Don't Expand, Don't Reorganize, MLB ... Please

Oh, goody.  Not satisfied with anything they should be satisfied with, Major League Baseball, the people who think that, at 500 miles distant, I live so close to the Baltimore Orioles that I should have their broadcasts blacked out, is considering expanding.

There are 30 teams as I write this, divided into two leagues with different rules on the designated hitter (though the same pool of umpires).  Each league has three divisions of five teams, so there is always the need for an interleague game, at least one, every day (do the math).

That, apparently, is not enough.

Rather than focusing on leveling the DH rule across the two leagues to avoid giving one league an advantage in interleague games, MLB is looking at adding yet more teams.

Unfortunately, they are looking at places like Mexico City, and looking at them as expansion sites rather than as relocation targets for financially struggling franchises like Oakland or Tampa Bay.  Now I don't have a problem with moving the Athletics or Rays if need be.  They are not able to compete; both have reputedly awful stadiums to play in and see a game in, can't draw flies, and accordingly cannot afford to spend even a third as much on salaries as the more successful teams can.

But Mexico City?  Really?  I will grant you that there could be a market for the game there.  Mexico City, where I have been several times in the past, is a huge metropolis with certainly enough people there to be able to fill a stadium.  There are the same amenities there as you would find in any huge city.

All that said, this is not the greatest idea Baseball has ever had, and they've had some stupid ones in the past, starting with the blackout system, or having every player wear #42 on Jackie Robinson Day, or letting the Yankees build a new stadium with dimensions in right field that are against the rules for a new ballpark in the majors.

But where do we start?  Shall we acknowledge the fact that for 81 games a year, a team there will be at home with another team there, where the local language is not English, the local food is questionable (trust me), the local laws are not American, the local enforcement is spotty and the local government corrupt.  And the earth below the city is not stable, either.  Yum.

For another 81 games, the team will be on the road.  Mexico City is not a border town.  Take a look at a map; it is literally 1,000 miles from the nearest MLB city (Houston), meaning that pretty much anywhere they would have to go to play, there is a minimum two-plus-hour flight to get there.  Ask a Seattle Mariner how much fun it is, on their life and performance, to be that isolated from the entire rest of baseball.

Baseball players are young, mostly alpha males.  Their choices are not always the best, let us say politely.  So let me describe my last trip to Mexico.  I was a product manager for a medical instrumentation company, heading to Mexico City for a medical trade show.  I was carrying with me a sample product called a "cardiac output gun", which is vaguely pistol-shaped and injects some kind of solution into a line run to the heart to measure its strength.  It clearly could not fire a projectile.

I was instructed by my company to carry $100 in cash with me through the airport.  That was not for tacos.  That was on the assumption that the Mexican customs agent would take one look at the cardiac output gun and pull me aside for a search.

I do not speak enough Spanish (did I mention the language is different there?) to be able to explain to even a medically fluent customs agent what that device was, even if he were to speak slowly.  So the $100 was in my pocket to be able to persuade a recalcitrant customs agent to let me through.  That was how it worked then, and I find it hard to believe it has changed that much.

That's where Baseball is thinking of expanding.  Let's run 750 young alpha males, with far too much money at their disposal, constantly through a city with a different language and a government not beholden to ours.  Then let's just see what happens when the first 40 or 50 of them step out of line with, I don't know, drugs, women, who knows what-all -- or, worse, get falsely accused of doing any of that -- and end up held in a Mexican prison.

You know, Baseball has a big problem.  Even with the revenue sharing and luxury taxes, the most revenue-positive teams can still spend three times what the least-profitable teams can on salaries and player contracts.  They can win, but only for a short period when multiple young players jell at the same time, before they reach free agency and go off to another team.

They need to fix that, even though the players' union (with zero interest in parity) will fight them tooth and nail.  Expansion only exacerbates the problem, and expansion to a place like Mexico City simply adds layers on top of the issues the game already has.

Which means, morons that they are who run it, we can almost surely expect the Ciudad Mexico "Hombres" in our immediate future.

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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