You have to feel sorry for Bud Selig. Having installed himself as
Commissioner Bud I, and achieved the Herculean task of getting major league
owners to agree on contraction, Bud's mission to rid North America of excess
major league baseball has been shot down by judges in Minnesota.
It's a shame really, because Bud is so good at what he does: getting people to agree with him. Major league owners, as a rule, have trouble agreeing on anything. Heck. These guys can't agree on what time to have dinner.
But Bud has changed that. He is, by all accounts, the master schmoozer. He has gotten owners, whose first and only interest is personal enrichment, to act in something approaching unison.
This is a historic achievement. Unfortunately, every time major league owners have acted in unison, something bad has resulted.
Owner unity has resulted in preserving the color barrier until 1947, a collusive boycott of free agents, and a disastrous strike in 1994.
So when major league owners agree on something, it's time to check if
you can't smell a rat.
!!!
Bud's proposed franchisectomy does nothing but put pressure on cities to fork over more money to billionaire owners so they can fork it over to millionaire players.
When Whitey Herzog, the former manager and GM of the St. Louis Cardinals, went to owners meetings , he was floored by what he saw. He describes the situation in his book, "You're Missin' a Great Game."
"The only thing they ever talked about was money," Herzog writes. "'How can we raise more revenue? How can we get more money?'
"They're nothing but gerbils on a treadmill.
"Well, any rodent is smart enough to get off the wheel and sniff around once in a while. But the owners don't do that. They figure if they're running hard, they're getting somewhere. So they run harder."
Well, Bud, like Herzog's rodent, has sniffed around and he wants change. For Bud, the wheel would spin much faster if every tax payer in America put his shoulder to the wheel for the good of baseball.
Franchises in Minnesota and Montreal were singled out for elimination because their politicians and tax payers did not divert want to help the rodents get up to speed.
Until now, cities with teams only had to face competition from other metropolitan areas. For years owners said, "Build me a stadium or I'll go to Tampa."
Unfortunately, Tampa allegedly has a team now and is not in the market for another one. Without a credible threat, the major leagues' extortionists were having trouble squeezing more money out of their victims, erh communities.
Bud's is a new approach. By simply voting to eliminate two teams, the major league mob can say to a host city, "You have such a nice community. It would be a pity if something bad should happen to it."
The beauty of the scam is that the owners don't even have to carry it out. Major League Baseball Inc.'s lawyers are hopping mad about an injunction that has forced the Minnesota Twins to do what they agreed to do: play their games this season in Minneapolis. But the mere threat has forced the local government to do what it had pledged not to: work out a plan to build the Twins a brand new ball park.
Bud's current spasm is unlikely to trigger the birth of a trimmed down major league structure. But rest assured, talk of contraction from owners will come more and more often from now on.
If Bud is truly serious that contraction is one solution to the majors' numerous issues, then he is extremely dangerous to the other owners.
The last thing major league owners want is for someone to force the indefensible nature of their absurd monopoly into the public forum.
The current inflated value of major league franchises is founded on MLB's ability to restrict supply. The American public has an incredible thirst for team sports and MLB's response has been to say, "Sorry. You have quite enough already. We don't need to sell any more."
But Bud's game is a dangerous one. If he pushes it too far, the Justice Department will realize that the U.S. is better off with more baseball at lower prices and might try to accomplish this by dividing up the current 30 teams into four to six leagues. Should the majors be broken up into competing leagues, everyone would benefit--except for the owners, whose franchises will be far less valuable when the market determines the number of franchises and not a gang of owners working in collusion.
Bud could well be leading the owners up a tree, from which there is no safe way down.
Does anyone remember the Monty Python sketch about the flying sheep? In that bit, sheep, convinced they could fly, climbed trees and plummeted to their deaths. To which a farmer observes about the ring leader, "There's nothing more dangerous than a clever sheep."
And as much as you respect Selig's ability to act, the owners would be better off with a contraction in the office of their clever commissioner. It's time to nip this problem in the Bud, before he leads the owners out on a limb and convinces them they can fly.
The Hot Corner appears each Thursday in The
Daily Yomiuri .