March 02, 2009
As Miami squabbles, the C-word rears its head
Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez declared today that the Florida Marlins stadium plan has been "hijacked" by dissident city commissioners, with their "unreasonable demands that have nothing to do with baseball," as well as "political grandstanding, the dissemination of half-truths and intellectually dishonest assumptions." He also instructed county manager George Burgess not to "expend or exhaust further resources or time into the Florida Marlins Baseball Stadium agreements" until the city votes on a plan — which seems pretty pointless given that they're voting on Friday, unless he knows something we don't know about a delay to deal with Commissioner Spence-Jones' bombshell.
In related news, New York Daily News baseball columnist Bill Madden has raised the specter of contraction, a subject that's been a major topic of discussion on the comment threads here:
Baseball has run out of places to move struggling franchises and, especially in this economy, who in their right mind would buy either the A's or Marlins with their bleak stadium situations? And just as Wolff, his partner John Fisher and the Marlins' Loria are going to be looking for a way out from under their mounting losses, baseball can't afford to keep dumping revenue-sharing money into hopeless franchises. Like just about every other industry in this country right now, baseball is going to have to take stock of its situation and downsize. There are too many teams in baseball anyway and it makes no sense to continue operating them in places that can't or won't support them.
ESPN's Rob Neyer is having none of it:
Look, the A's and the Marlins both have serious ballpark/revenue woes. No question about it, and Madden does a good job enumerating those woes. But it's a massive leap from "needing" a new ballpark to the c-word. For one thing, both the A's and the Marlins have, in recent years, been competitive. We're not talking about the St. Louis Browns here. We're talking about one franchise that won 93 games three seasons ago and another that won 84 games just last year. I mean, seriously: these are the two teams that might disappear?
What's more, even if both franchises were utter wrecks they still wouldn't be serious candidates for contraction. No franchise would be. It was, what, eight years ago when this spectre was first raised, regarding the Twins and the Expos? I said then that it would never happen; that Congress (among others) wouldn't allow it, and that the owners were simply floating the notion as leverage in their negotiations with the union.
I said much the same thing during the last round of contraction talk, for that matter. At the time, sports economist Rod Fort summed it up to me this way: "I think what'll happen is [players union chief Don] Fehr will look them in the eye and say, 'Fine. You can't.'" Eight years later, that still seems like a pretty likely scenario, as do the other possibilities (lawsuits, antitrust charges) I outlined back then.
