by Neil deMause
The contraction gambit was all the talk of baseball throughout 2002 but fizzled when a new labor agreement that fall prohibited baseball owners from so much as talking about eliminating teams until after the 2006 season. This left Selig with a dilemma. As part of the contraction talks, the league had executed a complicated three-way dance with the owners of the Expos, Marlins, and Red Sox in late 2001 that had resulted in former Marlins owner John Henry taking over in Boston, ex-Expos chief Loria getting Florida (bringing along his stepson, David Samson, as team president), and the Montreal team itself ending up a ward of the state, co-owned by its twenty-nine big-league rivals. With contraction off the table, Selig now found himself stuck with the booby prize. He was determined to turn that to an advantage.
The Extortion across America Tour
In December 2002 Selig issued his plans for disposing of the Expos: a multiple-city auction to determine the team’s new home. Unlike previous team sales, though, this one would not be pitched to prospective owners. Rather, delegations from cities hoping to land the Expos for 2004 would be invited to meet with a “relocation committee” that would decide where to award the franchise. “MLB wants to know, ‘What evidence do you have your market can support a franchise?’ and ‘Where are you going to play and how is that stadium going to be paid for?’” an MLB source told the Washington Post. “In a perfect world, jurisdictions should have all approvals in place and money set aside.”
And thus began what baseball business writer Doug Pappas would dub Bud Selig’s Stadium Extortion across North America Tour. By any measure, Selig had a rough road ahead of him. By 2002 not many major markets remained untapped by MLB. Denver, the perennial relocation bridesmaid of the ’70s and ’80s, had received its own expansion team in 1993. And Tampa Bay, which at one time or another had seen seven different baseball teams play footsie with it in order to extract stadium concessions from their hometowns, had landed the expansion Devil Rays in 1998, after MLB blocked the San Francisco Giants’ move to St. Petersburg, and Florida officials threatened an antitrust lawsuit if a new team wasn’t promptly supplied.
The Expos’ suitors instead included a mixed bag of cities, each with its own liabilities when it came to hosting a major-league baseball team. Portland, Oregon, had been a rumored relocation site before but was relatively small, had a minor-league team plagued by poor attendance, and boasted a local political culture that abhorred sports subsidies. (In the early 1970s, Portland had turned down an offer of an NFL team if it built a domed stadium; it never looked back, by 2000 landing the top spot in Money magazine’s rankings of most-livable U.S. cities.) Las Vegas had a thriving tourist trade but little in the way of local fan base, and the added taint of being a den of gambling, baseball’s official bête noire ever since the Chicago Black Sox scandal in 1919. San Juan, Puerto Rico—where Selig had arranged for the Expos to play twenty-two “home” games in 2003—and Monterrey, Mexico, were on baseball’s official short list but mostly as a nod to building baseball’s international market; hardly anyone took seriously the thought of trying to pay big-league salaries with pesos.
That left what was by far the largest remaining market: Washington DC. The nation’s capital had gotten the short end of the stick in baseball’s last relocation, when the Washington Senators bolted for Arlington, Texas, way back in 1972. Ever since, DC had been widely considered baseball’s best vacant market. The Houston Astros had threatened to move to DC’s Virginia suburbs during their own 1990s campaign for a new stadium, and Selig himself had called the nation’s capital the “prime candidate” for relocation as early as January 2002.
But even as Washington left owners salivating over its eighth-ranked media market, it had two major drawbacks. One was the presence of the Baltimore Orioles just up the road; while DC technically wasn’t Orioles territory according to MLB bylaws, there was no guarantee that team owner Peter Angelos would see things that way. Angelos—a superlawyer best known for extracting $4.4 billion for the state of Maryland in a tobacco class-action suit and demanding a quarter of the proceeds for himself—had already proven his willingness to buck the tight owners’ fraternity during the players’ strike of 1994–95, when he alone among the owners refused to field a team of “replacement players” during spring training.
