Decision on Expos not likely

Major League Baseball likely will not announce a decision on the future of the Montreal Expos during next week’s All-Star break.

The expected delay furthers growing suspicions within baseball that the Expos will not be given a permanent new home for next season. It also scuttles local groups’ hopes of getting a quick start in preparing for the team to play at RFK Stadium in April 2004.

Rich Levin, Major League Baseball’s senior vice president for communications, said he does not “expect anything to happen [with relocation] next week.”

Baseball’s relocation committee had hoped to issue a recommendation by Tuesday’s All-Star Game on the future of the Expos, who are owned by MLB.

That now appears unlikely.

“I know [July 15] was the goal when the committee first set out, but I don’t know how serious and absolute it was,” Levin said.

Expos president Tony Tavares agreed that the opportunity to move the club for next season is nearly past.

“2004 is probably slipping away as a possibility for relocation,” he said.

Several baseball sources and local government officials said that delaying an announcement by 30 to 90 days but still moving the club for the 2004 season remains an option.

Such a delay would allow relocation candidate cities, particularly the District and Portland, Ore., to advance public stadium financing efforts.

“There are all kinds of theories flying around,” said one District government official who declined to be identified.

However, the delay, if it leads to no move of the MLB-owned Expos before 2005, likely will have damaging and perhaps fatal effects on the Washington-area bids for a team.

The two local prospective team owners — District financier Fred Malek and William Collins, a former telecommunications executive based in Northern Virginia — already are making plans to continue their efforts into 2004.

Malek, who has memorandum of understanding with the District government for priority use of RFK Stadium for baseball, will begin negotiating an extension to the pact this fall if the Expos still have yet to move. The two-year deal expires in January.

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