September 16, 2003
A Rigged Game Of Milwaukee Hold 'Em
I have to love this latest twist in the saga of the Montreal Expos. As it turns out, officials at Major League Baseball have been clandestinely meeting with Chicago Cubs broadcaster and former AL Cy Young Award winner Steve Stone about buying the team and moving them to Las Vegas.
The cat was let out of the bag by a gossip columnist with the Las Vegas Review-Journal in the paper's Saturday edition. With the news out in the open, Stone gave an extensive interview detailing the discussions with Carol Slezak in Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times:
Things have moved quickly since March, when (Stone's partner Lou) Weisbach, the former Chicago businessman who heads Teamscape, a group looking to bring professional sports franchises to Las Vegas, called Stone "out of the blue.''
On Friday, Stone's group met with baseball representatives and Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman. Stone wasn't at the meeting. He was at Wrigley Field, broadcasting the Cubs game.
Just to refresh your memories, March was the time that officials from the District, Northern Virginia and Portland, Oregon all made their pitches to the Major League Baseball relocation committee concerning their plans to publicly finance a stadium for the Expos. With this information now in hand, it appears that the work of the committee has been nothing more than an expensive municipal dog and pony show.
For quite some time now, I've taken the position that Major League Baseball has been driving a hard bargain for the Expos. It's been a frustrating process, but I've always concluded that it's just business, and the owners inside Major League Baseball are only trying to protect the value of one of their assets.
Now, I'm totally convinced that both Washington and Northern Virginia should walk away from the table, and simply refuse to deal with MLB and in particular, Commissioner Bud Selig. If the content of the Sun-Times story is true, then the work of the relocation committee has been an expensive ruse, with local officials wasting millions of dollars for nothing.
Sun-Times link courtesy of David Pinto at Baseball Musings.
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