LAST WEEK, sportswriter Stephanie Myles described major league baseball owners’ proposal for the elimination of two big-league teams as “a contraction plan few want.” Myles writes for the Montreal Gazette, so you’d expect her to say that. Her Expos are, along with the Minnesota Twins, one of the two teams meant to go on the chopping block before spring training. I’m not going to rejoice at the loss of either team. It’s true that, since they moved to Minnesota from Washington four decades ago, the Twins have proved Minneapolis-St. Paul the worst baseball metropolis in history. Better to have left the Braves in Boston or the Dodgers in Brooklyn than to have wasted such teams on such ungrateful fans. The Twins have managed to play before empty seats despite pouring money into a state-of-the-art domed stadium and having one of the most consistently star-studded lineups in either league: Tony Oliva (perhaps the most underrated hitter of the past half-century), Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, Kirby Puckett (the most exciting ballplayer since Pete Rose), Jim Perry, Bert Blyleven (who ran up numbers to match Walter Johnson’s), to name just a few. There was also that 1987 team that managed the extraordinary feat of winning the World Series despite being outscored in the course of the year. But when I think of the Twins, I’ll think of the stars, not their fans’ indifference. I’ll miss the Twins. The Expos, meanwhile, never made the playoffs in 33 years, and seemed to produce stars (Rusty Staub, Ken Singleton, Pedro Martinez) only to export them to the United States. They are, however, in their mix of baseball and the French language, the only institution to have successfully combined the two great achievements of Western civilization. They’re also the National League team easiest to pick up on the radio in New England. I’ll miss the Expos, too. But Myles’s belief that contraction is unpopular is wrong. Let’s not kid ourselves. The major leagues are too big already. The great problem is pitching. There appears to be a limited number of major-league caliber pitchers in the world, and that number appears to be about 250. Assuming 10-man pitching staffs, this means that, beyond 24 or 26 teams, you frequently have people on the mound who are a quantum level below the batters they’re pitching to. You have batting practice masquerading as big-league ball. You have games that end 23-2 and 16-15. You have a travesty of major league baseball’s most sacred records, most notoriously Mark McGwire’s cheaply obtained 70-home-run season in the year of the last expansion in 1998. (Barry Bonds’s 73 are a different story. Bonds–unlike McGwire with his .263 lifetime average–showed an ability to hit big-league pitching with some consistency even before baseball’s last burst of expansion. But that’s another argument.) It is long past time to cut out the game’s dead wood. Unfortunately, everyone wants a (litigative) piece of the owners, and the road back to 28–or ideally 24–teams runs through a minefield of lawsuits. Florida’s attorney general, fearing for Miami’s Marlins and Tampa’s Devil Rays, is seeking to subpoena documents. Minnesotans want a court order to compel the Twins to play out the last year of their lease in the Metrodome, and Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone even seeks an end to baseball’s antitrust exemption. But the most likely roadblock to contraction will be major-league baseball’s players’ union, whose rank and file earn an average of $2.2 million a year. Union head Don Fehr dreads losing 54 spots that had heretofore been filled by lavishly compensated scrubs. Compromise may be necessary. If contraction proves impossible, the owners should insist on another popular reform that only the unions have blocked. Specifically, as a condition for not contracting, they should move to eliminate the designated hitter rule, which has deranged the game’s symmetry, sapped its strategic interest, and now has infected baseball everywhere from Triple-A to high school to Little League–all to allow the game’s most overrated has-beens to eke out a few years more at their peak salaries. If the owners stay firm on their plans either to shrink the big leagues or eliminate the DH once and for all, fans can go into the winter confident that baseball will be a better sport by the time spring training starts in February. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
