McPheet.com

Major League Baseball officially announced today that the Montreal Expos will be playing at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC next year.

Lots of things to complain about with this. MLB has treated the Expos pretty shabbily for a decade, between the 1994 work stoppage, the Jeffrey Loria debacle (which included yet another MLB attempt to extort a stadium from the public treasury), and the outright conflict-of-interest of a team owned by the other 29 teams. The idea that Montreal is incapable of supporting a team is absurd; many smaller cities seem to support their teams just fine. If the Expos had stable, committed ownership, they could have kept some of their free agents over the years and put together a great ballclub.

In addition, if they Expos had to move, there are more interesting places for them to go than Washington, DC. (Especially if the club is not going to be renamed the Washington Senators.) I have long supported the idea of placing a team in Mexico City. Mexico has a good baseball fan base, and so many of the players in MLB are native Spanish speakers. Plus, it would help with the internationalization of the game.

On the other hand, Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, has been such a nuisance — what good thing has he done for the game since he built Camden Yards? — that moving a team into his territory is very satisfying. Unfortunately, Bud Selig bought Angelos cooperation at a high price: guaranteed minimum revenues each year and guaranteed minimum selling price should Angelos sell the club.

The whole incident is sad and nauseating.

I’m converting McPheet.com to the Movable Type engine, rather than just writing up all the pages myself in MS FrontPage. I’m doing this for a couple of reasons: 1) it lets me blog from anywhere, rather than just when I’m at home; 2) it’s going to be a lot easier to use, so I’ll blog more often (I hope!).

I’ll be converting old essays to blog entries as time permits.

• As expected, the SwiftVets story has largely disappeared.  In its
  wake, it seems to have cost Kerry any chance of picking up momentum in
  August.  The Republican National Convention then gave Bush a bounce,
  and the race seems to be edging his way. 
  Slate’s Election Scorecard
  shows the president with a solid lead in enough states to give him 212
  Electoral Votes, and a lead in states that would give him another 95. 
  By contrast, Kerry is solid for 170 votes, with another 61 leaning his way. 
  270 is the magic number.  (By the way, it looks like Slate’s going to
  update the scorecard daily with new poll data, so this is a good place to
  track the horserace.  Another good place is
  
  Rasmussen Reports; the link takes you to their Electoral College
  projection page.
• The new big story (which will probably blow over in about two weeks)
  centers on CBS News.  Last Wednesday,
  
  60 Minutes II aired a report in which they claimed to have
  documents written by Bush’s commanding officer in the National Guard. 
  The documents indicate that the commander, Col. Jerry Killian, felt he was
  under pressure to "sugar coat" Bush’s reviews.  Within a few hours of
  the airing of the story, the documents were being discredited because, for
  technical reasons, they could not have been produced on any equipment
  available in 1972-3.  They are assumed to be forgeries (by everyone
  except Dan Rather and CBS News, who stand by the story), and the next phase
  of the story will be: who created them, and why is CBS so insistent upon
  their authenticity. A good place to read about this story is on the
  ever-valuable Wikipedia.
• Both the SwiftVets story and the forgery story are being widely touted
  as examples of New Media (bloggers) seizing control of the news agenda away
  from Old Media (major newspapers like the New York Times).  By
  the way, here are two
  
  interesting links
  dealing with the SwiftVets story.