When it comes to following the continuing saga of Washington, D.C.'s quest to lure a Major League Baseball team to the nation's capital, the newspaper to read has to be the Washington Times. Led by sports business reporter Eric Fisher, the Times has stayed with the story more or less consistently over the past few years, making sure to look at the entire enterprise with a jaundiced eye, rather than an opportunity for regional boosterism.
Over the course of the end of last week and through the weekend, the paper ran a string of stories that merited some attention. First, last Thursday, Fisher wrote a piece that was ostensibly about D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams' stadium financing plan, but ultimately turned into a news analysis examining Baltimore Orioles' owner Peter Angelos' claims concerning the ability of the Baltimore-Washington area to support two baseball teams.
On the same day, Dick Heller penned a brutal, but fair, attack on Angelos and Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and their role in keeping baseball out of D.C.:
Until Angelos sells the Orioles and an honestly impartial commissioner replaces Selig, we're not going to see a team in Washington. All indications are that baseball will keep the pathetic Expos in limbo for two more years until it can raise the contraction issue once more, and who cares what we want or deserve. If that's the way it has to be, we can live with it
So let me get this straight: MLB is surprised that Expos are failing to draw well with a team stripped of its two biggest draws (Puerto Rican Javier Vazquez and All-World outfielder Vlad Guerrero), in a small market, playing in a dreaful stadium in a terribly traffic-congested part of the city, with a third of the per-capita income and double and a half the unemployment of the US and charging more than the average ticket price for games in the US? I continue to be amussed at MBL’s stupidity.