Baseball Owners Vote To Eliminate Two Teams
And, they’re voting to eliminate all chances for the Senators to take their rightful place as “last in the American League.”
Shit.
At least we’re still first in war.
I’m waiting for us to be first in peace, however. 
Bastards. My city sent Jackie Robinson to the majors.
Ah well. I guess it was gonna happen anyway. Montreal and baseball haven’t clicked for a while. Stadium sucks and it’s nowhere close.
-SE
Wow, is it just me, or is this the huge red flag that says things have gotten way out of hand.
I love baseball, it’s my favorite sport, and I been a huge Indians fan since I was a kid. ( So ya, I remember Gaylord Perry pitching)
The way things normally work, I can see a normally functioning company cutting money losing franchises, but for me that only works if no public money is involved.
Baseball has had public money involved for years. Us evil smokers subsidized Jacobs Field for example. (A place you can’t smoke by the way)
I think it’s gone to baseball’s head. Baseball isn’t necessarily loosing money on it’s bottom of the list performers, it’s just not making enough.
This part bugged me:
- The move could set up a battle among cities to avoid being eliminated. Government assistance for new ballparks could get teams off the endangered list.*
So if baseball extorts the public for more money they may get to keep their team. That just blows.
I suppose I should have lost my faith in baseball years ago, this just drives another nail in the coffin.
Hey, the bubble burst. Like the stock market. Constant expansion and holding cities hostage, playing cities against each other all for the sake of money has got to stop.
Baseball in Florida was a major setback. Neither franchise is making much, nothing like they imagined.
I did give up on Major League(?) Baseball years ago.
Gonna happen in the NFL and NBA too. LA might be glad in a few years it doesn’t have an NFL franchise. Don’t have to keep feeding it. There’s so much to do there, that the Dodgers have a lock on it. Just ask the Angels. MLB is just the first to run it into the ground, IMHO. :wally
Exactly. I’m sure that this is why the Minnesota Twins are coming up so much in this discussion. Carl Pohlad asked for the people of the State of Minnesota to buy him a brand-new stadium, and they said no. They also called his bluff on selling the team to people who were going to move it to North Carolina. I can just see the threats of the future–“Buy us a new stadium–remember what happened to Minnesota?” Or even, “Buy us a new stadium or else we’ll move your team to Minnesota!”
I was surprised to see the Rangers on the list, too, though. Seems that they want to eliminate the spectre of Washington from the entire league!
I suppose it’s easier for Selig to simply get rid of all the small-market teams rather than take the time and effort to fix what is wrong with Major League Baseball’s salary and revenue structure. However, that will leave a whole lot of fans in those markets who probably just won’t care very much about MLB anymore. A Twins fan is much more likely to start cheering for the Saint Paul Saints (a minor league team) or the Minnesota Vikings football team than they are to cheer for the Milwaukee Brewers or the New York Yankees! I think that this is the beginning of the end for MLB.
That’s my dream, anyway.
And to some extent, it’s happening. This year’s WS, despite universal acclaim as a classic - by those who stayed up and watched it, anyway - had the third-worst TV ratings of all time, despite a big audience for Game 7.
Baseball’s attendance is about where it was in 1993.
And on TV, MLB seems afraid to go head-to-head against football - either NFL or college. (How else can we explain their play-the-WS-in-the-middle-of-the-night fetish, even on weekends?)
One of these days, baseball’s going to wake up and discover that it’s become a second-tier sport, like the NHL and NASCAR, and its claim to being America’s Pastime has become a joke.
And when that happens, they’ve earned it. Long, slow playoff games in the middle of the night, dozens of games in July and August that no longer mean much, repeated shutdowns of the game in a misguided and futile attempt to break the players’ union, and now a willingness to close down clubs, including a club (the Twins/Senators 1.0) that has been around for a century, rather than solve its problems by moving it back to Washington, where it came from.
As CNN’s Chris Isidore says,
And then, and then, they whine and cry, that no one gives a fuck about baseball and wonder why. Dumbasses.
When the last game of the World Series was on, Sunday night, the postgame shows were still on at 11pm central time! I was off that night, so, I could stay up and watch, But MOST people work day shifts, and quite a few have their workday start at 4-5 AM, (my mom does this) and if you have to go to work then,and your VCR is shit, you’re fucked.(our VCR is shit)I love baseball, but, baseball you are killing me here!
I think the strike is going to continue to haunt the league for a long long time coming. I was just starting to get into baseball in 91 during what was an incredible world series between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves. I remember a few years later an incredible pennant race between the Braves and the Giants, wherein the Braves came from being something like 8 games back at the All-Star break to win it. Then, the next year (I think), came the strike. By the time baseball came back, I no longer cared. I think many my age feel the same.
I absolutely agree with you, The Red Menace. I saw my first Twins game in person during that 1991 season and I watched the Twins go all the way to the World Series. It was just a magical time and I became a big baseball fan. Then, the 1994 strike came. I was in college by then, and I simply found other things to do. By the time baseball came back, I had completely lost interest in it. I think that I have gone to one post-strike game.
So, is Selig axing the Twins because he is expecting Twins fans to become Brewers fans? You know what, it ain’t going to happen! Minnesotans (and other Twins fans in surrounding states) are just going to find other things to do, and MLB’s fan base will shrink by that much more. Baseball, ho hum.
May I just comment that there are baseball fans on the West Coast, too? 5:00 is a dandy time for the World Series, especially when there are a lot of West Coast fans who missed the first few innings, if not whole games, during the playoffs because they were on when we were at work? The only reason I got to see more than one Seattle/Indians game was because I took half a day off for Game 5.
Not that I doubt you, but could I get a source for this?
I live in Minnesota, and my thoughts on losing the Twins (or Vikings for that matter) have always been, “Who gives a rat’s ass?” Same for the Vikings. I kinda like baseball, but I don’t support the use of state money to subsidize a hyper-expensive TV show.
I will feel bad for my dad, though, if he doesn’t have the Twins to listen to in the summer.
-Myron
I believe that was just Tamex’s guess.
On the other hand, there’s no excuse for all weekend World Series game to start as late as they do. And frankly, if it’s a choice between one time zone missing the beginning of the game and one missing the end, you should miss the beginning. The end is the important part.
Chris Isadore can smell my mule.
Well, I did it differently this time and still managed to screw up the quoting, even worse this time. Phil, hit me with your rhythm stick!
I’ll just reiterate that I was talking primarily about the weekends. They could certainly start weekend WS games (and earlier playoff games as well) at 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific time.
It really got under my skin when Fox started both its Sunday LCS games at something like 8pm a few weeks ago, so not only did neither of them finish up at a reasonable hour, but also the 2 baseball games were head-to-head with each other, which they didn’t used to do in the LCS. You think Fox’s football schedule might’ve had something to do with that? :rolleyes:
I’ve been primarily a baseball fan for almost all my life. But the way they’re running the game, in terms of how it affects me as a fan, has pretty much made a football fan out of me. So I’m with anya marie on this.
And , just think, RTF, there will be basketball, hockey, and soccer.
I will never start to watch football,FWIW, but I find that I care less about baseball every year.