Off Wing Opinion

The Washington Post's Tom Boswell talks tough to Major League Baseball over the prospect of moving the Montreal Expos to Washington D.C.:

Baseball needs to make up its mind about the Washington area -- and do so pretty quickly. The sport should consider this a friendly warning: If the game is serious about relocating the Expos to the District or Northern Virginia, then it better get on the stick, because the ground is shifting here.

From the public to politicians, Washington and Northern Virginia finally agree on one thing: We've gone as far as we're willing to go. We've made our case for decades. We've done demographic studies, Orioles impact polls, stadium design drawings, ballpark cost proposals and financing plans. We've amassed potential ownership groups and political supporters.

In short, this area has made its best offers -- on both sides of the river. We're not upping the ante any more. In fact, quite the opposite. If baseball procrastinates in its decision to relocate the Expos, it's almost certain that neither the District nor Northern Virginia will be able to make as good an offer -- or in D.C.'s case, perhaps any serious offer at all -- a year from now. There's nothing more to be said. Except "yes" or "no." That's up to baseball.

Over the past 18 months, I've written continually on the topic of the Expos possible moving to Washington, D.C. And over that time period, I've catalogued a number of obstacles that stood in the way of them getting here:

the opposition of Orioles owner Peter Angelos;
community opposition in both D.C. and Northern Virginia;
the lack of a big name ownership group with the dollars available to purchase the team, pay off Angelos, and provide significant private financing for a stadium;
possible traffic disruption around proposed stadium sites;
the absence of the combination of approved public financing and a designated stadium site in either jurisdiction;
and market conditions that have driven the possible sale price of the Expos below the point where the owners inside MLB can expect to get a reasonable return on their investment in the team.

If you read Boswell's column, you'd get the decided impression that all of these hurdles had been surmounted. But here we are, 18 months later, and none of these issues has been answered to the satisfaction of MLB. And if MLB isn't satisfied now, it's hard to see how they'll ever be satisfied.

Not that we should care. While I would love to see baseball return to the area, I don't think it should come at the expense of creating all sorts of new taxes (including a raft of new taxes targetted at individuals who come to do business in the area from out of town, something that makes Metropolitan Washington less attractive as a convention destination).

Metropolitan Washington has been a great place to live for a while now, and getting a Major League Baseball team, while a nice addition, won't improve the quality of life here in any appreciable way. In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who wouldn't say that life here has gotten a lot better since September 30, 1971 -- the day the second edition of the Washington Senators played their last game in RFK Stadium.

And life here will keep getting better, with or without Major League Baseball.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2003 at 6:56 am by Eric McErlain and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Jack Evans, chairman of the D.C. Council Finance Committee, is refusing to move the bill concerning financing a new baseball stadium out of his committee until Major League Baseball gives the city a firm commitment that the Expos are going to move to the city:

"I'm not moving anything relative to this out of my committee without a commitment from baseball," Evans said. "There is no purpose moving this ahead, raising taxes and so forth, and then have baseball say, 'Never mind.' And why does baseball care about the [financing] structure, anyway? If they come, we're going to build a stadium. We've done the convention center. We've done the MCI Center. The structure shouldn't matter to them. "This thing doesn't move unless I say so, and I need something from them."

And if MLB waits another year before moving the Expos, things get even more complex locally, as 2004 is an election year in the District.

There are 21 days until the July 15 deadline MLB's relocation committee set to announce the fate of the Expos for next season. But as one source told the Washington Times' Eric Fisher, "The sort of things that begin to happen when you're getting close to a deal just aren't happening."

As I've said over and over again, Washington is not getting the Expos this year, and perhaps never.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2003 at 11:57 am by Eric McErlain and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Washington Baseball Club, the ownership group led by Republican political operative Fred Malek, has just hired Goldman Sachs for advice and financial services in their pursuit of the Montreal Expos.

Malek's group, which includes Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, is determined to bring a team back to the District -- first at RFK Stadium, and then at a new ballpark that should be ready by 2007.

Major League Baseball has set a deadline of July 15 to announce whether or not the Expos will be relocated in time for the 2004 baseball season. 22 days remain before that deadline.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2003 at 4:06 pm by Eric McErlain and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Let's shout it from the rooftops -- the Montreal Expos aren't coming to Washington, D.C. Not next season, and unless something changes radically in the next few months, probably not ever. After last night, it's clear that the political support to build a new stadium in the District just doesn't exist.

After expressing doubts about Mayor Anthony Williams's plan to publicly finance a new home for the Montreal Expos, the D.C. City Council savaged the plan in a six-hour public hearing last night. Local support for the plan is hard to find, and wasn't helped by the findings of the District's Chief Financial Officer, who claims that the revenue numbers in the Mayor's plan could fall far short of projections:

D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi warned yesterday that the mayor's plan to spend $339 million to lure major league baseball to Washington could face a shortfall of nearly $2 million a year if the team plays poorly.

Gandhi contended that losing teams draw far fewer fans than winning ones, and he called the projected sales tax on tickets "a bit uncertain" because many tickets would be sold on the Internet, where taxation is rare.

"With an average or better record, the District's new team generates sufficient revenue to the support the debt service," he told the D.C. Council's Finance and Revenue Committee. "A losing team, however, does not generate sufficient revenue."

He also estimated that overall revenue could run as low as $13.1 million a year, nearly $2 million less than administration officials say they need to pay off bonds.

Bottom line: there will be no vote by the D.C. City Council on the stadium financing plan before the July 15th Major League All-Star Game -- the date Major League Baseball (MLB) set as the original deadline on the decision of the fate of the Expos. In the meantime, MLB has begun to explore the possibility of having the Expos play even more games in Puerto Rico next season.

If Mayor Williams really wants baseball in D.C., he's going to have to find a better way to sell it to a sceptical City Council -- and he'll need a plan where he'll essentially have to pay off a majority of the Council in order to get his way (something nobody is really factoring into the total cost of the stadium).

Whether or not Williams wants to invest the political capital to get this done, or even if he should, is another question entirely. What I'm curious about is where the two local groups who have expressed an interest in a D.C. baseball team (Fred Malek's group, and another headed by New York real estate developer Mark Broxmeyer), are in this whole process?

In Virginia, a stadium financing plan is already in place, but local opposition to any stadium plan is simply biding its time, wating for the moment that the Virginia Baseball Stadium Authority chooses an actual site to build on. And once it does, you'll see the opposition come together in an instant.

In the end, all D.C. baseball fans can really do is steel themselves again for another season of driving up I-95 to see the Orioles.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2003 at 10:20 am by Eric McErlain and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.