April 26, 2004
D.C. Baseball Update
When it comes to following the continuing saga of Washington, D.C.'s quest to lure a Major League Baseball team to the nation's capital, the newspaper to read has to be the Washington Times. Led by sports business reporter Eric Fisher, the Times has stayed with the story more or less consistently over the past few years, making sure to look at the entire enterprise with a jaundiced eye, rather than an opportunity for regional boosterism.
Over the course of the end of last week and through the weekend, the paper ran a string of stories that merited some attention. First, last Thursday, Fisher wrote a piece that was ostensibly about D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams' stadium financing plan, but ultimately turned into a news analysis examining Baltimore Orioles' owner Peter Angelos' claims concerning the ability of the Baltimore-Washington area to support two baseball teams.
On the same day, Dick Heller penned a brutal, but fair, attack on Angelos and Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and their role in keeping baseball out of D.C.:
Until Angelos sells the Orioles and an honestly impartial commissioner replaces Selig, we're not going to see a team in Washington. All indications are that baseball will keep the pathetic Expos in limbo for two more years until it can raise the contraction issue once more, and who cares what we want or deserve.
If that's the way it has to be, we can live with it — after all, we've done so since 1972. But let's expose this "regional franchise" business for what it is: another power grab by a man who has made a career of them.
No, I don't hate Peter Angelos, but don't push me.
I have my own doubts whether or not the area could support two baseball teams, but sometimes I wonder whether or not the real issue is that Angelos simply doesn't want to have to compete with another team -- whether the financial outcome would work in his favor or not.
On Sunday, Fisher followed up his first piece with a look at how the Expos have collapsed both on the field and at the gate so far this season:
The Expos currently sit in the basement of the National League East, right where many projected they would be. But their 4-14 record is easily the worst in the major leagues, and their team batting average of .203 is by far the lowest. Montreal has failed to score in five of 18 games and has topped three runs in just two others.
Far more striking, however, is what horrific business the Puerto Rico "experiment," as commissioner Bud Selig has often called it, has become.
The Expos' first six games of 22 in San Juan, including three each against the New York Mets and the defending champion Florida Marlins, had an average attendance of 12,269. The number is 3 percent below the Expos' full-season average for 2003, 14 percent behind the average San Juan draw last year and completely counter to a flourishing return to the turnstiles that has marked much of baseball this season.
Then again, if Selig had simply given the go-ahead a year ago, those same Expos could have been playing to sell-out crowds in RFK Stadium this Spring. It makes one wonder why MLB would continue to underwrite the red ink the Expos must be bleeding these days.
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So let me get this straight: MLB is surprised that Expos are failing to draw well with a team stripped of its two biggest draws (Puerto Rican Javier Vazquez and All-World outfielder Vlad Guerrero), in a small market, playing in a dreaful stadium in a terribly traffic-congested part of the city, with a third of the per-capita income and double and a half the unemployment of the US and charging more than the average ticket price for games in the US? I continue to be amussed at MBL's stupidity.
Posted by:
at April 26, 2004 01:53 PM
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12:10 PM