I love baseball. I love it on television or in person. I love to keep
score, and I love to just watch. Every day, I check in with ESPN’s Baseball
page and the Baseball Prospectus, even during the long, hard winter. I’ll
start counting down the days until pitchers and catchers report to spring
training camps. I watch every trade rumor for my favorite team. One year I
tracked the pitch counts of all the starters and relievers, just so I could
know who’d be available to pitch each night. I dream of taking a year off so
I can follow a team through every game.
But every winter, Major League Baseball (MLB) seems to take another stab at
my love of the game. Some years, it’s the threat of a new labor dispute
disrupting the season. In other years, it’s a complaint about not getting a
new publicly-funded stadium built in one city or another. This year, we get
both, wrapped up in a more vicious package.
Just as the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the team owners and
players expired, Commissioner Bud Selig announced the owners’ plan to
eliminate two as-yet-unnamed franchises.
If it happens, it will be the first contraction in Major League Baseball in
over a century. Selig claims the owners need to
eliminate two (or more) teams because the 30 teams collectively lost a
half-billion dollars this year. The two leading contenders for contraction
are the Montreal Expos and the Minnesota Twins, though there has been some
mention of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Oakland Athletics, and Florida Marlins.
What do these teams have in common? With the lone exception of the Tampa
Bay Devil Rays, all of these teams have unsuccessfully tried to get their
local governments to buy them a new stadium. Selig has explicitly mentioned
this as a reason the Twins may be contracted. On Nov.
15, he said, "But at some point in the past decade, despite 26 or so stadium
proposals, there were chances to do something, and nothing got done. So
there are a lot of people up there who have to look themselves in the
mirror… To survive in this environment, even if you change other things,
you still need a new stadium." Of course, none of the 26 proposals read,
"The Twins will pay 100% of the costs of construction, land acquisition,
etc. for a new stadium."
This is despite the fact that the Twins led the American League in
attendance as recently as 1988, with over three million fans attending games
that year. They were fifth in the league in 1992, the last time they
were in the top half of attendance. That was also the last year they posted
a winning record until this season. In the intervening eight years, they
reached 70 wins only three times, and 75 wins only once. In short, they put
a crummy product on the field. No wonder people stayed away.
And, according to reports, the Twins have been profitable over the past
two or three seasons. Presumably, owner Carl Pohlad tucked away the money
received through the league’s "luxury tax" program, and spent only a
relatively small amount on player salaries.
Even if you concede that the Twins need a new stadium, this demand that
the public pay for one is best described as extortion, which my dictionary
defines as "the act of obtaining something by coercion or intimidation, of
wresting something from an unwilling person by physical force, menace,
duress, torture, or any undue or illegal exercise of power or ingenuity."
* * * * *
I hate MLB. (The NFL, NBA, and NHL
are just as bad.) Since 1991, various local and state governments have spent
a whopping $2.5 billion building or renovating fourteen baseball stadiums.
Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody’s head.
Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask
yourself, "Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?"- from “Parliament of Whores,” by P. J. O’Rourke,
1991
We have put that gun to our
mothers’ heads for… baseball stadiums?
Here in Seattle, Safeco Field was budgeted at $417 million. State and
local government contributions totaled $342 million. The team’s ownership
committed to $75 million, plus all cost overruns. When the overruns reached
$100 million, the team tried to get additional public money. (Thankfully,
the Public Facilities District has declined.)
Aside
from being a better facility for the Mariners (which it is, by far), Safeco
Field is in no
other way superior to the Kingdome it replaced. In fact, it is less useful
than the Kingdome, which also hosted football games, tractor pulls, monster
truck contests, concerts, car and boat shows, etc., none of which can be
held at Safeco Field. Most of the facilities built in other cities are also
baseball-only stadiums. This truly is a transfer of hundreds of millions of
dollars from the people of Washington state and King County to the ownership
of the Mariners.
The legitimate function of government is to hold a monopoly on the use of
force, not to redistribute wealth. This applies regardless of whether the
redistribution is to corporations or individuals. If MLB teams cannot survive without this most despicable form of
corporate welfare, let ‘em close down.
