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If there's a baseball team for the post-dot-com years of the early 21st century, it's the Minnesota Twins. This club even got a pink slip. Battling Major League Baseball's version of a layoff -- called "contraction" by Commissioner Bud Selig -- its future, like the futures of millions of tenuously employed techies, remains murky.
Still, the Twins are off to a blazing start on -- and off -- the field. After sweeping Cleveland on Apr. 20-21, Minnesota is vying for first place in the American League Central. While other franchises are seeing deep dips in attendance, Twins ticket sales are up 30%. Their home opener was sold out, with the largest crowd in six years.
Local TV ratings are spiking, too. Minnesotans seem to be gleefully thumbing their noses at Selig and the Lords of Horsehide. "Hey, would anybody else like to see the Twins stick it to Bud Selig this year?" Don Shelby, the popular drive-time personality on the Twins' flagship radio station WCCO, asks in a promotional ad.
SOLDIERING ON. Booing Bud -- who has become the personification of the arrogance and inequities of baseball economics -- is the new national pastime. That's why, from Cooperstown to Cupertino, a cheer should ring out for the Twins, which, facing extinction, soldier on.
The Twins began this new season with the 27th-lowest payroll of the 30 MLB teams, $40 million -- or less than one-third of the Yankees' $126 million. The average cost of a Twins ticket is $11.46, the cheapest of any major-league team except for the Montreal Expos, the other target last winter for franchise elimination. But unlike the nonchalant Quebecois, Minnesotans take themselves out to the ballgame.
The public agency that owns and operates the 20-year-old Metrodome, the well-worn site of World Series victories in 1987 and 1991, went to court last winter and stymied Selig's attempt to terminate the franchise. Players, for once, spoke out. Fans rallied, with thoughtful T-shirts that were as cold as a January night in Thief River Falls: "Fix Baseball: Contract Bud (and do something about that hair, too)."
POLICY DEBATES. In the Minnesota legislature, where the bang of the gavel signals a new baseball season as much as the crack of the bat, lawmakers are for the seventh year considering bills to help billionaire banker/owner Carl Pohlad use other people's money to build a new ballpark. This annual standoff has led to some novel public policy debates about sports.
One current proposal would force MLB to collapse the gap between high- and low-revenue teams and enhance competitive balance before a spade is turned for a new stadium. "We will build it," the proponents of this bill are saying, "but not until you get your darn house in order."
Under such a plan, no Twins ballpark funding would be approved until the revenues of the flushest team are no more than 35% higher than the poorest. That would take some doing. Last year, the Yankees' annual revenues of $242 million were 400% above those of the Twins, at $56 million, and 100% higher than the MLB team average of $118 million. State Senator Dean E. Johnson, the sponsor of one current stadium bill, has told Minnesotans that if they expect baseball to level the economic playing field before a ballpark is approved, "You must not want a stadium built in your lifetime."
DEFIANT DREAM. Why build and fail? Why enable a sick system? Look at Selig's own Milwaukee Brewers. Season-ticket sales are down nearly 25% at a publicly funded ballpark that's home to a small-market team with little hope of winning a pennant. Without some deep fixes in the game's structure, a necessary outcome of the collective-bargaining talks between players and owners now under way, a new Twins ballpark likely won't get the team anywhere near the Yankees' revenues.
For now, though, it's not about dollars. It's about defiance. And Minnesotans can't wait to razz Selig as they pray for a miracle come October. "Let's watch Bud Selig hand the world championship trophy to Carl Pohlad," Keith Summers of Wayzata, Minn., wrote in a recent letter to the editor of the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, "and then see if the two of them will turn out the lights on baseball in Minnesota for the good of the game."
That would be the best thing that could happen for baseball. The endangered Twins win more games and more customers. The underpaid Twins drive toward the playoffs. The never-say-die Twins make themselves invulnerable to the threats of Selig and his cronies. Need we say: Go, America's Team, go!
Weiner writes about sports in Minnesota and is the author of the book, Stadium Games: Fifty Years of Big League Greed and Bush League Boondoggles, University of Minnesota Press Edited by Ciro Scotti
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Copyright 2002 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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