I’m not a Twins fan, but I think it would be rather horrible if they got rid of a franchise with so much tradition. Harmon Killebrew, Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, Rod Carew, world championships, etc.
If they really do pull the trigger on a couple of teams, you can be sure that within a few years the owners will have bidders from Charlotte, Nashville, Memphis, D.C./Virginia etc. lining up for the next expansion, and whoever “wins” the new franchises will pay a rather premium price.
It’s unbelievable. Rather than fix the inherent problems with the game’s salary structure (or lack thereof) they are going to whittle away teams. I don’t even blame Expo fans for their actions – their former players could routinely fill out an all-star lineup, and everytime his/her team got really good there was a strike.
And chopping away the Twins?? One of the few small market teams that actually did find a way to win last year? Pure genius from the MLB House of Ideas.
Why the Twins and not the Devil Dogs er I mean Rays?
actually, they might get rid of them too.
It’s not definite the Twins are going, they’re just on the list of potential teams to be cut. AFAIK, the other teams under consideration are the Expos, the Marlins, and the Rangers. I’ve also heard the Devil Rays being tossed around as being under consideration for contraction.
But today, owners have voted to eliminate two teams.
Why MLB would have at their helm, a man with a vested interest (Selig owns or partly owns Milwaukee), is beyond me. Selig also has the distinction of Winning last years Jerk of The Year Award.
Baseball would be far better off without him.
I honestly can’t understand this recent vote to eliminate two teams. So, let me get this straight, Major League Baseball: you had a vote to eliminate two teams, without specifying WHICH teams would be eliminated? I don’t know, if I was a MLB owner voting on contraction, I think my yay/nay vote just MIGHT depend on the specific teams being contracted!
The other thing that blows my mind about this whole issue is the fact that we even know about it. If my sport had just played its World Champion-deciding series, a thrilling series that came down to a bottom-of-the-ninth comeback in the final game, the last thing I would do is make public my plan to eliminate two of the thirty teams! And if contraction was definitely my plan, I wouldn’t leak the fact that two unidentified teams will be contacted! How about you guys figure out which cities get the shaft and then let us know, instead of making millions of fans wonder if they’ll have a team next spring. The way these stories have been leaked, coincidentally at the same time that the Collective Bargaining Agreement with the Player’s Association runs out, leaves no doubt in my mind that this is nothing more than a bargaining tool for the owners.
As long as one of the teams being contracted is the Yankees, I support it.
Otherwise, it’s a bad idea.
I live in Minneapolis and have heard the Twins-goings-on for years now.
The Twins are gone and here is my interpretation of why:
We stood up to them and must be punished.
That’s my take.
Goodbye Twins. I won’t miss you!
Blink
Well the rat vomit bastard list is now chock full of “baseball” people…Carl Pohlad, Bud Selig, Donald Fehr, all the other owners…pretty much anybody who has contributed to the current state of baseball and the potential contraction of the Minnesota Twins.
My very first baseball game was at the old metropolitan stadium back in 1976 watching the Twins play the Baltimore Orioles. I watched them when they were horrible but had a bunch of new players, Kent Hrbek, Gary Gaetti, Tom Brunanasky, Frank Viola, Kirby Puckett a few years later. And they struggled but they prevailed for two World Series Cahmpionships…only the Yankees have more in the last 20 years.
BlinkingDuck is absolutely right, this is pure greed and vidivctiveness byt baseball against those who dared stand up to the billionaire owner (and by proxy the millionaire players) and refused to build them a stadium. How goddamn ridiculous is it for any of these sports leagues/franchises to be asking for public handouts for their millionaire/billionaire pocketbooks while the rest of the country suffers through an economic downturn. Carl Pohlad can take some rusty barbed wire and stick in his eye through his miniscule heart and right out his fucking anus.
And Bud Selig and Donald Fehr for fucking up baseball so much so that a team like the Twins is eliminated, they also deserve the rusty barbed wire treatment. It is just sickening that they expanded, then proceded to make baseball the most functionally and fiscially dysfunctional sport going and now the Twins are probably going to be one of the vitims.
Unlike BlinkingDuck, I will miss the Twins, just not their conniving, fuckershitcuntassbastard owner.
Goodbye baseball…I am a fan no more.
And exactly what does Donald Fehr have to do with the possibility that MLB might fold the Twins? I missed that part.
From my rant:
Donald Fehr is one of the people responsible for the current dysfunctional state of baseball, therefore he is shit.
When I first heard about the very real possibility of contraction a few months ago, I thought it was actually a good idea. It still is a good idea, in theory.
The talent level in the MLB has been diluted quite a bit due to the two relatively recent rounds of expansion. I believe that there probably are at least a good 80 players on big league clubs that do not have “major league” talent.
But now that some of the details are coming out as to HOW this contraction will take place, it all does seem pretty terrible.
Don’t worry. It is very, very doubtful that it will happen.
There are so many issues involved here, including what will happen to the teams minor league franchises, and so many lawsuits will be filed, I don’t think the owners honestly believe they can pull this off, especially in the four months before spring training camps open. It’s a bargaining ploy to use against the players union now that the existing agreement has expired. If they had a workable contract on the table, nobody would have even suggested this. Whether it works or not, I don’t think the teams are going anywhere.
