Contraction threat just a labor pain

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By GARY SHELTON

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 9, 2001

And now, a few contractions about contraction.

Don't, as in believe it.

Won't, as in happen.

It's, as in malarkey.

I don't know if you caught the news this week, but once again, our noble baseball commissioner, Sir Bud of Light, dared to nod grimly toward the problem of his sport. Once again, Bud Selig spoke gravely -- let's face it, the guy should endorse Tombstone pizza -- and said that contraction, the reduction of the number of existing franchises, remains a possibility. It is still on the table, Selig said. In fact, it could be covering up that nifty new pen he got from the owners' meetings.

This column will now pause for five seconds while you run around and declare the sky to be falling.

Back?

Good, because it's all bullfeathers. In the end, contraction is a distraction that will be followed by inaction rather than subtraction.

Got it?

Look, as far as water-cooler talk goes, contraction is an interesting debate. You lean on the wall, and you wonder where in blazes all of the pitching has gone, and you remember when you could name all the starting shortstops in the league whereas now you can't even remember the nicknames, and you think back to when things were so much simpler. Then someone says something like this: "Yeah. Who needs the Montreal Expos anyway?" And you find yourself nodding along.

In reality, this is such a worm farm that it has zero chance to occur. It would solve none of baseball's problems, and it would create so many new ones, that the mere suggestion of contraction should make you point and laugh.

In theory, contraction would work thusly: Baseball would buy out two franchises (most likely Montreal and Minnesota; Tampa Bay, Kansas City, Florida and Oakland all have been mentioned in the next tier, in case baseball decided on a four-team reduction) and promptly fold them. And just like that, ta-da, baseball would be right again, and players would know how to bunt, and shortstops wouldn't make as much as the gross national product of Peru, and people would hit the cutoff man, and Babe Ruth would still hit home runs for sick kids in the hospital, and all that.

Except that baseball wouldn't be right.

It would be, basically, what it is now. Only with a couple of fewer deadbeats hanging around the regular season.

Would contraction mean there would be enough pitching to go around? Of course not. Heck, for the most part, Montreal and Minnesota don't have pitching. Would eliminating the Expos and Twins (or Rays and Marlins) mean that the Yankees still wouldn't outspend some teams by $100-million? Of course not. Cut the talent pool by two teams, and you're back the number of teams of 1997. You know, the good old days.

Here's what it would mean. It would mean a holy war with the Players' Association, because it would eliminate 50 jobs.

It would mean closing the door on a couple of million fans a year, who aren't liable to drive to the next state over to see a ballgame. Ask yourself: Do you run off 1.5-million fans a year simply because you're annoyed they aren't 2-million?

It would mean lower television ratings in those areas, meaning a reduction in TV revenues.

It would mean raising some $200-million per team to buy out those teams (Gee. Let's see which team is first in line to pay its share of that.)

It would mean talking some owner into being a former owner, which sounds like a good way to turn him into Al Davis.

It would mean giving politicians a chance to posture about how evil baseball is.

It would mean baseball would take over the financial obligations of the teams it has folded.

It would mean lawsuits, from cities who thought they had firm leases to sponsors to class action suits by fans. And we know how well sports leagues fare in lawsuits, don't we?

It would mean the sport would take on the image of a dying tree pruning itself to stay alive.

It would mean guys like me would run up the commissioner and say "Hey, Bud. How far apart are the contractions?"

Of course, contraction is an interesting conversation around here, where the Rays have been mentioned as a possibility. And no, the team has not drawn what most of us thought it would, and it hasn't been as interesting as many of us hoped. A lot of fans have found the Rays to be a dull, plodding team, perhaps because the Rays largely have been a dull, plodding team. They have played exactly two essential games in their history (the first opening night, and the game in which Wade Boggs had his 3,000th hit).

That said, there are a lot of teams that are worse off than the Rays, who have pretty good revenue streams. Even if baseball decided to cut teams, this doesn't look like one of the possibilities.

Why, then, does Selig not step on the neck of these whispers? The common perception is that it's a negotiating ploy for the labor wars ahead, that Selig is dangling the 50 jobs as a chit in negotiations. At last report, Don Fehr was not quaking with, well, fear.

If Fehr doesn't take this kind of talk seriously, neither should we. Baseball can't even agree on moving teams from one division to another, let alone shutting some down.

You want contraction?

Doesn't, as in make sense.

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