Baseball loses two teams

[Stealth bomber]

Today the governing bodies of baseball decided that they are eliminating two franchises. It has not been announced which ones are getting the axe yet; supposedly it will be voted upon. Seems a bit soon, considering the World Series just ended.

The three most likely clubs to get the axe are Montreal, Minnesota, and Florida.

It is not known at this time what will happen to the players; the MLB players union is looking into possibilities.

Of the three, Minnesota has been around the longest and has had the most success, with two World Series titles in 1987 and 1991. Florida won in 1997. Montreal has never played in a World Series. Ironically, the Twins themselves were a relocation of the old Washington Senators. And, despite one of the lowest payrolls, they contended for their division title this year and still have somewhat decent attendance.

Would anyone miss the Expos? I doubt that baseball was ever meant to be broadcast in French anyhoo.

 

[oh_my_hat]

If history and romance has anything to do with sport in the modern world I hope that the Twins remain. Canada will still have representation and Florida have only been around a couple of years. they bought a World Series in '97 and dismantled their list due to too large a wage bill.

 

[Stealth bomber]

Tampa Bay was also considered. How about if the two Florida teams merge or something? The Devil Rays have not been anywhere CLOSE to competitive in the four seasons of existence they have. Nobody would miss them.

The Marlins make me sick - basically the owner buys himself a World Series, then sells off everything and lives off the revenue while the people that marketed the franchise as well as the fans and the players all get stuck with a loser.

Minnesota would be tragic. As much as the 1987 World Series hurt this Cardinal fan, I would feel for them greatly if they lost their franchise. They were competitive this year and are going to be next year. The attendance is picking up. They have a sense of history with hall of fame players like Harmon Killibrew and Kirby Puckett. Montreal, Florida, and Tampa Bay don't have any history at all.

The only reason Minnesota is on the chopping block is they have a grumpy 86 year old owner who wants the $250 million compensation so he can retire and leave it to his kids; he has no interest in baseball anymore.

Minnesota has terrible luck with the sort of thing. They lost the Lakers in the 50s, the North Stars in the 80s and now possibly the Twins. Then, just as basketball and hockey come back and the state has all four major sports again, one of them gets dumped out the window.

What do the four possibly doomed teams have in common? They all play in terrible stadiums. With the exception of Florida, all are sterile domes with artificial turf. The Marlins are still playing in a modified football stadium.

Both the Twins and Vikings for some time have been trying to get a new stadium built and nobody in town will pay for it. As a Packer fan I would not have a problem if they imploded the Metrodome

If the Twins must go, why not move back to Washington D.C. instead of folding completely?

 

[NYMets]

Originally posted by Stealth bomber

The Marlins make me sick - basically the owner buys himself a World Series, then sells off everything and lives off the revenue while the people that marketed the franchise as well as the fans and the players all get stuck with a loser.

I shouldn't say anything as I don't have the oppurtunity to follow the game that much but amen to the above. You can stick those two more-$-than-brains Texass teams as well. LOL How did A-Rod do this year? But the Twins ..now that's a team I've heard of.

The Marlins...isn't that the team those morons who run the Dodgers traded the great Piazza to..for about three minutes before he cruised over to the Mets?

 

[The Hippie]

I've got no great love for the Marlins either, after robbing the Braves of a World Series a few years ago. The Twins should stay in, a lot of tradition to lose if they go.

Expo's are out the gate, I think.

 

[Stealth bomber]

I've always had mixed feelings about salary caps. I think baseball really needs it, but the players union is too strong. This is an outfit that has had 9 strikes or lockouts in 30 years and got a World Series cancelled.

Baseball is similar to the AFL's management in that it wants to level the playing field for the smaller markets by putting a limit on spending. The risk of course is that it is seen to punish those teams who build themselves a dynasty with money and keep it together.

Dynasty or Parity? It can be argued that either is bad or good for the game. I tend to like parity, but I don't like some of the side effects that come with it.

Hopefully this will put a stop to the expansion boom that has been rampant in the last 10 years in our sports. Too many teams dilute talent and cheapen in my opinion the "major league level" player. It has gotten harder and harder for teams to field a complete outfit full of players that are worthy of being called major leaguers.