The other problem with DC was the same as for other cities: stadium money. Washington had a big-league-ready stadium in place—RFK Stadium had been the home of the Senators from 1961 until they departed for Texas eleven years later—but MLB’s condition of granting the franchise was a new building, ideally paid for entirely with public dollars. Mayor Anthony Williams, a former city finance chief who had assumed the top job in 1998, was offering $275 million toward a $425 million stadium—nice enough, but not the free ride that Selig was seeking; if the Expos’ new owner were expected to put up $150 million in private funds, after all, that would be $150 million that MLB couldn’t extract in sale price. And Williams had not identified a source for the money, a major concern, given that the city council still hadn’t approved a new stadium. A Washington Post poll in the summer of 2002, meanwhile, had found that whereas 84 percent of DC residents favored the return of major-league baseball, only half would support public funding of a new stadium.
The final alternative was to site a stadium in the Virginia suburbs across the Potomac, thus tapping the DC metro population without competing as directly with the Orioles. But although this might have pleased Angelos, it would have reduced the team’s value to MLB: A Virginia team would only reach half the market, and half of DC was little better than Portland.
Searching for Suitors
Selig’s would-be bidding war got off to an inauspicious start, with city officials all proclaiming their love of baseball but not exactly throwing open their checkbooks. Northern Virginia pitched a stadium plan paid for one third by the team and one third by ticket taxes and stadium-related sales and income taxes; the remaining $100–150 million, according to the AP, had “not been accounted for.” Portland pinned its hopes on a special tax on baseball players’ salaries, which was supposed to generate $150 million in stadium financing; the other half of the construction costs would come from, well, no one seemed sure. Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman proposed to “fully fund a magnificent new retractable stadium” [sic], then backtracked and mumbled something about unspecified casinos paying the tab.
Meanwhile, the Expos free-for-all was bringing out of the woodwork anyone and everyone who had a pet scheme to bring a baseball team to their backyard. In San Antonio, Bexar County judge Nelson Wolff—a former mayor of San Antonio and author of the book Baseball for Real Men—suggested that the Expos split time between San Antonio and either Monterrey or Austin, playing in a converted minor-league stadium (coincidentally enough named Nelson Wolff Stadium) while waiting for the city to grow to major-league size: “Ten years from now, things may be completely different around here.” A Connecticut newspaper columnist suggested that the state buy the team and move it to the University of Connecticut’s new football stadium in Hartford. And a Florida movie mogul named Craig Marquardo offered to buy the Expos and move them to a new stadium in Portland that he’d build entirely with private money; he faded from the headlines once it turned out that he’d apparently invented several items on his résumé, including having played minor-league baseball, been wounded in the Gulf War, and sung backup for Sting.
Perhaps the most unlikely bid, though, came from Norfolk, Virginia, a longtime minor-league baseball town that suddenly found itself entered in the Expos sweepstakes by a pair of young entrepreneurs named William Somerindyke Jr. and Jason Osborne, invariably described in the press as “a pair of twenty-six-year-old former stockbrokers.” (As Doug Pappas pointed out, this was “a phrase not likely to inspire confidence.”) The Norfolk duo promised a Navy-themed stadium with twin gun turrets on the roof that would shoot fireworks, and launched a season-ticket sales drive to drum up public support; Somerindyke confidently declared, “We think we’ll have enough suppor
t to go to New YorK, and we can put the numbers on Bud Selig’s and Bob DuPuy’s desk and say, ‘Here, now just give us the franchise.’”
Several months later, the Virginian-Pilot newspaper finally thought to dig into how two twenty-somethings had managed to find themselves in the chase for a major-league baseball team. Somerindyke and Osborne had claimed to be officers of an investment-banking firm; in reality, the paper discovered, they’d each worked briefly as brokers at Merrill Lynch, but there was no evidence they ever worked in investment banking. The companies they claimed to run, Summit Broadcasting and Efirms.com, turned out to have been shut down, if they’d ever existed to begin with. “Some of their accomplishments,” concluded the Virginian-Pilot dryly, “have been embellished.”
