Baseball wants a scapegoat for steroids. Now Selig and congress want to blame and punish the Giants. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/16/MNPQUFMS5.DTL Best punishment - Take away their south bay teritorial "rights" and let Wolff build this downtown:
That won't happen any more than there'll be yellow and/or a tag-shaped border in the Chicago Fire's Best Buy jersey sponsor wordmark. Lewis Wolff revealed back in August 2006 that the very funding for AT&T Park from various South Bay banking institutions and other entities (that the Giants is now paying off with interest) has depended from Day One, and continues to depend, on the Giants' hold on its South Bay territorial rights. No amount of money offers to the G's from Wolff nor secret handshakes to Commissioner Selig could break that. MLB will certainly punish the Giants in some way, but it won't be in that way. GO SAN JOSE EARTHQUAKES!!! -G
I agree. Being an A's fan there is nothing I'd like to see more than the Giants suffering... but not even Selig is that cruel. He'd cripple the Giants franchise.
I believe (strongly) that baseball itself needs to be disciplined. I think the best way (and I've so written my representatives) is to have Congress lift MLB's exemption from the anti-trust statutes.
Only thing about raising the anti-trust limitations is what would it change? By and large the only thing it would do is more teams would move around. Which frankly is a bad thing no matter how you slice it.
I don't even like baseball anymore (thanks to the lack of cap, steroid blame game and of course territorial rights), but that would certainly be nice. I don't get how this would set a dangerous precedent. They'd be moving further away from the Giants. How many doors does that open for other teams, like the Marlins to New Jersey or whatever? None.
Ron Owenns asked Wolff about this today on his radio program. Interesting. Also googled up this - even more interesting! A possible penalty for Giants: give A's San Jose