 

[Dan26]

I hope Minnesota don't go. They have loyal fans and average 22,000 people per home game. They have a stingy owner, who doens't want to pay exorbitant amounts

The Montreal Expos only average 7,900 people per game. Shocking. They should go. Tampa Bay also are a mistake, with a smallish market and a crappy stadium.

Tampa Bay and Montreal for me.

What do you reckon Stealth?

 

[oh_my_hat]

Originally posted by Stealth bomber
Dynasty or Parity? It can be argued that either is bad or good for the game. I tend to like parity, but I don't like some of the side effects that come with it.

I agree Stealth. I do have a leaning toward parity but the top teams do get punished somewhat for success (read Dallas, SF & Essendon to a lesser extent) but also it comes back to the player and player mangers pushing the salary envelope for their representatives as soon as the player as part of the Championship team / Premiers have some success or the player is selected to a All-Australian or All-Star team or wins an MVP award.

I feel the onus should be pushed back to the player managers in particular to keep it real in their wage negotiations and not drive the game broke. Expansion of teams does have the impact of watering down the playing talent which is not good for the game also. This is a phenomenon here as well as in the US and there are players playing in the AFL for example that wouldn’t have got a game 15 years ago when the talent was spread across 12 teams.

Having said that I still love the game(s) AFL and NFL and look forward to Richmond continuing to improve next year and the Cowboys winning a couple of games before the year is out.

 

[oh_my_hat]

Here is an article from Tim Colishaw that I found today which addresses some of the issues being discussed in this thread. He uses the communist v capitalist analogy with regard to NFL (salary cap) and MLB (no cap and the Yankees spending wildly to win pennants). I agree with most of what he has to say.
*************
Fiscally, NFL knocks baseball's bloc off

Every now and then I think of leaving the Communists and switching over to the capitalists. But then I always come back to my senses.

If you thought the '90s was all about the fall of socialism, what with that collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall tumbling down, well, that was only part of the story. And you don't have to look beyond our borders to see the socialists alive and well and, yes, prospering.

I refer, of course, to the ongoing struggle for fan support between major league baseball and the National Football League.

The major leagues are the thing that's giving capitalism a bad name. Even blessed with anti-trust protection, the owners want to share next to nothing. Theirs is a world of haves and have-nots, a world where the fat-cat New York Yankees live large in the penthouse while the Montreal Expos and Minnesota Twins exist on the brink of homelessness.

As a result, baseball finds itself on the ropes – perhaps the very rope that Lenin said the Communists would purchase from the capitalists to hang them.

Such frightening gaps between rich and poor would not be possible in the NFL. Certainly they would not exist in today's NFL as governed by Comrade Paul Tagliabue, friend of the proletariat. Their world is all about equal footing. Buying championships is next to impossible. Heck, building a championship team is next to impossible.

In the NFL's repressive salary-cap system, all are equal. New York and Green Bay market sizes are of no consequence.

Revenue sharing was the very thing that inspired the NFL's rise to power in the '60s. The salary cap, the draft, a schedule that gives greater hope to the bottom teams – these things are designed to level the playing field for all.

The St. Louis Rams had the league's worst record in the '90s until they won the Super Bowl following the '99 season. Where did that come from?

The Baltimore Ravens didn't even bother to find a top-flight quarterback on their way to Super Bowl glory last year. Where did that come from?

This year at the season's halfway point, 21 teams are .500 or better, which means there are 21 Super Bowl contenders.

Baseball will have maybe half that many World Series contenders when and if spring training arrives.

This is what we are to choose from at professional sports' pinnacle. Baseball will give us the wealthy in the World Series, generally the Yankees. The NFL provides no assurances that we will have heard of half the starters the week before the Super Bowl.


Some regard the NFL as a league reduced to salary-cap mediocrity, but that's an oversimplification.

