LET'S BREAK A DEAL


I am so angry I can barely put words together. I think I'll just let Mike Wilbon do it for me:

It's a great idea that private money finance at least 50 percent of the cost of a new riverfront baseball stadium. It's a smart idea to protect the District from millions of dollars in penalties resulting from some phony stadium construction deadline that is unlikely to be met. It's common sense and good business to challenge a bunch of fat-cat Major League Baseball owners on every clause and every dollar asked for when spending $500 million or more on anything non-essential that includes a playpen for multi-millionaires.

But the time to do that was before agreeing to a deal. The time to say no was before, not after. The time for Linda Cropp to ask for amendments and show the city how tough (not to mention ambitious) she is was before Mayor Anthony A. Williams and other city officials agreed to do it baseball's way. If you're that tough, that smart and so creative as to come up with these measures now, why wasn't that done two months ago? Why not 10 months ago?

The coverage is downright apocalyptic this morning. The Nationals have suspended business operations, and deposits on season tickets are being returned. MLB says it will take their wayward team elsewhere if the stadium deal doesn't go down the way the District promised. I, for one, believe them. A little while ago someone tried to tell me that MLB is bluffing. That makes no sense. It may be true that DC is the best location to move a team, unless of course the city can't find enough investors and the stadium falls through (RFK, pictured here, isn't nearly big enough). When you think about it that way, Las Vegas -- or even Northern Virginia -- starts to look like a better option. But DC only has one option. Wilbon's analogy:

[For MLB, it's] akin to finally agreeing to a date with somebody who has stalked you for five years, then being stood up.

Hear, hear. (Elsewhere in the paper, the Kids section offers an swell analogy involving hamsters.) But city councilor Linda Cropp -- the Cruella DeVille of this nasty episode -- doesn't think so, and now she's going around saying mean, ugly things such as:

"I'm willing to let baseball walk."

And:

"I am not trying to kill the deal. I'm putting some teeth in it because I'm really disappointed with what I got from major league baseball."

The deal you got? YOU? Fuck you, lady. I hereby announce my version of Democrats' "move to Canada promise: If Linda Cropp succeeds in destroying the last chance for DC to get a baseball team and then becomes mayor, I will move back to Arlington. I really should, anyway. The taxes are lower there. Maybe they'll even have a baseball team.

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posted by WWB at 11:20 AM |