DC and Virginia remained the frontrunners, but neither was quite laying out the red carpet that Selig had sought. In Virginia demonstrators picketed a Virginia Baseball Stadium Authority news conference, while supporters of the DC library system rallied carrying signs reading “Books Not Baseball.” Arlington, the preferred site from among the Virginia suburbs, withdrew its bid, saying residents were hopelessly split on the merits of the project. Worst of all for MLB, both DC and Virginia officials were levying demands of their own: Give us the team first, they said, and then we’ll talk stadium. MLB officials, not wanting to give up their only leverage, refused. A stalemate was born.
It would drag on for almost two full years. In January 2003, asked if the Expos would definitely have a new home the following year, Selig replied: “Ask me that later this year.” On July 10, five days before a relocation-committee deadline to decide the team’s fate, MLB spokesman Rich Levin demurred, “I know [July 15] was the goal when the committee first set out, but I don’t know how serious and absolute it was.” By September, Selig was talking gamely of finding a temporary home for the Expos just for 2004, or perhaps forcing the team to split time among several cities: “Obviously the options are the various cities that have expressed interest, as well as the cities that have expressed interest in a series of games or all the games. The relocation committee is hard at work in finding a home for the Expos. We’ll make that determination in the coming weeks, or how long it takes.”
The year 2004 dawned with the Expos still on their Montreal-to-San Juan treadmill, and with Selig’s right-hand man, MLB COO Bob DuPuy, taking the reins of the relocation effort. One day after declaring that he “would rather get [the relocation of the Montreal Expos] done sooner rather than later,” DuPuy clarified the league’s stance: “It is an objective to have a facility committed for and understand how the facility is going to come together before a decision is made. We don’t want to do something in the blind.” DuPuy added a few weeks later: “We’ll get it done this year, I promise you.” The following month, Selig said he hoped to have a new home selected for the Expos “by the All-Star Game this year.” He added: “The relocation committee is hard at work and we all agree by the middle of the season we ought to have a buyer and a site.”
Asked by Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci if the ongoing Expos’ saga had become an embarrassment to baseball, Selig could only reply: “I don’t know if ‘embarrassment’ is the right word.”
Au Revoir, Montreal
By late 2004 “laughingstock” seemed the right word. The previous year, the Expos had unexpectedly found themselves in pennant contention, only to have MLB refuse to allow them permission to bolster their roster with youngsters after the end of the minor-league season, as every other team does, to save $50,000 in salaries. In 2004 first baseman Nick Johnson complained that he’d been stuck in a season-long slump thanks to ownership’s refusal to pay for game film of opposing pitchers. And yet despite the penny-pinching, the lame-duck team was still mired in red ink: Baseball Prospectus’ Derek Zumsteg estimated that the other twenty-nine MLB teams had lost at least $130 million in three years of owning the Expos. “That probably wouldn’t build a stadium anywhere near a metro market that could support a team well,” wrote Zumsteg. “It almost certainly would have allowed them to complete the financing to fill the gap in Portland, though, and probably in Northern Virginia as well. If baseball had gone to DC with that kind of money, they could almost certainly have gotten that deal done, too. It might even have been able to revive baseball in Quebec, for that matter.” The Expos bidding war was turning into an expensive game of chicken.
Then, just as baseball officials issued 2005 schedules with the team listed merely as “Expos,” with no city named, the stalemate abruptly broke. The catalyst arrived via what should have been bad news for baseball: In DC’s Democratic primaries, three pro-stadium city council members went down to defeat at the hands of stadium opponents. Once the three new members took office in January—in DC, there’s essentially no chance that a Democrat will lose in the general election—any hope of a council majority would evaporate, and with it baseball’s hopes of wringing stadium funding from the DC treasury. “We need to get this done sooner rather than later, and we should get it done in this [electoral] cycle,” DC mayor Anthony Williams pointedly told reporters shortly before the primary vote. “We can’t take for granted the political support that is now in place for this.”