Locally, the cap is often cited as the thing that ended the Cowboys' dynasty, but it did the same in San Francisco, where the 49ers couldn't keep Ricky Watters and couldn't match the Cowboys' offer for Deion Sanders. This came at a time when the 49ers had won five of the last 14 Super Bowls.

The cap hurts good teams, but so does free agency itself in a league that demands team precision. Baseball's pitcher-vs.-hitter world is a different story. Also, today's offenses in an overexpanded league have simply not caught up to the blitzing schemes that are all the rage.

That's why 12 franchises have appeared in the last seven Super Bowls, with only small-market Green Bay and Denver showing up twice. Seven franchises have played in the last seven World Series, with the local-TV revenue-driven Yankees and the Superstation Braves making eight of those appearances.

While I think the Yankees probably don't get the credit they deserve, even in the free-spending, capless world of baseball, consider how the season ended. The fireworks were still exploding in Phoenix when Yankees manager Joe Torre mentioned he might put in a call to Oakland slugger Jason Giambi.

Oh, great.

It's hard enough to watch the Yankees pull away from their division rivals on the strength of Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina, the very pitchers that once gave those rivals hope.

Now that Oakland has pushed the Yankees to the limit the last two years, let's put Giambi in pinstripes and send the A's fans back to hibernation.

That would never happen in the NFL, where the first ones now shall later be last, where the standings are always-a-changin'.

Baseball is a great game, but its free-market approach that provides for $90 million disparities in payroll makes it a bad business.

In the economic choice of the sports world, make mine Marx.

 

[Stealth bomber]

That's a great article.

I wouldn't say that the NFL's system is completely foolproof though - just in the last 20 years we have seen franchise relocations from teams in St. Louis, Cleveland, Houston, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and one team that has relocated twice (Oakland), the second time back to its original location.

It says a lot about the NFL's approach when the nation's second largest TV market (Los Angeles) loses not one, but TWO franchises right on top of each other.

In the baseball situation, it appears that all the lawsuits are coming out of the woodwork now. The MLB players union is suing for breach of the labor agreement , and the owners of both endangered Florida teams are taking (Commissioner) Bud Selig to court. I am pretty sure the Twins have some sort of aggressive litigation on the block as well. In terms of fan reaction, the Minnesotans are far and away the ones the most upset about this whole thing.

 

[Longboysfan]

Good take there Dan. Yes the Expos - and not for lack of trying with th talent they have had over the years.
And the Marlins - Just give the guy the buyout and get out.

 

[Longboysfan]

Just thinking do you have any Footy teams there like this.???

 

[oh_my_hat]

Originally posted by Longboysfan
Just thinking do you have any Footy teams there like this.???

LBF, we have one team (Sydney Swans) who relocated from Sth Melbourne in the early 80's and Fitzroy merged with Brisbane (this year's premiers) at the end of the 1996? season. The AFL doesn't have private ownership in the main so I don't think it is a prevalent as in the U.S.

You will have to hop on board and follow Richmond next season in the AFL like Mooster7. We are a rebuiding club that finished 3rd last season and hope to take the next step next year (season begins late March? next year). Bookmark the web-site http://www.richmondfc.com.au/richmond/default.htm for future reference.

There are a couple of clubs that aren't supported that well that are often financially in trouble but I believe will not collapse or relocate, namely Nth Melbourne, Western Bulldogs and Geelong of late.

 

[The Hippie]

Glad you have confidence the Rooboys will be there, OMH. Wish I could be as sure. Purely from a selfish point of view, if I had a choice of relocating or merging, I hope they go to Canberra as I live 2 hours from there and I could get to more games than I can if they are based in Melbourne. I'd hate to see it, of course, it wouldn't feel the same as supporting Nth Melbourne but we'd still have a team.

 

[oh_my_hat]

Hippie,

I think revenue raising ideas like playing games in Canberra will help them survive. Now if only some of their fans would dig deep into their pockets and buy some memberships then they should be fine.

I have an emotional tie to Nth Melbourne (even though I am a Richmond fan) because my Grandma is a rabid, mad, passionate 80 year old fan and goes to see her beloved Roos, so it would be heartbreaking to all of our family to see them relocate.