WHATEVER HAPPENED to investigative reporting?

JUST HOW are we gonna pay for this war, anyway?

BASEBALL COMMISSIONER BUD SELIG (you know, the guy who stole the Seattle Pilots away) has won owner approval (but will undoubtedly get player-union challenges to) a plan to not move two teams but to shut them down altogether. This would leave places for the remaining owners to threaten to move their own teams to, and would lower the leverage of the players’ union in the next round of contract negotiations.

Baseball needs to bring more parity to its small-market teams, not pare them down. The Expos, Twins, and Marlins (the three teams most likely to get one of the two death sentences) all were league leaders at different times in the ’90s, and all have had reasonable attendance before current owners mismanaged them to near-death. Yet it’s those very owners who’d benefit the most from killing the teams. They’ll get cash from the other owners, and will be permitted to buy other MLB teams, thus letting them wreak their destructive management styles onto the Angels or A’s.

“Contraction” (Selig’s term for the scheme) isn’t something successful sports leagues do. It’s what outfits like the American Basketball Association and the North American Soccer League did, just prior to folding completely. For Major League Baseball to get away with this would be an outrage to the sporting community.

In human physiology, a contraction can lead to a birth. Selig’s contraction plan, however, could help lead to the death of baseball as we know it, or at least make it fiscally sicker.