Letters to the editor

Sounding off on the baseball plan

Whether the District gets a baseball team fails to address a more important issue: the credibility of the city government with any corporation, group or individual interested in doing business in the District (“Cropp, baseball refuse to budge,” Page 1, yesterday).

I do not support spending any public money on any stadium, but I also believe that a deal is a deal. If D.C. Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp was not aware of the nature of the negotiations with Major League Baseball, she was not fulfilling her long-standing commitment to the people of the District.

Mrs. Cropp is in over her head and does not seem to be able to see beyond the nose on her face. Her 11th-hour stunt has severely jeopardized our city’s chance of getting a baseball team, now and forever.

Major League Baseball is a vindictive, shortsighted, greedy organization. Mrs. Cropp and the members of the council who supported her amendment seem to have forgotten that MLB canceled a World Series because of a labor dispute, crippling the game for two years, yet failed to address the league’s financial problems. This is an organization that can work on spite.

Council member Adrian Fenty was quoted in The Washington Post on Thursday as saying Major League Baseball “is not going to walk. They don’t have anywhere else to go. One, they already looked everywhere else. No one else was financially feasible. … They set up a store, sold tickets and they have [RFK] stadium.”

It is apparent that Mr. Fenty is not familiar with MLB. A brief primer: eight work stoppages in the past 32 years; a canceled World Series during a strike that nearly crippled the game; and two years of sending the Expos to Puerto Rico for part of the season rather than give the team to a new city, any city.

Baseball is not like other businesses. Baseball spent eight years watching the Expos wither on the vine in Montreal. Anyone who thinks MLB would not put the Expos back in Montreal does not know Major League Baseball. Maybe the delay in settling on the District was because MLB feared exactly this kind of poorly thought out last-minute bait-and-switch.

Whatever happens, a city government that has tried to recover from decades of mismanagement and corruption will be forced to prove to a wary business community that the city can be a trusted partner in development.

DANIEL N. SMITH

Washington

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