Quiet, please.
Baseball is in the throes of trying to relocate the Expos, forever wrestling with potential sites, starting with possibly Harpers Ferry, W.Va.
Baseball is in the habit of coming up with improbable suitors, no disrespect intended to the romantics in either the District or Northern Virginia.
This is merely business, both icky and tedious, steeped in the tear-covered faces of yesteryear.
Many of the nearly dead white men in the vicinity cling to the false deity of Joe DiMaggio, the late ballplayer whose grace was one of the subjects on ESPN Classic the other night.
The faded men dispensing poetry in DiMaggio’s memory appeared to regret not having a child by him.
The sadness cut both ways, both for DiMaggio and the shriveled sleuths clinging to worshipful notions.
Baseball feeds on this curious dynamic while lacking the courtesy to provide an air-sickness bag to those who experience indigestion around the pretentiousness of Bob Costas, the itty-bitty fellow who aspires to live in the cosmos.
Costas, in his defense, has been in an extended recovery period since Vince McMahon threatened to hurt him with a pinkie.
Nausea has come to be an unfortunate by-product of the game, both on the field and off it, depending on your view of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds.
Washington is hardly a baseball town, just demographically in the heavens. Washington is a football town. Basketball, too. Ted Leonsis, one of the casualties of hockey, is losing $30million this season in discovery of the principle.
Washington is perhaps a victim of baseball’s proclivity to live in the past. The 2004 Washington is distinct from 1971 Washington, the last time there was baseball in the local environment.
The absence of the Senators, thank goodness, has never risen to the weepy sentimentalism of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Washington actually beats Brooklyn by one relocation, counting the Griffith-led Senators before the Short-led Senators.
If anything, given the limited legacy of these mom-and-pop operators, baseball owes Washington instead of the other way around.
The insult to Washington’s injuries is baseball’s teasing manner.
Baseball has been on the verge of returning to Washington since the ’70s, with first the San Diego Padres, which has come to be the closed-door carrot of improving conditions elsewhere.
The Washington region is seemingly up against the same tact, considering the modest civic options and the nomadic sentence before the Expos.
Hampton Roads? Las Vegas? Monterrey, Mexico? San Juan, Puerto Rico?
Baseball delivers no punch line with the other candidates, just milquetoast proclamations following sense-dulling meetings.
The undertaking has descended to the level of watching neighbors take out their trash to the front curb.
In the spirit of the times, perhaps Bob DuPuy and all the rest could use a performance-enhancing substance to facilitate the thought process.
They impose deadlines just to break them.
You never know which municipality might shake out from the next deadline.
At this pace, Walla Walla, Wash., eventually could muster the resources to solicit a visit from members of the relocation committee.
If it matters, baseball is promising to resolve the bloated travel expenses of the Expos by the 2005 season.
The groups in D.C. and Northern Virginia accept this as a faint sign of enlightenment.
One D.C. backer expressed an anxiousness in helping baseball eliminate its relocation crisis.
Groveling is an aerobic activity in Washington, whether the gasbags are trolling for campaign funds or a baseball team.
Baseball has only the temperance of Peter Angelos to lose by dumping the Expos on either D.C. or Northern Virginia.
Either market, one and the same in many respects, is capable of rustling up a crowd for the most marginal functions. That should be enough to appease the owners, Angelos excluded. The Expos exist because of their charitable donations, which gets old, as David Stern has found with the WNBA.
Yet baseball, try as it might to move beyond the inertia of the Expos, is lost in the cataclysmic possibilities of what could be. Their spare-change cup is not even half-empty.
So the Washington region remains on eternal hold, which is especially maddening to an ex-member of the Senators Fan Club.
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