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| Tuesday, November 6 Users on contraction: Most don't like it ESPN.com |
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Baseball owners voted Tuesday to eliminate two teams before the start of next season. While commissioner Bud Selig would not name the teams, the Montreal Expos, Minnesota Twins and Florida Marlins were the teams recently mentioned as the likeliest candidates.
Here are some of your responses:
Baseball failed to address the fundamental inequalities between teams. Instead, they just decided to cut their losses by cutting two teams. This action is inexcusable. Without real salary caps and revenue sharing, baseball will be in the same boat it is today five years from now.
No matter which teams are eliminated, it is my opinion, the darkest and most depressing decision in baseball history, even worse than the 1994 strike. At least then, there was a future for all teams. Now, two teams have no future. ... If two teams are eliminated, so should Bud Selig's tenure as commissioner of baseball.
This is unbelievable. A league that cannot settle on salary caps or any real profit sharing is going to dump two franchises and think the problems will be over? Get real. All this contraction will do is to attract baseball fans to other professional sports.
Will eliminating two teams help baseball? Greed, greed, greed ... That won't be eliminated. Greed is the whole driving force behind this issue. Contraction will not solve anything.
I understand that this may be merely a bluff for Selig and owners to finally make the right demands, but like any bluff, it will have real consequences if it's called. How quickly MLB has forgotten the lessons of the strike, how quickly fans can find other sources of entertainment. I, for one, will be done with MLB, and I'm sure I won't be alone.
The owners got themselves into this mess with fiscal irresponsibility (Rangers, Orioles, etc.), and are now sacrificing two teams to bail themselves out.
Contraction doesn't help anything. After all, MLB will probably add two new teams in the next five years or so anyway. Any short-term gains for lower-market teams from contraction will be offset when the new players go via free agency.
Instead of contracting two teams the better solution would be to get Selig out of baseball. ... The real reason for Selig's need to act like the savior of baseball is to correct the problems the owners have created for themselves.
Eliminating two teams makes sense, because it will make baseball a much more
compelling game to watch. The talent level will rise and 16-11 games will once again
be a rarity. The game will be helped by the elimination of 50 players who should
be in the minor leagues. However, eliminating the Twins goes against everything that is great about baseball. Tradition is what makes baseball so unique and the Twins are one of the great franchises
in major league baseball.
I'm all for a business trying to become profitable. However, I urge any potential businessman to stay away from ownership if his sole intention is to make a profit at the fans' expense. Maybe that anti-trust exemption shouldn't be excused anymore and Selig an Co. can try to run this business like any other business in this country. All in all, it's yet another reason I just don't care about baseball like I used to.
Go for it. In fact, eliminate four teams: Expos, D-Rays, Marlins and Angels ... but don't touch the Twinkies, they have too much tradition.
I think Bud Selig is doing the right thing. Getting rid of two teams would be a start of trying to help the game of baseball. I disagree though on one of the teams he chose. The Expos are of course the obvious one. The Twins on the other hand are not.
First team to draw 3 million fans ... two world championships ... three Hall of Famers ... proud 41-year franchise. ELIMINATION ... Priceless.
Back in 1994, I placed equal blame on both the players and owners. If baseball loses the Twins, I will focus all of the blame at the owners. This is sick.
Contraction's greatest effect on baseball will likely be to further stratify it's current salary structure -- only the richest teams will be able to afford the best players from the contracted teams. Selig's insistence that relocation is not a viable option -- hello, D.C. has a stadium and the demographics for a team -- is further proof that this charade is nothing more than a clumsy leverage grab, both in the owners' ability to extort publicly financed stadiums from the remaining major league cities and in their continuing (futile) effort to negotiate a salary cap with the players' union. The sad fact is that almost everyone is on to their game and fewer and fewer people are buying it. But you tell me: Does dumping 2-3 million paying customers seem like a good way to increase business?
I am in favor of eliminating teams only if it helps to break the stranglehold that the players' union has on the game. Look, of course the owners have plenty of money, but that is their right as the owners. The players did not make these owners rich, period. So they are not deserving of such a huge share of their money. I am more in favor of an NFL-styled salary system for MLB. A few years ago, I almost lost my beloved Mariners to St. Petersburg. I would accept contraction even of the Mariners for a year or two, as many teams as it takes, if it means we could break the union.
Fifteen years ago, what teams would have been contracted? The Indians and Mariners. Now we'll never know if the Twins (or Marlins) could have been baseball's next dynasty. Shame on the owners who are more concerned with short-term gains than the long-term health of the game. What's to stop them from contracting more teams next year, and the year after that? And don't worry Twins fans, 10 years from now, you'll probably get an expansion team after building a new stadium.
As a Canadian baseball fan you would think I would be upset if the Expos left ... NOPE! Take the money from the sale of that pathetic excuse for a franchise and give it to the Montreal Canadiens.
Dumb and dumber. Baseball owners continue to feed us their wildy innaccurate and often outright false ideas. Shame on them.
Of course it doesn't help. For crying out loud, anybody who thinks that this will solve MLB's "problems" is seriously deluded, and there are 31 of those deluded folks in Chicago who, by all rights, should have a difficult time sleeping tonight. ... In the beginning, God created baseball. Owners were deemed necessary, so God lined up all of the people who could afford to own a baseball team in order of intelligence. Then, God picked the people at the stupid end of the line and gave them all a team.
The Expos were exemplary in their development of young talent. Many great players passed through their system from Gary Carter to Larry Walker, from Randy Johnson to Pedro Martinez. But none could stay and the fans never came. It would be a shame to dismantle that organization, but a bigger shame to leave Vladimir Guerrero playing day after day to an empty stadium until he, too, must leave.
If MLB goes through with this, I quit. I'm not a fan of any of the teams to be affected, but I won't be watching baseball next year live or on TV. I'll be watching a sport that doesn't have an antitrust exemption to protect its owners from their own stupidity. If I need a baseball fix, I'll watch college baseball. Go NFL! Go NBA! Go NHL!
The only franchise that at this point is beyond repair is -- and fans in Canada forgive me -- the Expos. But instead of contracting them, move them. Baseball needs to return to our nation's capitol (Orioles, learn to live with it). Move the Expos to D.C., but leave everyone else alone.
Contraction is a bad public relations move for MLB. It is the professional sports equivalent of corporate downsizing and brings to light the economic insanity that exists. MLB would be better off finding suitable cities to relocate these teams to instead of disbanding them.
1991-2000 attendance figures: Milwaukee Brewers, 15,238,305; Minnesota Twins, 15,499,156. And they're looking at contracting the Twins? Interesting.
Why don't we drop the contraction idea and get rid of the silly DH instead?
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