Making its move

Baseball moves toward 2002 season ... with not a lot settled

Sometime in the next few weeks or so, something finally will give. It has to. All the threats have pretty much been squashed. Most of the backroom maneuvering has pretty much been pulled off. The lawyers already have more Benzes than they could ever drive. It's time.

So sometime around the start of February -- maybe sooner but probably a little later -- baseball will announce that baseball will go on, intact, in 2002. All 30 teams. The Twins and the Expos where they belong. At least that's the way it looks right now.

The annual baseball off-season will come to an end, hopefully in February just like it's supposed to. Pitchers and catchers will make their way to spring training and, not long after that, the rest of the players will, too, pulling their million-dollar contracts behind them.

Baseball will start again. Nothing will be settled. Not much will have changed.

Aaargh. Double aaargh.

In a lot of ways, this off-season has been like every other recent off-season. A few weird trades, a few worthless exchanges of prospects, the handful of astronomical signings.

You know, Barry Bonds can sign a $90 million contract and Jason Giambi can sign with the Yankees for $120 million and, well, we've seen it all before, haven't we? We don't even blink. It's hardly even shocking when, say, Steve Karsay gets $22.5 million for four years.

(He's a pitcher. Was in Oakland, then Cleveland, stopped in Atlanta for a while. Now will pitch for the Yankees. Good curve, lousy record, OK ERA. Nice bank account.)

In many, many more ways, though, this has been as weird an off-season as you could ever imagine. The threat of contraction. Commissioner Bud Selig crying poor in front of Congress. The Red Sox sale. The discovery of a hush-hush loan from Twins owner Carl Pohlad to Selig. At least a couple of owners switching teams.

Will they play or won't they? When?

What just happened?

Well, owners just wrapped up some meetings in Phoenix where they conducted a blur of head spinning rubber-stamping that probably sealed a 2002 season with 30 teams after all.

First off, the owners OK'd the sale of the Red Sox -- to the guy who owns the Florida Marlins. But that's OK, because he plans to sell the Marlins to the guy who owns the Montreal Expos, who in turn will foist the Expos off on Major League Baseball, who will run the Expos this season and try mightily to move them somewhere -- anywhere, but probably Northern Virginia -- before the 2003 season.

And we said these guys didn't have a clue.

All that means is that baseball will go on in 2002 with the Expos in Montreal and the Twins in Minneapolis. Contraction will slip quietly into the background.

Now the owners and players will sit down, starting next week, to find some way to replace the labor contract that expired back in November. They promise they'll play nice, too. The owners say they won't lock out players and the players say there will be no strike.

So what has baseball accomplished these past few tortuous months? What really went on here? Was it really worth all that gnashing and bad press?

Just to move the Expos? Next year?

If one good thing has happened in the past month or two, it's that owners and players have realized -- at least going by what they've said in the past few days -- that not playing this year would be far worse than playing under the current economic system. So they'll play. So it seems.

At least until 2003. Then we'll see what gives again.

John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.

Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.

 

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