Baseball 2002's winners and losers

Forget the talk of contraction and lockouts. It's spring -- time for the Red Sox to edge the Yankees (really!) and the Cardinals to go all the way.

By King Kaufman

Mar 30, 2002 | When we last saw baseball, Jay Bell of the Arizona Diamondbacks was leaping into the arms of his teammate Matt Williams, having just scored the winning run in Game 7 of one of the great World Series of all time.

While we've been away, baseball has been behaving badly.

Commissioner Bud Selig announced that Major League Baseball would "contract," that is, eliminate, two teams. Baseball has a revenue sharing system that forces the more successful teams to give money to the less successful ones. This sounds like a good way to offset the fact that, since most baseball revenue is local, larger market teams make more money. The problem is, or at least one problem is, the system doesn't force the recipient of the shared revenue to invest it in the team. I guess I'm not sophisticated enough to understand why baseball can't just force the receiving owner to invest the money in its team rather than pocket it, which annoys the giving teams.

Carl Pohlad, the billionaire owner of the Minnesota Twins, volunteered to have his team "contracted," for which he would get a fat check, after the people of Minnesota declined to build him a new stadium with their tax money. This is known in advanced economic theory as the "Screw me? Screw you!" gambit. The Montreal Expos, a team with virtually no fan base anymore, figured to be the other team, though Selig never spelled out his plans, and there were rumors that the Florida Marlins might be targeted. An injunction in Minnesota prevented contraction from happening this off-season. This week, the Minnesota House, heretofore reluctant to spend public money on a stadium for the Twins, passed a bill to sell taxable revenue bonds to finance a ballpark. The state Senate had already passed a similar bill. It's amazing how a little carefully applied pressure can focus the legislative process.

Selig has also been on what one baseball observer has called his "extortion tour," on which he travels from one spring training camp to the next, nodding solemnly as he says things like "I think people understand in South Florida that the Marlins do need a new stadium." If that sounds to you a lot like when the neighborhood mobster says, "I think you and I both agree that it would be just terrible if anything happened to your family," go to the head of the class.

Selig went before Congress over the winter to plead his ridiculous case that baseball is losing money. Major League Baseball released figures showing a loss of about $519 million in 2001 on about $3.5 billion in revenue. A first-year econ student would be able to spot the accounting tricks baseball uses to make profits disappear. And Selig would not allow the players union to talk about the presumably more reality-based numbers baseball had provided it.

As Doug Pappas of the Society for American Baseball Research points out on his Web site, Major League Baseball's numbers show that revenues have risen 156 percent since 1995, while player salaries, supposedly the cause of baseball's financial woes, have risen only 113 percent. Meanwhile, other expenses have risen 134 percent. If baseball's in such financial trouble, why is it allowing non-salary expenses to skyrocket like that?

Because baseball's not in financial trouble, that's why. No franchise in modern times has ever lost value. Incredibly rich people keep paying incredibly steep prices for franchises -- the Red Sox were bought by a group led by John Henry this month for $660 million. Henry had just sold the Florida Marlins, a team so pitiful it's in danger of being "contracted," for $158.5 million -- to Jeffrey Loria, who had just sold the supposedly worthless Montreal Expos to his fellow owners for $120 million.

When Selig was talking about baseball's financial difficulties on Capitol Hill this winter, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., repeatedly and pointedly reminded him that he was under oath.

Let's put aside the "contraction" talk -- which is now widely seen for what it was, a hammer in the league's stadium extortion racket. The real cloud hanging over the game as it heads into the new season is the expired collective bargaining agreement, which means that a work stoppage, in the form of either a player strike or a lockout, is not out of the question in 2002. To get an idea how bad things are, consider that when Selig promised this week that there would be no player lockout through the end of the World Series, the players took it as a veiled threat that he would try to impose new work rules -- such as a salary cap -- or lock them out as soon as the Series ends.

Depressed yet? I am.

The thing is, if you're paying attention to even a little bit of this stuff, it's becoming less and less fun all the time to be a baseball fan, and that's without even taking into account the outrageous ticket prices, Dot Racing and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Loyal fans find themselves wondering why they're spending their hard-earned money to support this incredibly lucrative business that gives them back almost nothing but heartache, all because of bickering over how to split up the ungodly wads of loot.

I don't have an answer to that question, except to say that the game itself is still fun enough to keep most of us around. Once they start playing for keeps each April, it becomes a little easier to forget the greed and the lying and the nonsense, at least for a few hours at a time. A home run is still a home run, a wicked two-strike slider still just that.

In the spirit of sticking our heads in the sand and ignoring the evils baseball assaults us with in favor of enjoying the game between the lines -- the foul lines, that is, not the lines of billionaire owners with their hands out -- I offer herewith my preview of the 2002 season, with the usual caveat that I'm usually wrong about who's going to win what. But then again, so are you. In the immortal words of T.S. Eliot, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, or one of those old birds that sentimental baseball writers like to quote at this time of year as they wax lyrical about fields of green and the youthful renewal of spring and all that blather: "Dat's why they play 'em."

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