Baseball needs a salary cap, for sure. Let’s say $90M per team per year. Of course, some teams are still going to have double the payroll of other teams, but it’s a good start. It would force the Yanks (whom I love, btw) to trim a good $25M from their ranks, and those two or three high quality players can make a big difference. Plus, when the cash flow dries up, free agent contracts will come back down to reasonable levels, allowing more teams to realistically make bids.
I’m not sure where I stand on revenue sharing. I think it’s good to a certain extent, but the league should force the teams on the receiving end to spend that money on payroll. Bring in the quality players, and the crowds will come.
If you don’t piss us all off first.
And screw Bud. How a fucking OWNER ended up as commissioner… I just don’t get it. They should dig up Judge Landis and set his skeleton down at the conference table. He’d do just as well.
I love the idea of a salary cap, I think it would go a long way toward solving baseball’s revenue disparity. However, I can’t in good conscience support a proposal puts an artificial limit on how much money a worker can earn in a year. Why should baseball players have to agree on a limit to their salaries if the owners can’t stop throwing piles of money at free agents? Why is it the players’ union’s responsibility to help curb the owners’ free-spending ways?
Don Fehr has a job, and that is to negotiate the best deal he can for his employers–the players. He is under no compunction to sacrifice the best interests of his clients in order to placate a group of owners so clueless about their own business that they will contract two teams a mere four years after an expansion. Bud Selig, on the other hand, is the commissioner of baseball. As commissioner, he has an imperative to act in the best interests of baseball. Not “the best interests of the baseball owners”, and not “the best interests of the poor, beleagured small-market owners”, the best interests of baseball, period. If anyone should be vilified, it is he, because at least you can say that Don Fehr is doing his job. Can Bud Selig honestly say that he is doing his job, to act in the best interests of baseball?
I completely agree with BlinkingDuck. If the taxpayers of Minnesota had bought Pohlad a stadium, Bud would be singing the praises of the Twins as an example of what every small-market team needs: a brand-spanking-new taxpayer-paid-for stadium. Finally, for once, the fans had the balls to say, “Show us the winning team, show us that you’re willing to put money in the, and we’ll come see you play–then let’s talk about a stadium.” I can’t wait to see where the Brewers, Pirates, and other “small-market” teams with new stadiums are attendance-wise in a few years once the thrill of the new stadiums wear off. It would warm my heart to the point of spontaneous combustion to hear Bud Selig announcing the relocation of the Milwaukee Brewers to Las Vegas in 2004.
Maybe they out to consider a 30 team contraction. Here are good reasons to eliminate all 30 teams.
The owners are conspiring to extort taxpayer financed stadiums out of cities under threat of blackmail. Blackmail and extortion are supposed to be crimes. Anyone want to join me in a class action suit against the owners? If the contraction plan is tried there’ll be lawsuits aplenty (union vs. owners, minor league cities vs. owners, owners vs. owners) so why not?
Weirddave:
True.
Since you’ve still said nothing about how Fehr is responsible for the state of the game, I can only conclude that your brain is shit. All your bad-mouthing of Fehr is backed up with the equivalent of “because I said so.”
Thank you for promoting ignorance, and keep up the good work. :rolleyes:
RTF and I have discussed this in different threads over the last few weeks and I think we’re on the relatively same page.
This is a two-pronged bargaining tactic by the owners.
A) To send the union a wake-up call with a new Collective Bargaining Agreement needing to be negotiated.
B) To place pressure on cities that have balked at paying for new stadiums.
Nothing more.
Even if it happens it won’t control salary inflation. Neither the Twins nor Expos have been a significant part of the free agent market for 10 years. Therefore they’re not driving up prices. Unfortunately, given arbitration, they SUFFER from free agent prices because they’re 4-6 year players are compared to free agent salaries when they go to arbitration.
And Tampa is not a candidate for contraction because they have like 25 years left on their lease at the SunCoast Dome (or whatever that pit is called). That lease would have to be broken or bought out before the team could vanish. That would up the price considerably. Montreal, Florida and Minnesota are all on short-term leases that they could walk away from if they were contracted.
I believe, in my heart of hearts, that the true economic problem in baseball isn’t player salaries but the disparity between large and small market teams.
Here’s my solution:
Don’t contract.
Establish meaningful revenue sharing. That would mean licensing dollars, half or more of local TV revenue, a 50-50 split of profits from attendance, etc.
Eliminate arbitrated salaries for players between 3+ years and 6 years of service time.
Move free agency from 6 years to 4 years.
Have a salary scale for players with between 0-4. All players in those years get the same pay, ie minimum wage for 0, 2x minimum wage for 1-2, etc…
Do those things and you’ll see no economic disparities harming baseball at all.
Anyone also notice Bug Selig’s veiled threat when discussing the vote to contract by two teams? He mentioned that there were several owners who actually supported contracting four teams. So not only does Bud come off as some sort of savior (“see, we could have contracted by 4 teams, but I held out for only 2!”), but this also serves notice to all those other “small-market” teams whose taxpayers haven’t bought new ballparks for them in the past 3 years. See this, Kansas City Royals? If you taxpayers don’t shape up and spend $500 million on a new ballpark, your team will go away, just like the Twins! Thanks, Bud! You’re just a boon to baseball fans everywhere, ain’t ya?