A Late-Inning Curveball

Major League Baseball’s financial squeeze play in the nation’s capital still might work. For now, however, a renegade City Council chairwoman who ignored the popular drumbeat is holding fast against baseball’s demand that the city’s taxpayers hand over half a billion dollars to build a ballpark for the late-of-Montreal Expos.

Only the very brave -- or foolish -- choose to stand between baseball-starved Washingtonians and the possibility of their beloved game returning next spring after a 33-year absence. Critics have every right to complain about Council Chair Linda Cropp’s timing, a political version of bottom of the ninth with two men out. She should have balked in October, when the deal pushed by Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams still was percolating. Even so, whether it’s grandstanding or a real awakening, Cropp’s stand is justified. San Francisco got its new SBC Park with only a tiny bit of public funding. Los Angeles hasn’t hesitated to tell the NFL that if the league wants football here, it can foot the bill.

Washington’s elected officials should have demanded what Cropp is now holding out for -- a guarantee that private dollars will be used to cover a significant portion of the costs of building a stadium in a worn-out part of town on the Anacostia River.

Major League Baseball predictably responded to the demand by threatening to walk away. The league shuttered a popular store that had sold Washington Nationals hats and jerseys and began returning deposits plunked down by anxious season ticket buyers. Top baseball executives demanded that the City Council surrender by Dec. 31 -- implying that Las Vegas, Portland, Ore. and Monterrey, Mexico -- cities that earlier had been in this dubious race -- might still have a chance.

Baseball really doesn’t care where the troubled Expos franchise lands, as long as someone else picks up the considerable tab. MLB officials figured that they had a patsy in Washington, where the politically correct thing for politicians to do was to cater to fans still smarting from losing -- twice, actually -- the Washington Senators franchise. The mayor, playing by baseball’s self-serving rules, crafted a financing agreement that would use municipal bonds (paid off by a new tax on businesses) to fund land acquisition and construction. A quick drive through the nonfederal parts of the nation’s capital shows no end of more urgent uses for tax dollars.

Even as the deal was being crafted, estimates for renovating Robert F. Kennedy Stadium (where the team temporarily would play), acquiring land and then building the new stadium swelled to more than $530 million from $435 million. Baseball’s barons may have figured that they were well insulated from the costs, so why care? Cropp’s demand that the public be spared this unnecessary expense could prove otherwise.