With 2 out, it's hard to feel safe

SHELTON E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times,
published November 7, 2001

Be thankful. From all indications, your team, such as it is, still is standing.

Be relieved. Baseball is ready to lop off heads but, evidently, none will roll around here.

Be comforted. There is pain and loss and betrayal but, it seems, only in the distance.

Say it together: Whew.

It is a natural reaction. For all the sympathy you might have toward baseball's proposed victims of this grand folly called contraction, the initial reflex is to exhale. The bullet seems to have missed. Franchises may be dying, but it appears they are the franchises of other cities and other fans. Allow yourself a moment to be grateful it was not yours.

Then be nervous.

Because the next time, it might be.

This is how baseball wants you to feel about contraction. It wants to see you sweat. It wants to feed your paranoia. It wants you to storm the ticket window before someone slams the glass on your fingers. It wants you to build a stadium -- no, two stadiums -- to preserve your team's tomorrow. It wants you to stop celebrating the World Series and be afraid. Very, very afraid.

Any day now, baseball will pull the switch on two teams. Even now, however, Bud the Executioner will not tell you which ones they are. It's a secret. You are twisting in the wind, but that's fine with baseball.

It's hard to tell in a chaotic sport such as baseball, but for now, the Rays seem safe. Most of the reports say, as they have for days, that Bud Selig will take away the Minnesota Twins and the Montreal Expos. This is Selig's legacy as commissioner. He takes things away. Once, he took away a World Series. Now, he is poised to take away two franchises.

When he does, there will be an implied threat to a half-dozen other teams, including the Rays. Remember those teams that got the death penalty? Well, you're still on trial. No new stadium in Miami? Whack. No attendance boom in Oakland? Hack. Apathy in Tampa Bay? Thwack. Selig says there was quite the move to eliminate four teams. Could Tampa Bay have survived a four-team cut? Do you really want to know?

An admission: I was fooled. I never thought a business would get this far with such a lamebrain, misguided, beside-the-point plan as contraction. It made no sense, because it was a great deal of effort toward something that would solve almost none of the problems. It was not a move that a healthy sport would even consider.

Silly me. I forgot I was talking about baseball.

Turns out, contraction has a chance to be approved because it has virtually nothing to do with the game's real problems. It gives commissioners and committees something to do while not addressing issues such as revenue sharing or labor talks or World Series games that end so late that most of us are forced to watch them on the next morning's SportsCenter.

Listen, you could contract a half-dozen franchises, and some owners still would spend $90-million more than other owners. Two-thirds of teams still would have zero chance to win the World Series this year, next year or the year after. The only thing that goes up faster than the ticket prices are the expectations of how many of them the public should be expected to buy.

Those who would try to sell you contraction as good for baseball would try to convince you the greatest ill in the game is a dilution of talent. It's a silly argument. Cutting two teams merely gets things back to the way they were in 1997. People complained the talent was too thin then, too. They've been complaining about it since 1960.

But since 1960, the U.S. population had grown from 179.3-million to 281.4-million. Don't any of those people have gloves? That doesn't even take into account the way the game has taken off in other countries.

So why contract? Because contraction gives baseball's administrators one thing they need.

It gives them a gun to place at the heads of other communities.

In the old days, the ultimate leverage an owner had was franchise relocation. If he didn't get his stadium, or if he didn't like his attendance figures, he threatened to pack up his business and move it somewhere else. That threat died when baseball filled all the good locations, not to mention a lot of mediocre ones.

This restores the hammer. Mess up your franchise, and the sport may disown you. Build the stadium, sweeten the lease and fill the stands, or the home office will close you down. Better yet, it may move your team to Minnesota. Word is, there will be an empty stadium there soon.

At the same time, the owners figure contraction gives them an early lead in the upcoming negotiations with the players union. Fifty jobs would be eliminated. If the union wants those back, the owners can vote to expand rosters by two a team. But only for a price.

But the owners would pay a price for contraction, too. Almost 1.8-million fans watched the Twins this year. More than 642,000 watched the Expos. That's a lot of customers to run away. What will the politicians say? How will the television ratings be affected? What's the over-under on lawsuits?

Baseball's owners need to ask a few questions. What kind of leadership has allowed this sport to disintegrate to the point where it needs to be contracted? If expansion came too quickly, whose fault was that? And why can't the Pirates or Royals or Angels or Rays ever hope to win a Series?

As for the fans, they need to ask a few questions, too. If baseball would do this to the anyone, what will keep them from doing it to your team? Why would owners of the sad franchises be rewarded while the fans are punished? And once the relief that it wasn't my team passes, why does such a rotten taste linger?

Soon, it appears, there will be less of baseball, and less to think of it. Be sympathetic. Be wary. Be angry.

And if you live in Tampa Bay, be prepared for a time when it might not be about the other guy.

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