04/19/24
April 21, 2002
Three weeks into the season and look who's in 1st Place.: That's right, the Twins and les Expos. Not exactly the plan Budlite and Co. dreamed up. It's a long season and no one expects life to imitate Disney. Can you contract two winning teams, or are we going to have to buy a team?
I don't support contraction, but I'm at a loss to find anything in the history of the Expos that makes them untouchable if a contraction did occur. The Twins trips to the World Series are in their favor, but even then, like a lot of teams they were built on top of the corpse of another community's franchise (the Washington Senators). Why is baseball in Minnesota sacrosanct? The Devil Rays are a bad team in the worst stadium in the league, but they're too new a franchise to write off entirely. It also would border on fraud to sell the owners an expansion team at such a high price ($130 million in 1995) and take it away before the owners and the community have a chance to recoup their investment.
posted by rcade at 09:17 AM on April 22, 2002
I don't think the Twins will be contracted. The state has really rallied behind them, and we are trying to work something out with future owners and the public to get a stadium deal worked out. Even though most of us in Minnesota feel that Selig has blackmailed us into funding a stadium, we feel that losing the Twins would hurt us in the long run. Plus we just swept Cleveland and our hopes are high again. Remember we went through this with the North Stars and we don't want it to happen again. Go Twins.
posted by emoeby at 10:54 AM on April 22, 2002
I just want to point out that the last time the Expos were a legitimate first place team (1994), we had a work stoppage. This year, they are in first place (albeit early in the season). What is the talk about baseball now? That there might be a players strike in August. If I was an Expos fan, I'd be thinking tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories right now... Go Expos!
posted by grum@work at 11:08 AM on April 22, 2002
I'm a Mets fan, but I vowed before the season started to pull for the Expos all the way. I'm wearing an Expos cap this season, and I intend to go to Montreal for a weekend series this summer. AL fans should likewise adopt the Twins. It's not that contraction is necessarilly a bad idea, it's that the Twins and the Expos are a connection to baseball history that shouldn't be trifled with. Contract the DevilRays, or some other useless team. Don't mess with the Twins and the Expos.