Baseball Throws a Sucker Pitch Past Washington, D.C

By JIM LITKE
Oct 1, 2:23 AM (ET)

The deal that brought major league baseball back to Washington is so one-sided
there's no need to hold a contest to come up with a name for the franchise.

"Suckers" is a perfect fit.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the word as "a person easily
cheated or deceived," and apparently the nation's capital has its share of
them. How else to explain why any municipality would rush out and promise to
build a $400 million stadium for a handful of its richest businessmen, two dozen
wealthy entertainers and a few thousand well-heeled fans.

"It's the team owners, business owners, the stadium users who are paying for
this - and not one dime of a D.C. resident is covering this important investment
in our city," Mayor Anthony Williams said.

Right.

But only if the 2,000 or so businesses hit by increased taxes don't pass the
costs along to their customers. And so long as the team sells enough tickets
most nights to meet the pie-in-the-sky revenue projections Williams and his
council used make the deal feasible. And never mind that the recent history of
new stadiums and nearly every scrap of independent research suggest that such
publicly financed projects rarely deliver the benefits they promise.

Can you say "welfare program for the rich?" Because that's how Stanford
economist Roger Noll laid out the deal in the Washington Post.

"It's taxing ordinary people for a stadium attended by upper income people, and
then the income generated goes to even higher income people, namely players and
owners. Basically," he said, "you're taxing people who make $30,000 a year to
generate a toy for people who make $200,000 a year, and income for people who
make millions of dollars a year."

Noll has done work for the baseball players' union, so you might think he has it
in for the owners.

But there's a reason baseball commissioner Bud Selig promised to "very
aggressively recommend" that his fellow owners approve the move to D.C. at their
November meeting; Selig knows firsthand what a sweetheart deal it is. So good,
in fact, that he'd push up the date of the owners' meeting at the first sign
that the D.C. city council might be coming to its senses.

After all, Selig just unloaded his share of the Milwaukee Brewers for a tidy sum
- he hasn't said how much - and that is no small feat. The franchise hasn't been
to a World Series in 22 years, its last winning season was a dozen years ago,
and those slumping fortunes are reflected every night at the gate.

Yet people in the know say it's safe to assume the value of even a lousy team
like the Brewers was doubled because it includes a long-term lease on 3-year-old
Miller Park, which also happened to be built largely with public funds.

"I always tell owners, 'If you can get public money, go for it,"' said Robert
Tilliss. CEO and managing partner of Inner Circle Sports, a Stamford,
Conn.-based firm that consults with owners from all four major sports leagues on
stadiums and financing packages.

"If you poll enough economists, you'll get enough opinions to bolster any
argument about whether it's good or bad for the economy of any area as a
whole. But there's no arguing that the bigger a city is, the better its chances
are of making the deal pay its way."

What Washington has going for it is a metropolitan population of 5 million and a
business class that is the latest darling of major league baseball ticket
sellers. With luxury suites tougher to sell, they've targeted a new class of
premium seating for sale to mid-level law, accounting and lobbying firms - a
business strata that Washington is loaded with.

Betting on those people to step up is a risky enough gamble, specially for a
team that is a long way from winning. The Expos are a beggar's banquet at the
moment and they'll remain a wreck as long as MLB controls the team, probably
until next summer.

About the best thing that can be said for the Washington offer is that the
council skipped over a lot of the easier tax targets hit in similar stadium
deals - hotels, rental cars, cigarettes and general sales - and tried to zero in
on the end-users of the ballpark.

And anybody willing to keep paying good money to see a lousy team shouldn't mind
very much if it just happens to be named the "Suckers."

---=

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him
at jlitke@ap.org