Subsidies and lies: how baseball came back to D.C.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Major League Baseball

FEW CORPORATE WELFARE tales are filled with as many tawdry lies as the return of professional baseball to the nation's capital.

On April 14, the Washington Nationals, who have spent the previous 36 seasons as the Montreal Expos, will play the first Major League game in D.C. since the hapless Senators limped off to Arlington, Texas, in 1971. The game and season will take place at RFK Stadium, which was renovated for baseball over the winter with $18 million in taxpayer-backed bonds. Starting in 2008, the team will play in a new waterfront stadium projected to cost as much as $584 million, paid for by a cash-strapped and notoriously mismanaged city council, which swears that it will get private investors to pay for up to half of the costs.

The publicly financed stadium boom of the last 15 years may be drawing to a merciful close, but the Nationals' history of mendacity is a textbook case of billionaire shamelessness that could inflict serious damage for years to come on a city that can hardly afford it. As always with Major League Baseball, lying in the defense of leeching hundreds of millions of dollars is no vice.

Lie #1: Baseball is hemorrhaging money and needs to downsize. In November 2001 Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig announced that the 30-team league was too large to be financially sustainable and needed to be pared down to 28 to enhance "competitive balance." MLB, he testified to Congress, lost more than half a billion dollars in 2001 alone. The likeliest stragglers to be culled were the Expos and the Minnesota Twins, franchises that generated "insufficient local revenues" to compete.

All of Selig's statements were false. In fact, league profits had grown 17 percent a year since 1995, according to baseball economist Andrew Zimbalist, with franchise valuations increasing by 250 percent in just half a decade. Attendance and television revenue were at all-time highs. Small-market teams, far from being unable to compete, actually thrived in 2002, with the tiny-revenue Oakland A's making the playoffs for the third of four consecutive years. Even the contraction-targeted Twins won their division for the first of three straight seasons.

Most important, there were myriad contractual and legal barriers to downsizing the league, making it likely, as Zimbalist wrote in his recent book May the Best Team Win, that the talk of contraction was a gambit through which "the owners were seeking leverage in the...