Squeeze Play
Cooper, Matthew
Squeeze Play How Congress got baseball to cough up two more teams by Matthew Cooper Playing Hardball: The High-Stakes Battle for Baseball's New Franchises David Whitford, Doubleday, $22.50 Even...
...He made it a point to attend the baseball owners' meeting just days after his election in 1986 to pitch Denver as a possible expansion city...
...Local politicians persuaded voters to support a cushy stadium deal, 70 percent of which would be financed by taxpayers...
...But Pena also emerges as too eager to please, a weak negotiator who gave Denver's baseball owners too much, including a two-year rent-free deal in which the city agreed to give the team 92 percent of its revenue from concessions...
...Ironically, as Whitford notes, baseball cared as much about the groups of millionaire owners bidding on a team as it did about their city...
...Barbarians at the Gate meets Ball Four...
...Thus, when the ownership group in St...
...Is this the man who will reform government construction practices...
...senators...
...television rights were up...
...Harry Blackmun, despite his reputation as a judicial activist, declined to overturn Holmes' opinion when he ruled on an important baseball case in 1972...
...As my Washington Monthly and U.S...
...task force held its first meeting, Ueberroth declined to meet with half a dozen U.S...
...David Whitford's fun read falls into this last category...
...An American Paradox Censorship in a Nation of Free Speech By Patrick Garry A thought-provoking book about the full range of censorship in America, necessary to an understanding of our national psyche and restrictions on our freedom to speak...
...He detailed a staffer to find out what Congress could do to put pressure on the big leagues...
...in the subtitle...
...and it was Wirth who organized Gore, Quayle, and other expansion-hungry senators to come together for a press conference in early 1987 to threaten an end to the antitrust exemption...
...22.95...
...Instead, he sent his deputy commissioner who, in one of many very funny scenes in the book, Wirth derisively refers to as Ueberroth's "A.A.," Capitol Hill jargon for administrative assistant...
...0-275-93627-9...
...Booklist Praeger Trade...
...This episode offers one more reason why the Monthly's longstanding suggestion that fans own their teams makes so much sense...
...Eventually, in the wake of Giamatti's untimely death in the fall of 1989, baseball agreed to a limited expansion of two teams rather than the six the senators had tried to extract...
...The goal of these books is not only to explain the culture of the clubhouse but also of the front office, to give color and shape to the guys in suits as well as the guys in uniform...
...But it was his successor, Bart Giamatti, who charmed the senators...
...Yankee Stadium, for example, never "revitalized" the South Bronx as local politicians had promised when they sold taxpayers on a major NEW FROM pRAEGER Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment Profiles of a New Black Vanguard By Joseph G. Conti and Brad Stetson "The politically incorrect voices lucidly represented in this book are an essential antidote to the monolithic civil rights establishment...
...public policy dimension that's worth wider consideration: the things cities do to revitalize themselves...
...Or do you want the truth...
...The reluctance stems mainly from the wariness of owners to divvy up more of the pie, but also comes from a quite legitimate concern about the dilution of talent on the field...
...Whitford tells the story of how that changed in the mid-eighties when a host of senators, eager to get a baseball team in their home states, threatened to lift baseball's exemption unless expansion was forthcoming...
...What got them to change in 1990, when they voted to allow two new teams into the National League, were two factors...
...With owners free to move anywhere, he claimed, they would...
...The Rockies and the Marlins are the first expansion teams in baseball since 1977, and, as fans know, that slow pace of expansion is no accident...
...It's the account of the machinations that led to the creation of the Florida Marlins and the Colorado Rockies—both of which are now embarked on their first season...
...Kirkus Reviews Praeger Trade...
...Praeger Trade...
...The exemption dates to 1922 when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that baseball was a game rather than a business and 50 The Washington Monthly/June 1993 outside the purview of the Sherman Antitrust Act...
...Al Gore (looking for a team for Nashville), Dan Quayle (Indianapolis), and especially Tim Wirth (Denver) joined the effort...
...Obviously, when it comes to hustling business for a city, baseball is about as good an industry as a mayor can hope to get...
...There were no new teams between 1902 and 1952...
...There are hagiographic accounts of teams which are written for the benefit of hometown fans and which usually contain a phrase like "The incredible story of...
...Petersburg looked financially shaky, the city's dreams of a team were held hostage and finally died...
...Squeeze Play How Congress got baseball to cough up two more teams by Matthew Cooper Playing Hardball: The High-Stakes Battle for Baseball's New Franchises David Whitford, Doubleday, $22.50 Even more than most genres, sports books tend to be pretty predictable fare...
...Dinesh D'Souza Author of Illiberal Education Capital ResearchCenter Praeger Trade...
