Baseball Contraction Unlikely for 2002
N E W Y O R K, Dec. 6 -- To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it's getting late early for the baseball owners' contraction plans.
Despite Commissioner Bud Selig's announcement on Nov. 6 — just two days after the Arizona Diamondbacks beat the New York Yankees in a memorable World Series — that baseball's owners were planning to cut back from 30 major-league teams to 28, several roadblocks are preventing a full-bore contraction effort from taking place this off-season.
A Minnesota lawsuit has already thrown the owners' contraction timetable out of whack, while on Wednesday an arbitrator began examining whether the owners can eliminate franchises without agreement from the players' union. Legal challenges from affected states and minor-league teams are possible, too.
And while the owners say contraction is necessary to restore the game's economic health — Selig claims major-league baseball lost half a billion dollars in 2001 — unhappy members of Congress are saying they would consider overturning baseball's antitrust exemption to prevent teams from being eliminated.
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has dismissed Selig's financial claims, called the contraction plan "ill-considered," and threatened to act on a bill that would "ensure that the full weight of the antitrust laws applies to this anti-competitive decision." The House Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on the subject today.
Then too, with the owners having not yet even picked which teams they think should be eliminated, the difficulty of working out logistical matters like scheduling strongly indicates that baseball will enter the 2002 season with its full complement of teams.
"By introducing this on Nov. 6, without having talked to the players at all … the notion that these guys actually thought they'd be able to contract really stretches the imagination," says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and the author of Baseball and Billions, an analysis of the game's finances.
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