Another Expensive Initiation

Some years ago, 30 to be exact, when baseball, as we had come to know it and love it, expanded for the first time, you could get in on the cheap.

All you had to do was agree to buy a dugoutful of overage, overpaid--for those years--roster members from existing teams at a cost of $125,000 for Grade A has-beens, $75,000 for Grade B and $50,000 for players who could barely make it off the rubbing table to get dressed.

The then Los Angeles Angels and the neo-Washington Senators were the first two expansion franchises, and the Angels paid $2.15 million for the likes of Aubrey Gatewood, Bob Sprout, Jerry Casale, Gene Leek and a whole bunch of other household names. The American League as a midwife left a lot to be desired.

The National League let the New York Mets and the Houston Colt .45s (later the Astros) in for the promise to shell out $1.8 million for a packet of their stiffs. The Mets got immortals such as Ray Daviault, Choo Choo Coleman and Chris Cannizzaro (of whom Casey Stengel said, “He’s a defensive catcher who can’t catch,” and whom he called “Canzoneri” throughout both their careers).

The cost of initiation into this exclusive men’s club went up the next time around. The Montreal Expos and the San Diego Padres had to pony up $10 million each to get into the National League in 1969, while the Kansas City Royals and the Seattle Pilots got into the American League for $5.55 million apiece.

The National League always had an inflated idea of its superiority over the American League anyway, dismissing the junior circuit as the “brother-in-law league” because it played three-run-homer-big-inning baseball vs. the National League preference for single-bunt-steal-one-run-dirty-uniform baseball. So, when the American League took in the Toronto Blue Jays for $7 million and a new Seattle team, the Mariners, for $6.25 million in 1977, the National League airily passed and said, in effect, “We’ll play these.” Although it made for lopsided baseball, 12 teams in one league, 14 in the other.

Now, the National League is getting ready to expand again, and naturally, it’s going to cost. It’s going to cost $190 million for two teams, is what it’s going to cost.

For that $95 million apiece, two as yet unnamed franchises are going to get another litter of marginal players. They are probably going to get a team that won’t be successful in their lifetimes, if ever. It’s illuminating to reflect that only two expansion teams have ever made it to the World Series--the Mets and the Padres.

Is an expansion franchise, which 30 years ago cost $1.8 million, now worth more than 50 times that amount?

Well, six cities think so. They are Miami, Denver, Washington, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Buffalo and Orlando.

Baseball always wants to put a franchise in the nation’s capital despite the fact two of them went bust there. They seem to think that putting a team in the shadow of Congress--and the Supreme Court--will somehow preserve what is left of the game’s antitrust exemptions. It won’t. They’d be better off putting a franchise in the shadow of Marvin Miller. He will have more to say about baseball’s exemption than the senator from Idaho.

The front-runners seem to be Miami and Denver. Which is all right so far as it goes. Denver represents an entire time zone that has no major league baseball.

It also represents an entire altitude that has no major league baseball. Baseball at 5,280 feet is apt to be very eye-opening.

What becomes of home run records at mile-high atmospheric conditions? It’s well to remember Arnold Palmer won a U.S. Open at mile-high Cherry Hills because he was able to drive a 312-yard hole. And this was in the days before the metal woods and square grooves made such prodigies commonplace.

The literature of baseball is alive with exploits of batsmen operating on mountaintops. A slugger named Joe Baumann belted 72 home runs one year (1954) in the rarefied air of New Mexico, where the average altitude is 5,700 feet. Baumann never even got to the big leagues. He couldn’t hit at sea level. A player named Bob Crues hit 69 for Amarillo, Tex. (alt. 3,690 ft.) one year, and Tony Lazzeri hit 60 for Salt Lake City (alt. 4,490 ft.) in 1925, or two years before Babe Ruth broke the major leagues’ 60-homer “barrier.”

Expansion will dilute the quality of pitching drastically. “Tony Gwynn will hit .400,” Sports Illustrated quotes pitching coach Ray Miller as predicting.

Will someone hit 70 home runs at Denver? A distinct possibility with watered-down pitching and beefed-up elevation. If a golf ball can go 312 yards, 400 feet should be child’s play for a baseball. Do the records have asterisks if Denver gets in? Or do they just move the fences to Pueblo?

Florida probably should receive major consideration. Baseball, like the rest of the population, should move to the Sun Belt. Which would leave Rust Belt Buffalo facing an uphill battle. But Buffalo has one advantage over South Florida: It will be cool in the summer (both days of it). Baseball might be better advised to put its Florida franchise in St. Pete, where at least the stadium is domed.

Comfort of the fans and sanctity of the statistics have never been major concerns of the grand old game anyway. Accommodation of TV far outweighs either.

TV is the reason franchises are going for $95 million even in incubators. Expansion heretofore had been an intraleague proposition. Now, both leagues will be tapped to stock the new franchises, with the result that the $190 million will be carved up with about 22%, or $42 million, to the American League and about 78%, or $148 million, to the National League. This computes to $12.3 million a club in the National League and $3 million a club in the American League.

Except the American League will be expected to make available an equal number of marginal players--seven per club--to the expansion draft.

It is a measure of the distrust major league owners have for each other that both American League and National League moguls are dissatisfied with the arrangement. The American League reasons that if it puts half the players in the window, it should get half the revenue. The National League figures, “It’s our league, it should be our money.”

Revenue sharing does not come easily to the operators of the grand old game. They’re going to get $12.3 million for a garage sale of baseball bric-a-brac that they would probably discard in the trash in a year or less anyway and they want the additional $3 million.

They share network television revenues but not their own local deals. The New York Yankees are not about to split their lucrative contracts with, say, Seattle, with one result being that Seattle will never be economically competitive with the Yankees whenever it comes to a bidding war. The Yankees would still get Babe Ruth.

Any time you have a commodity of which there are only 28 in the world, you have something of value. If you ever find a unicorn, please call.

And sports are in a runaway bull market anyway with pay-per-view TV lurking on the fringes and the public paying $80 million to watch a 42-year-old overweight challenger fight a 28-year-old underweight champion.

But, at $75,000, Ray Daviault was a fantastic bargain in 1962. After all, he went 1-5 with an earned-run average of 6.22 in his only year.

The sad thing is, he might be the star of the staff they’re going to get for $95 million in 1992.