With the clock ticking, Selig and DuPuy decided to roll the dice with what was on the table; Angelos and the DC council could be dealt with when the time came. And so, on September 29, 2004, Selig called DC officials to let them know: The Expos were theirs. At a celebratory press conference, Mayor Williams donned a red cap with the white “W” of the long-gone Washington Senators, and joined seven council members in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” “I’m beyond thrilled,” he declared. “The American game is rounding third and at last heading back home to the nation’s capital.”
The announcement came just hours before the Expos’ final home game of the season—and, it now appeared, for all eternity. Disgruntled fans tossed a few golf balls onto the field in the early innings, briefly holding up play. But, mostly, the crowd of 31,000, including thousands of walk-up ticket buyers who’d rushed out to Olympic Stadium when it was clear this might finally be the end, was more in the mood for sad goodbyes than for recriminations. After the Expos had gone down in defeat, 9–1 to the Florida Marlins, fans wandered the artificial turf and mingled with members of the 1994 Expos squad who were on hand for the occasion.
“Major League Baseball didn’t want a team here,” said lifelong Expos fan Bob Hall as he walked the field with his eleven-year-old son. “That was pretty obvious. It’s kind of like your wife saying, ‘I want a divorce,’ and she says it for ten years, and you say, ‘Do it and go away.’”
In DC, meanwhile, Mayor Williams produced in a matter of days a bona fide stadium plan, complete with one of those waterfront sites—with a view, it was promised, of the U.S. Capitol, though about a mile distant—that gets the sports pundits drooling. It was the financial plan, however, that got MLB excited. Mayor Williams’s office declared that “there is no money that will come from the general fund” for the stadium, while the baseball booster group DC Baseball echoed that it “will not be paid for by DC residents’ tax dollars.” But the truth was something very different.
Williams’s estimated price tag for a new stadium stood at $440 million, to be paid off from three sources: about $22.5 million a year from a tax surcharge on large DC businesses; $12.5 million a year from in-stadium taxes on tickets, concessions, and merchandise; and $5.5 million a year in rent payments by the team. Each of these would largely siphon off money that could otherwise go into the city’s general fund. Although the business tax was sold as a special “baseball tax,” local business leaders made clear that they’d bitterly oppose any further hikes, meaning the stadium would tap out this source of city revenues for good. The “in-stadium taxes” would include a mix of existing sales taxes and special tax surcharges—much of which would be subject to the substitution effect and so merely end up cannibalizing sales taxes on, say, movie tickets elsewhere in DC. And even the rent payments wo
uld be offset by naming-rights fees: Though the city would build and own the stadium, the team would get all proceeds from slapping a corporate name on it, cutting baseball’s rent costs by anywhere from $2.5 million to $4 million a year. All revenue from events at the stadium, meanwhile, whether baseball games or rock concerts, would go to the team.
In the end, DC taxpayers would be on the hook for about $320 million of the stadium costs, MLB for $70 million. (The remainder would end up largely diverted from the treasuries of Virginia and Maryland as commuters chose to spend more of their entertainment dollars inside the Beltway.) And because Williams had agreed to pay all cost overruns, whether for stadium construction, land, or infrastructure, the city’s share could only go up. It was to prove to be a momentous detail.
Overall, it was an extraordinarily generous deal, given the going rate. The most recent baseball stadium to be approved, St. Louis’s new Busch Stadium (the third in forty years to bear that moniker), was being funded about one third by taxpayers, two thirds by the team; the Minnesota and Florida legislatures were mulling proposals for about a 50–50 split. Yet DC, with the Expos’ owners up against a wall, had agreed to cover at least 73 percent of the stadium costs. Even baseball officials were stunned at the generosity: The Post quoted an executive at baseball’s executive council meetings as noting, “People were amazed that the District had done the deal that they did.”