The Appearance of Misconduct
by Tim Walker
Jonah Keri
has ably analyzed the Colon trade and its ridiculousness for the Expos. I
want to focus on the deal as an indicator of the shadiness and shame implied by
the league's ownership of the Expos.
First, some background. For better and for worse, Major League Baseball is a
legal cartel. As such, it may be thought of as a sort of open, friendly
conspiracy (it conspires to keep any competing league from offering top-level
baseball in North America). Nothing wrong with that in itself -- we happily put
up with cartels in most of our major sports, and in other areas of life as well.
And as long as I the consumer understand the arrangement, benefit from it, and
have some kind of recourse to get out from under it, what's the problem? No one
makes me spend money on MLB or the NFL. If I have a beef with one of these
cartels, I can always boycott their sponsors, or push for new laws to rein them
in, or just go to Longhorn games instead. So far, so good.
But for their own long-term health, sports leagues must convince their consumers
that they field a fair product, or else the entire attraction of honest
competition is ruined. By this token, baseball's fans must be able to believe
that MLB holds itself in check by various means, whether in the structure of the
amateur draft, or in a player's arbitration calendar, or in the rules of the
waiver wire. These rules (and many others) allow for open explanations of
events: The Red Sox signed
Johnny Damon
fair and square under the free agency rules; the Yankees got stuck with
Jose Canseco's
contract because the Rays really were looking to unload him via waivers; there's
only so long the Expos can hold onto
Vlad Guerrero
thanks to his free-agency calendar. And so on.
Whether we like an individual piece of news or not, we have reason to believe
that matters were handled out in the open. The league's internal rules are made
even more potent in this regard since they're monitored by a powerful player's
union and, at least in theory, by an independent press.
Onto the problem at hand. The very nature of the league's ownership of the
Expos raises the specter of misconduct - of a violation of consumers' trust -
because it subverts this system of checks. Because the league now controls the
Expos' players, this specter extends not just to Expos fans, but to fans of
other teams (like the Red Sox), and to followers of the league as a whole.
Protestations of innocence from Selig & Co. are irrelevant. Maybe the
Commissioner does have firewalls in place such that he holds no sway on the
Expos' day-to-day operations. It doesn't matter. Again, it is the very nature
of the arrangement that opens the way for back-channel, conspiratorial
explanations for events. Indeed, given the current arrangement, it actually
becomes logical to entertain such notions.
Most conspiracy theories fail at the level of common sense because they have too
many moving parts - too many conspirators, too many secrets to keep, and so on.
Most folks can then deflate these elaborate theories with simple questions: What
bizarre overlap of motives would lead the Mafia to cooperate with Cuban
communists to assassinate JFK? By what elaborate system of coordination would
the Trilateral Commission pull the levers that run the world? It's not that the
conspiratorial explanations are impossible, just that they're so unlikely that
they fail the sniff test for most folks: "Huh? . . . Naah, that could
never happen." Put another way, these theories fail the test of Occam's
razor. That is, they don't supply the simplest explanation that fits the
available facts.
In the case of the Colon trade though, it may actually be simpler to use
a conspiracy theory to explain what happened. Consider:
It is of course possible that Omar Minaya merely fell down on the job of
extracting maximum exchange value for Colon, and that Ken Williams succeeded in
pulling off a rare, masterful three-way trade. Minaya did clear a huge chunk of
payroll and get a 'name' pitcher; Cashman simplified his glut of starters;
Williams helped push his club to the front of its division. It's possible that
the whole exchange is a case of three GMs doing their jobs.
But a Selig-led or -inspired conspiracy to make this trade happen would require
only (a) cronyism on Selig's part -- which we may take as a given -- and (b) two
phone calls. It's merely a thought experiment, but how hard is the following
scenario to believe?
Elapsed time? A few minutes. Advanced planning? None. Number of actors? A
handful: Selig, Reinsdorf, Minaya/Tavares, Williams, and Cashman. The last two
would only be doing their jobs and wouldn't need to conspire at all, which
leaves only three or four interested parties - Selig, Reinsdorf, and
Minaya/Tavares - to keep their mouths shut. This scenario's low number of
moving parts lets it pass the sniff test.
It also passes another informal test that hadn't occurred to me until I bounced
the theory off my buddy Paul, who has long experience in electoral politics and
public-relations work, and even longer experience as an MLB-watcher. He found
the theory plausible enough that he recast it another way: If he were Selig's
p.r. man, and he knew that this deal had gone through without Selig's knowledge,
he would scramble to make it known - for example by leaks to friendly reporters
- that the Commissioner had no involvement in the deal. In other words, he
would ensure that Selig had clear deniability.
It doesn't matter whether Selig had a hand in the Colon trade. In the long run,
it probably doesn't matter whether the deal pushes the White Sox over the top or
not. What matters is that the league has put itself in a position where
speculation like this even makes sense. Each day that Major League Baseball
owns the Montreal Expos is a day in which baseball fans have yet another reason
- another very good reason - to question the league's integrity and, by
extension, their own support of the game.
Fix it, Bud.
Tim Walker is a business writer in Austin.