Better Red than Steinbrenner; why fans should own their teams.

• Author: Rowe, Jonathan
• Position: George Steinbrenner

BETTER RED THAN STEINBRENNER

When Robert Short ran for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota in 1978, baseball fans finally had a chance for revenge. Short had spurned the city of Washington just seven years earlier by moving the Washington Senators to Texas. The fans were so angry at the time that they stormed onto the field in the ninth inning of the final home game, uprooting bases and tearing up turf.

Short's Senate race raised the possibility that he might return to the city that, in the eyes of local fans, he had so callously deserted. A group of these fans, led by one "Baseball Bill' Holdforth, a Capitol Hill bartender of ample girth who was rarely seen without his baseball cap, formed a "Committee to Keep Bob Short Out of Washington.' They held beer bashes to raise money for Short's opponents and took out ads in the Minneapolis newspapers presenting to the voters of that state their view of the man who was seeking their vote. "We're simply going to the people of Minnesota and asking them if they think Bob Short is in the tradition of Hubert Humphrey, Fritz Mondale and Gene McCarthy,' Holdforth told a local newspaper. Short suffered a humiliating defeat, and while Baseball Bill's campaign was admittedly a minor factor, Washington fans could gloat nevertheless. Millions of abandoned sports fans, from Brooklyn to Baltimore to Oakland, would have relished a similar opportunity for vengeance.

But while Washington has had its revenge, it still doesn't have a team. By economic arrangements that will, in some far decade, seem barbarous and benighted, that repository of local identity and loyalty called a baseball team is deemed the exclusive property of a single individual called an "owner,' who can move it to another city as though it were his body and fender shop. Washington has learned that twice. Only ten years before Short ditched the city, Clark Griffith had moved the original Washington Senators to Minneapolis. The Supreme Court, moreover, ruled many years ago that although baseball looks like a business, acts like a business and certainly uses tax subsidies like a business, it is not a business, and therefore is exempt from antitrust laws. The U.S. Congress has let that decision stand. Washington does not have baseball because a group of owners from other parts of the country have gotten together and decided, at least up until now, that it won't.

Pat Buchanan, left tackle

Big league baseball would be good for Washington. Baseball, with its attendant summer leagues, would provide an outlet for young energies (sandlot baseball has just about disappeared, and the departure of the big leaguers is one reason why). It would be evening entertainment for the tourist hordes, most of whom cannot afford seats at the Kennedy Center even if they are so inclined. With its 162-game system, baseball does not belong to the season ticket holders the way professional football does. You can actually get a seat to the game. The ceremonial possibilities alone justify having a team; throwing out the first ball is the sort of thing our president does best, and isn't it a shame we make him go all the way to Baltimore to do it?

With all its ideological hit men and gangtackling PACs, Washington today is not a very pleasant place. Not surprisingly, the leading professional sport in town is football, which is played only a mile or so east of the Capitol building. The most memorable moment of the last season at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium was when Lawrence Taylor, a 240-pound linebacket with the New York Giants, crashed into Joe Theismann, the Redskins quarterback, with such ferocity that he split Theismann's leg in two. The game represents much that is regrettable about the temper of Washington today. A recent column by Patrick Buchanan in The Washington Post accusing Democrats who don't support military aid to the contras of being "with Moscow, co-guarantors of the Brezhnev doctrine' could be seen as a verbal rendering of Lawrence Taylor's tackle.

The quality most lacking in Washington today is civility, and baseball, as has often been noted, is among our most civil of sports. The evening House Democrats and Republicans play their annual baseball game is one on which the more virulent partisan animosities are held in check; if they were playing tackle football, the mood might not be so benign. Baseball is not without its moments of violence: the baserunner breaking up the double play at second, the brush-back pitch, the enraged hitter charging the mound. But these stand out by their very brevity. The central act of the game, hitting a ball thrown at 90 mph or more from a distance of 60 feet 6 inches, is so difficult that a player who fails in only 70 out of 100 attempts is considered among the very best. Baseball is still a game of strategy and skill.

Baseball is also a calm, deliberate game. Its "problem' from a marketing standpoint--it's made for lazy summer afternoons rather than the frantic urgencies of television--is exactly why Washington needs it so much. Of our major team sports, it is the only one not...