Playing Hardball: The High-Stakes Battle for Baseball's New Franchises.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew

Even more than most genres, sports books tend to be pretty predictable fare. There are hagiographic accounts of teams which are written for the benefit of hometown fans and which usually contain a phrase like "The incredible story of. . ." in the subtitle. There are "as told to" biographies that are as fun as they are self-serving. A recent and welcome type of sports book works the crossroads of sport and commerce, or, more properly, sport as commerce. The goal of these books is not only to explain the culture of the clubhouse but also of the front office, to give color and shape to the guys in suits as well as the guys in uniform. Barbarians at the Gate meets Ball Four

David Whitford's fun read falls into this last category. It's the account of the machinations that led to the creation of the Florida Marlins and the Colorado Rockies--both of which are now embarked on their first season. A Boston-based writer, Whitford parachuted into both Denver and Miami and kept a keen eye trained on the jockeying that marked both cities' efforts to acquire a franchise. What he's come up with is not only a solid sports book, but one with a public policy dimension that's worth wider consideration: the things cities do to revitalize themselves.

The Rockies and the Marlins are the first expansion teams in baseball since 1977, and, as fans know, that slow pace of expansion is no accident. (There were no new teams between 1902 and 1952.) The reluctance stems mainly from the wariness of owners to divvy up more of the pie, but also comes from a quite legitimate concern about the dilution of talent on the field. What got them to change in 1990, when they voted to allow two new teams into the National League, were two factors. First, their profits seemed safe. Baseball attendance had been soaring; television rights were up; the asking price for a new franchise had reached such a high level--almost $100 million to be shared among the incumbent owners--that the threat of a dip in profits seemed minimal compared to a few years earlier.

The second and more important spur to expansion was Congress' threat to lift baseball's exemption from antitrust laws--a status no other sport enjoys. The exemption dates to 1922 when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that baseball was a game rather than a business and outside the purview of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Harry Blackmun, despite his reputation as a judicial activist, declined to overturn Holmes' opinion when he ruled on...