...88 Post Road West, Box 5007 • Westport, CT 06881-5007 • (203) 226-3571 • FAX (203) 222-1502...
...After the referendum passed, a memorandum was attached to the stadium deal, and, incredibly, taxJune 1993/The Washington Monthly 51 payers wound up paying for everything...
...In a majority opinion, he declared the exemption "illogical," but, citing precedent, he upheld it...
...News colleague Paul Glastris has noted, the only thing that's a more democratic experience than going to a ball game is standing in line at the department of motor vehicles...
...1993.256 pages...
...0-275-94447-6...
...When Wirth's baseball Denver went full bore—even having the city's church bells ring "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" when major league officials came through town for their on-site inspection...
...0-275-94522-7...
...In Denver, local politicians persuaded voters to support a cushy stadium deal, 70 percent of which would be financed by taxpayers...
...1993.200 pages...
...News & World Report...
...There are "as told to" biographies that are as fun as they are self-serving...
...The second and more important spur to expansion was Congress' threat to lift baseball's exemption from antitrust laws—a status no other sport enjoys...
...1993.288 pages...
...Miami linked up with neighboring cities to sell itself as South Florida, gateway to Latin America's crazed baseball fans...
...That does not augur well for Federico Pena, now Transportation Secretary and then Denver's mayor...
...1993.164 pages...
...In the manner of a Reagan-style constructionist, he ruled that the antitrust exemption is a matter that is to be remedied by Congress and not this Court...
...The city's Suncoast Dome now hosts rock concerts and flea markets...
...What he's come up with is not only a solid sports book, but one with a Matthew Cooper, a contributing editor o/The Washington Monthly, covers the White House for U.S...
...0-275-94460-3...
...A Boston-based writer, Whitford parachuted into both Denver and Miami and kept a keen eye trained on the jockeying that marked both cities' efforts to acquire a franchise...
...The local St...
...This was a particularly rough blow since the Gulf Coast city had banked heavily on baseball, building a $234 million domed stadium—on spec—in the hope of luring a team and shedding its image as "heaven's waitingroom," a town teeming with octogenarians and hemor-raging business to nearby Tampa...
...He argued that the removal of the antitrust clause would lead to havoc...
...A recent and welcome type of sports book works the crossroads of sport and commerce, or, more properly, sport as commerce...
...Denver went full bore—even having the city's church bells ring "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" when major league officials came through town for their on-site inspection...
...When Wirth dropped Ueberroth a note after the meeting, it took the baseball commissioner three weeks to respond...
...First, their profits seemed safe...
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...Whitford does a terrific job of explaining the hustling that the competing cities did to lure the big leagues to their home towns...
...At times, Congress has toyed with the notion of removing baseball's antitrust safeguard...
...But for the most part, owners correctly dismissed the threat as halfhearted...
...Baseball attendance had been soaring...
...If Wirth comes across as a savvy politician, then-baseball commissioner and oft-mentioned candidate-for-everything Peter Ueberroth emerges as anything but the suave wheeler-dealer you would expect...
...After the referendum passed, a memorandum was attached to the deal, and, incredibly, taxpayers wound up paying for everything...
...22.95...
...Ueberroth thought that playing the role of tough guy would get Congress to back down...
...Beyond the fuzzy virtues of good feeling that's garnered from having a professional sports team, there is always the cash benefit, albeit a modest one...
...the asking price for a new franchise had reached such a high level—almost $100 million to be shared among the incumbent owners—that the threat of a dip in profits seemed minimal compared to a few years earlier...
...Pena, eager to bring baseball to his city, emerges in Whitford's account as a can-do mayor who understands that baseball and other high-profile projects, like expanding the city's airport, could help the Mile High City rebound from the oil price collapse of the eighties...
...When Ueberroth finally consented to meet with the senators, he was contemptuous, saying to them, according to a participant: "Do you want me to give you a line of crap...
...Secret Science Federal Control of American Science and Technology By Herbert N. Foerstel "Required reading for anyone concerned with continued abuses of power by the military-industrial complex...
...Wirth emerges in Whitford's account as a wily tactician, quick to understand the role Congress could play in making pro ball cough up more teams...
...22.95 ORDER TOLL-FREE, 24 HOURS-A-DAY: 1-600-225-5800 • Please call us for a free catalog at (203) 226-3571 ' PRAEGER PUBLISHERS An Imprint of GREENWOOD PUBLISHING GROUP, INC...
...In Defense of Garbage By Judd H. Alexander ["Alexander's] reasoned insistence on the economic and technical parameters of handling trash precisely balances the nonacidic, nonalkaline needs of the current affairs shelf...
...Petersburg government was largely powerless to do anything to avert the disaster...
Vol. 25 • June 1993 • No. 6
