Baseball prepares to feel the pinch

Leave it to the Major League Baseball (MLB) owners to turn "contraction" - a term commonly associated with the birth process - into a negotiating tool.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig's official position is that he won't take an official position until the completion of the World Series, but for the past several weeks selective leaks detailing a draconian plan to upgrade the big league product by eliminating two weaker franchises have been popping up here and there in the newspapers of two countries.

The schemes under discussion have revealed enough detail that the information could only have come from the highest offices of the sport's inner sanctums, and the timing of the revelations makes it clear that the leaks were anything but accidental.

Over the past decade baseball salaries have escalated to the point that they can barely keep pace with multi-billion dollar television contracts. Teams payrolls range from $25 million to upwards of $100 million. Unlike, say, the National Football League, where television revenues are shared, the syndrome has had a deleterious effect in some smaller market cities, where teams cannot hope to be simultaneously profitable and successful on the field.

For the past month word has circulated that, after this World Series, the owners may take steps to curb this financial trend with the wholesale elimination of two franchises. The teams most often targeted for euthanasia are the Montreal Expos and the Florida Marlins, although one proposed variation has the Marlins being moved to Tampa Bay and the present Devil Rays being disbanded.

The alternative that would immediately occur to European sports fans - relegation - would not, in the minds of the owners, be a workable solution. They argue that, if Canadian fans stay away in droves from Stade Olympique when the Expos are facing the world's best teams, would they be any more likely to show up to watch them play against an inferior brand of competition?

Every behind-the-scenes discussion of "contraction" has come in terms so grave that many have been misled into believing that it represents an actual threat, instead of what it is: a plainly transparent negotiating tool.

MLB's collective bargaining agreement with the Players Association is due to expire over the off-season, and the threat of eliminating 50 jobs could be an extremely useful tool as Selig tries to head off what looms as the sport's ninth work stoppage since 1972.

But if Selig and the owners are merely posturing with all the scare talk about "contraction", they have nothing on the congressional delegation from Virginia, who have stepped into the fray with muddy feet. Instead of eliminating another franchise, the lawmakers have all but demanded that one of the struggling teams be relocated in the metropolitan Washington area, on the Virginia side of the Potomac. Moreover, they have attempted to reinforce their demand by cloaking it in the misguided trappings of patriotism.

Joined by a trio of northern Virginia Congressmen, the state's two Republican Senators, George Allen (a son of the late Washington Redskins coach of the same name) and John Warner (who, as a former husband of Elizabeth Taylor, is a member of an even less-exclusive club), dispatched a "strongly worded" letter, on official government stationery, to Selig, suggesting that a baseball franchise be relocated to their constituency as a tribute to the victims of the September 11th acts of terrorism.

In what may be the first documented evidence that anthrax causes stupidity, the politicians suggested the creation of "a new national landmark ballpark" which would constitute "a lasting memorial to American freedom and the men and women of our armed forces who gave their lives in its defence on September 11th".

The proposal suggested that the "new national landmark ballpark" be erected in the shadow of the Pentagon, and beyond the bald-faced opportunism implicit in the proposal, it is, if anything, disrespectful to the families of the victims.

It also tends to ignore the realities of history.

Washington fans were so unenthusiastic in support of their baseball team that 40 years ago the Senators packed up for Minneapolis and became the Minnesota Twins. A few years later (largely as the result of political interference) Washington was awarded an expansion franchise, also called the Senators, who drew so poorly that in 1971 they moved to Dallas and became the Texas Rangers.

In other words, if ever a city cried out to be "contracted", it was Washington.

Moreover, it isn't as if Foggy Bottom fans have been baseball-starved: if they want to watch a team, the Baltimore Orioles play less than an hour's drive away, and any clamour for the return of the national pastime to the national capital has come not from disenfranchised fans but from politicians and Washington sportswriters whose motives are equally suspect and self-serving.

New York politicians may have been similarly guilty of attempting to exploit the events of September 11th when they lobbied for the Super Bowl to be relocated to the metropolitan area, but at least there was a certain muddled logic to that proposal. This one is so silly it would be laughable, if only it didn't prey so cravenly on the aftermath of a tragedy. To their credit, not even the most venal New York official ever suggested building a new stadium for the Yankees on the site of the World Trade Center.