As a devoted baseball fan, I’ve been getting through the winter on rations of Bill James’s newly updated Historical Baseball Abstract, a gift I received at Christmas. But in all of that book’s accounts of the sometimes malicious, more often weak-willed and sycophantic boobery of the commissioner’s office, I have yet to see anything as stupid, as misguided, and as damaging to the sport as Bud Selig’s idea of “contraction,” of eliminating at least two and perhaps as many as four major-league baseball teams. The only thing that compares is Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s defense of the color line, the ban on black players that lasted until after he was dead. Yet even that is explicable, given Landis’s background and the temper and the prejudice of the times. By contrast, contraction makes no sense whatsoever; it is sheer idiocy.
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Why would major-league baseball liquidate franchises worth hundreds of millions of dollars, ponying up $270 million for each one? What possible economic sense can that make? Would any home owner pay twice the market value to raze the house next door, on the theory that this would make his or her home more valuable? The argument that there isn’t enough talent is specious. As James has written elsewhere in his statistical studies, talent develops to fill the available spots (except in the National Hockey League, which truly has overexpanded). While the most recent baseball expansion, in 1998, brought about a pitching shortage that inflated hitting statistics, new talent emerged, and last year’s return to a proper strike zone brought the sport back into balance. Right now there are probably more hard-throwing pitchers than at any time in baseball history. While I’ll grant that it’s increasingly difficult for major-league teams to turn a profit–though not as difficult as the owners would have fans believe–for some reason this has made those teams no less valuable. A major-league sports franchise remains one of the nation’s most precious corporate commodities. The Boston Red Sox and their TV network were recently sold for more than $600 million–with a $700 million offer left on the table–and the bedraggled owner of the Montreal Expos is simply moving on to buy the Florida Marlins for $160 million. If the owners think they’re saving money long-term by buying out the franchises instead of sharing revenues with them, perhaps it’s their revenue-sharing system that needs to be readjusted, not the allegiance of fans in Montreal and Minneapolis. The damning truth is that the Minnesota Twins, pegged for destruction along with the Expos, are one of the brightest examples of how a small-market team can rebuild by developing young talent. They’re also one of the few teams that baseball’s owners, with their shady bookkeeping practices, are willing to admit made a profit last year.
Anyone who believes Selig and the owners can’t be that stupid need only consult baseball history. It was their hard-line bargaining stance during the 1994 strike that led directly to the decline of the Montreal franchise. The Expos were the best team in baseball that year, and if they’d become world champions local interest would surely have increased and more of their team could have been kept together. But the end of the season was canceled, and after that embittered fans stayed away in droves and most of the Expos’ best players moved on. The owners gained little in 1994’s war of attrition, and the players have won every legal battle since then. The average salary has doubled since 1996 and the players’ union is as strong as ever. In contrast with the suck-up sportswriters who have been writing about how “inevitable” contraction is, I’d argue that baseball is the best of all sports because it’s the players and not the owners who have the power. The owners want to arrange the rules so that a major-league franchise becomes a license to print money–as it is in the NFL and the NBA. But we’ve seen how that system encourages mediocrity. A baseball team like the Sox–the Cubs are another matter entirely–has to win to attract fans, and win without breaking the bank, and the Sox and general manager Ken Williams have been exemplary in showing how this might be done.
In fact, both Chicago teams ought to compete. This is the first spring in decades in which there is legitimate reason to hope for a city series. It’s a long shot to be sure, but the potential is there. This ought to be a time of excitement for Chicago baseball fans, but Selig’s contraction plan, which overshadowed one of the greatest World Series ever last fall and dominated baseball news throughout the winter, has made it a time of dread and trepidation. That’s perhaps the worst fallout of all.
