I’m not sure who deserves to be Pitted more: Major League Baseball for being its usual greedy arrogant asstard self or the DC City Council for their ongoing “yes we have a deal – no we don’t” shenanigans (which are going to cost the taxpayers more in the long run).
I’ll bestow a special side pitting on Virginia Governor Kaine, for using the occasion to float a trial balllon suggesting that the NoVA bid might be resurrected (thereby encouraging MLB in its abovenoted asstardhood). Hell, maybe I should make that my main pitting, given that Kaine is the only player in this farce who has any reason to give a damn what I think of him (for the record, that would be: :wally).
Truthfully, I would be thrilled for baseball to move to Northern VA. I don’t understand why the can’t renovate RFK to make it more suitable and avoid all the eminent domain crap going in to get the land for the new stadium. It seems like a waste of taxpayer money when there is so much other crap to fix in DC.
I’m so mad I could spit nickles. The original proposal was about $440 million. After that ugly convention center that just went up a few blocks away I can’t wait to see what the stadium is going to look like. I agree that RFK should be renovated (they already have to some extent) and we continue to use that.
Maybe they’ll find toxic chemical weapons when they start digging, like they did in Spring Valley.
I fucking hate the Council. What a bunch of pansies. I was all set to applaud their stand against the lease, but then they screwed it up by caving at the last minute. Seriously, all of these people are completely freaking useless.
Of course this was started by MLB looking for a city to buttfuck into their deal… or else.
It was elevated to surreal last year (12-31-04) by the outgoing council ramrodding the deal thru before they were replaced. The new council was seated early in '05 and penis ensued. I just have to laugh at tangled webs King Bud (and others) have woven.
I don’t think the new convention center is any worse than the old one, although it is massive. With the state of the school buildings here and the libraries, I think that 600 million could be much better spent.
Hell, no. We had the sense to send the robber barons of MLB packing once. DC can have them (and is almost certainly stuck with them if these flip-flops continue until MLB decides to pursue arbitration on their existing deals).
The one silver lining is that this fiasco will make it at least somewhat risky for teams to pull their standard “gimme more toys or we’ll move to another city” game. (That’s one reason I’m annoyed with Kaine for floating the notion that Virginia might be willing to rescue MLB from this mess.)
Well, Arlington did, I’m pretty sure that the Loudon plan was still on the table when the decision to move to DC was made and could be resurrected fairly quickly if needed.
Technically, yes. Realistically, it was still “on the table” in the same sense that the Black Knight was still “on the battlefield” threatening to bite King Arthur’s knees off.
It’s true that the stadium is going to cost a lot of dough, and there are plenty of things in the District that could use the money. However, speaking as a carpet bagger, as long as Congress prevents D.C. from instituting the commuter tax it desparately needs, the only way to fix that is to lure people like me to stay in town after the end of the work day and spend. In my experience, it sure as hell worked this summer.
Except that area is getting better. The Department of Transportation is moving out near the Navy Yard. That area already looks a lot nicer than it did four years ago. Granted a stadium would help speed things up much like the MCI Center did for the area near Chinatown.
