One of the oldest sayings in baseball is, "We was robbed." Well, we is being robbed right now. And it's a dirty shame, because no one has the guts to do anything about it. Quick, someone cover the kids' eyes. There are things a kid shouldn't see, things a kid is too young to understand: Like adults standing idly by while ruthless profiteers cut the heart out of the Twin Cities.
The faceless heads of Major League Baseball plan to gather in a back alley in Chicago today and, like mob bosses always have done, decide whose truck to hijack. In case you haven't figured it out, it's our big rig that is going to disappear.
The mob has taken out a contraction on us.
That's what they are calling this obscenity: a "contraction." There are too many teams and so baseball has to shrink. I guess they want baseball to shrivel like the heart of a billionaire who, at a time in life when most people square up their accounts so they can meet their maker, just wants God to wait until he can pick up another quarter billion.
I'm so mad I can't even bear to say his name. But if this deal goes down and he kills off the Minnesota Twins, his name will live on for years as a Minnesota Bogeyman, a name to scare little children with when they misbehave: Stop hitting your sister, Jason, or else [team owner] Carl [Pohlad] may come and contract you in your sleep.
He's already contracting our memories: forty years Minnesota history, vaporized.
The Expos and the Twins are being put out of business in order to give clout to a baseball management that has been winless against the Major League Baseball Players Association in a quarter-century of negotiations.
All previous negotiations have been conducted with baseball having a Commissioner's Office, a National League office and an American League office.
The most disastrous of management's defeats took place in 1994-95, when the players went on strike. Donald Fehr's union would not crack, even as the 1994 World Series was wiped out.
Since then, Bud Selig has gone from interim to full-time commissioner, and he has centralized the game's decision making. The American and National League offices are gone. The game is run from the Office of the Commissioner. . . .
"We are now a 28-team business, not 30 teams. There are 50 major league jobs gone. If you want us to expand the in-season rosters for the remaining teams to cover those 50 jobs, what are you going to give us?"
Obviously, the Expos are on life support. This is a team that averaged less than 8,000 fans per game this season, with virtually no broadcast revenue and no prospects of a new ballpark that might revitalize the game in Montreal.
But the feeling you get, looking at the array of problems confronting baseball as the owners get together, is that the game itself is sick, despite the glitter of that World Series.
The question is whether these owners (and the players and agents who have nearly as much power as they do) have the will to heal the game -- or whether, two or three or five years from now, the owners will meet in another city to discuss further contraction.
Basics