’t the only one to subscribe to the fallacy he’s implying.

Major League Baseball is a business. It exists for the purposes of making money. It profits from the emotion and sentiment of its consumers. This isn’t disingenuous, it’s something that every consumer of its product should understand and be content with. Pohlad was philanthropic, just as most billionaires are. He gave away plenty of money to charity, but he earned that money in the first place because, yep, he treated his businesses like businesses.

Mr. Caple is misguided to request that an owner imbue his philanthropy into his business. Yes, Pohlad’s business was baseball, that slice of capitalist America that, somehow, many regard as sacrosanct from concepts such as “money” or “profit” despite its transparently capitalist nature. If Caple feels betrayed, whether personally or vicariously, he should simply take his business elsewhere. Maybe to another baseball team, or maybe to a different indulgence altogether. That’s on him, not the businessman.

Finally, I’d be remiss not to address Caple’s closing remark.

You can’t take it with you, but that didn’t stop Pohlad from trying.

“Signing off, this is Jim Caple, reporting live from a dead man’s system of values.”