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Owners, aiders and abetters There are plenty to blame for baseball's current woesPosted: Thursday November 29, 2001 12:21 PM
In a politically correct world where ethnic jokes are no longer allowed, where neither mothers-in-law, blondes nor even lawyers can be made fun of, only baseball owners are fair game. Baseball owners are such villains, I believe only they can be profiled. They've been meeting again, poor devils, trying anew to figure out if they can maybe cut down on the number of woeful teams. Baseball is all screwed up, but no matter what happens, only the baseball owners are criticized. For years, for example, everybody cried out that baseball was watered down, rosters diluted. As soon as the owners said "OK, let's contract and make our soup thicker," all the old critics bellowed that baseball owners were heartless monsters. How dare they deal with the dilution problem by cutting diluted teams. The part I loved was when everybody wept and wailed that baseball had ruined the wonderful World Series by talking business too soon. Oh come on, five minutes after the World Series ended, most fans were already betting next week's NFL games and checking their e-mail for their fantasy basketball results. It was a wonderful World Series then, and it still is. The owners can't screw up those memories any more than they can put a hex on Harry Potter at the box office. Baseball is accused of being too traditional, until the owners do something new, and then the owners are accused of destroying the sainted baseball tradition. Baseball's problem is simple, to wit: Unlike football and basketball, it doesn't have sensible revenue sharing or any salary cap, so a few teams stay too rich and the poorer teams can't keep up. Defenders of the system say, well, it's better than it was 50 years ago. This is like saying, Zimbabwe is OK under Robert Mugabe because it wasn't any good when it was white Rhodesia. The truth is baseball is controlled by a curious alliance. The big wheels who run the rich teams are really in cahoots with the players' union. Together, these strange bedfellows keep the rotten status quo, wherein the players get more money and only the rich teams can afford the best players who are paid the most. This sweetheart deal is reminiscent of the old arrangement in many southern states where prohibition was maintained because the Baptists and the bootleggers tacitly joined forces. Yes, of course, there are some really mean-spirited and selfish baseball owners. One appears to be Carl Pohlad, who owns the Minnesota Twins, who would rather take the blood money for folding the franchise. But why has it come to this? Because the people of the Twin Cities don't want to help Carl Pohlad pay to build a new baseball stadium. Which is fine. Cities can decide whether they'd rather spend money for schools and hospitals and convention centers instead of stadiums. But don't whine then when you lose a team. Los Angeles doesn't even have a football team because it wouldn't pay to build a proper stadium, and Los Angeles is a lot bigger than Minneapolis and St. Paul put together. You want a team, you build a stadium. Sorry, it may be unfair, it may be extravagant, but that's the way the game is played in the United States of America in sports in the 21st century, and the Twin Cities can't pretend they're innocents. They knew. Of course Minnesota should have a baseball team. It's a terrific baseball city. But it's facile to just blame it all on the owners. They aren't smart enough to screw things up all by themselves. They need accomplices ... and they have them. Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. His new novel, The Other Adonis (Sourcebooks Landmark), is available now at bookstores everywhere. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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