EDITOR’S VIEWPOINT/Mayors play hardball with Bud Selig
In an effort to have his team be the only one in the Major Leagues that starts with an ÒM,Ó Baseball Commissioner (and Milwaukee Brewers owner) Bud Selig is expected to make the Montreal Expos and Minnesota Twins go away. Ordinarily, this would be interesting only to me and the countryÕs solid Ñ but dwindling Ñ core of baseball fans. But the U.S. Conference of Mayors has gotten involved, with the happy result that I now have a legitimate reason to write about baseball in the context of my real job.
Under the signatures of New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, the groupÕs president, and Minneapolis Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, vice chair of its sports committee, USCM has written to Selig asking him to reconsider. The group is pitching (get it?) the idea that it should be involved in decisions of such unmitigated importance. The catastrophic ramifications of taking away a cityÕs baseball team, it notes, include economic hardship and ÒdisserviceÓ to fans in the affected communities.
Selig, who is worried that baseball has overextended itself by dropping teams all over the map like so many peanut shells under the bleachers, is likely to balk (get it?) at the request. See, Major League Baseball operates on a revenue-sharing basis. So-called Òsmall-marketÓ teams like Montreal and Minnesota donÕt help it a lot in that department.
Montreal and Minnesota are dispensable; the former because it canÕt draw flies in a country where people think, if it doesnÕt involve ice skates and dental insurance, itÕs not a sport; and the latter because residents of the Twin Cities keep turning down TwinsÕ Owner and gazillionaire Carl PohladÕs demands that they build him a new stadium.
In their letter, Morial and Sayles Belton point out that USCM worked with the National Football League to develop a set of principles governing the relocation of any pro football teams (presumably that happened after Indianapolis stole the Colts from Baltimore, which responded by stealing the Browns from Cleveland). They want Selig to meet with them to discuss similar principles for baseball. On the back end of their double play (get … oh, never mind), they also want baseball to adopt a stadium financing program similar to that in the NFL, under which owners borrow money from the league to build new stadiums. Currently, stadium financing mostly involves extortion of cities desperate to keep their teams.
But hereÕs the 98-mile-an-hour fastball. USCM states that, in the absence of an agreement by SeligÕs office, it will Òlook at other options, including federal legislation.Ó As the National Pastime, baseball has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with the federal courts. Efforts to unsettle that relationship have, thus far, been unsuccessful. But if USCM takes up the cause, it could be a whole Õnother ballgame.