Hand Bud Selig and the owners of Major League Baseball a loaded gun and they
will successfully shoot themselves every time. Some time on Tuesday morning,
someone handed Selig an Uzi and several rounds of ammunition. Unfortunately,
he survived…and held a press conference.
What we got was even more disgraceful than the worst scenarios any of us had
conceived. Baseball made the ultimate coward’s threat. As expected, they
announced that the owners had agreed to eliminate two teams for the 2002
season–a practical impossibility, but well in line with the previous
announcements of the Impotent King, Bud I. But Bud took it two steps
further.
- First, he announced that the pro-contraction camp had the votes to
eliminate two more teams, but wouldn’t do so because someone reached in his
pocket to count his money and found one last remnant of civic virtue. - Second, he refused to name the two teams to be contracted.
If there was any remaining doubt in the minds of fans, the Players
Association, or sports journalists as the true motives of the owners, this
erased it. It was the act of a coward. And it was a threat.
The primary threat is to the cities and states that have, to date, refused
to cave to previous threats to relocate teams the way most government bodies
did: by using tax revenues to build a new stadium for the use of the local
privately-owned baseball team. Montreal said no. Florida said no, because
the Marlins play in a stadium that’s just 12 years old. Minneapolis and
Minnesota said no, because the Twins received a publicly subsidized stadium
in 1983.
Minnesota’s governor, Jesse Ventura, has probably shined on this issue more
than on any other, repeatedly thumbing his nose at the Impotent King and
defending the right of taxpayers in Duluth and St. Cloud and Mankato to have
their money used for more productive purposes than further lining the
pockets of billionaire Carl Pohlad.
MLB has made the threat clear by implying that if Quebec, Minnesota, or
Florida coughs up the cash and builds a new stadium for its team, that team
will not be eliminated. When the mob does this, it’s called a shakedown–or
racketeering–and it’s a federal crime. When MLB does it, the media
applauds.
There’s another threat here, one aimed specifically at the players. The
owners have said to the players that they will eliminate 50 jobs, including
at least 24 starting jobs and two closer spots, if the union doesn’t come up
with some other concessions to the owners. The Impotent King needs to behead
his royal advisers: the owners have tried this gambit during previous labor
wars, and they lost every time.
The owners have made an enormous mistake. Scratch that: they have made
another enormous mistake, just one more to add to the list. They have
alienated the fans just two days after a widely acclaimed World Series. They
have ceded important ground to the MLBPA, allowing Don Fehr to marry the
union’s position with the interests of the fans. And they have set
themselves up for failure, since there’s no way they’ll get the union’s
assent and avoid the legal obstacles already coming from Minnesota and other
jurisdictions in time to eliminate two teams by the start of the 2002
season.
Time to round up some more bullets so the owners can finish themselves off.
Keith Law is an author of Baseball Prospectus. You can contact him by
clicking here.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now