( 11:43 PM )
Baseball in DC: Amateur hour
Check out the official site of the Washington Nationals today on MLB.com: you’ll find out that you can no longer by Nationals gear or put down deposits on season tickets. In fact, you can learn how to get back your season ticket deposit, assuming you were naïve enough to actually go ahead and spend money on what was all a pipe dream.
Baseball in DC is dead, and just as Washington was starting to earn some respectability. Ever since Marion Barry, Washington has been a punchline. Now, thanks to a politically clumsy mayor and a council chair with no idea of how baseball or business works, Washington has again shown the rest of the country it’s ass. We might be the power center of the world, but we’re a second-rate city.
This whole debacle reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry and George get the deal with NBC to produce a pilot. George didn’t like the offer, offended at the relatively small payday compared with the network’s multi-million dollar deal with Ted Danson. So George passes, telling Jerry it’s just a negotiating technique. Of course, Jerry explains to him that if they pass, it’s over; NBC will just go to the next people on the list.
Bud Selig and Major League Baseball don’t need Washington. If DC doesn’t accept their terms, they will not hesitate to turn their back and keep walking. Baseball has a long history of doing things out of spite—these people don’t mess around. If Linda Cropp thinks she is negotiating for a better deal, she is not only out of her league, but completely out of her mind.
Perhaps the Expos/Nationals can hire George Constanza to be their traveling secretary next year. They’ll need one, because it’s doubtful they’ll be playing at RFK next year. Players might be looking at a six-month road trip in ’05. Tom Boswell of the Washington Post (the most authoritative voice about this issue) said he heard from a high-ranking baseball official that if DC doesn’t agree to the original deal by the end of the year, then the Nats will never play in Washington.
Looks like Vegas might be the next option on the board. Sports Illustrated ran an article two weeks ago about Vegas trying to land a pro sports franchise. The only thing stopping it is the shadow gambling might cast over baseball, particularly in the aftermath of Pete Rose, which seems to creep into the news every year. But at this point, who cares? Steroids are a much bigger issue than gambling. Las Vegas is the only viable city right now if DC is off the table. Otherwise, MLB might as well hold onto the Expos for two more years and then contract them after the current collective bargaining agreement expires.
We were so close. But to be honest, there were plenty of opponents to baseball in DC. Of course there are much greater needs in Washington then securing a baseball stadium at no cost to MLB or the new ownership group. But in the end, public financing of this stadium had nothing to do with fixing the schools or building more hospitals. You won’t see the city government doing anything about those problems if they manage to blow the stadium deal. You think businesses would agree to higher taxes to raise $400 million for the school system? Would anyone get behind that? Of course not.
Maybe I should move to New York.
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The new Wes Anderson movie is not getting good reviews. I loved Rushmore, still haven’t seen Bottle Rocket, wasn’t crazy about Royal Tennenbaums, and probably will wait to see The Life Aquatic on DVD. David Edelstein nailed it on Slate.com:
“But as is often the case with Anderson, the narrative design is elbowed aside by the production design…It would be all too easy to Make Your Own Wes Anderson shot. Put a quirky person, dressed in loud but stylish colors, in the center of the frame; use a lens that spreads out the image and shortens the distance between foreground and background, creating a two-dimensional puppet-stage effect; stick an object or a character off to one side to throw off the symmetry; and, voilà. You're in the New York Film Festival.”
That encapsulates how I felt about Tennenbaums: scenes were created for their own sake, their own intrinsic beauty or bizarre juxtaposition of characters and scenery. They did little to advance a compelling story. Sounds like The Life Aquatic is more of the same.
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