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When baseball's owners voted last week to euthanize two of its struggling teams, no one took the news harder than Montreal Expos fans.
Both of them.
The owners will still have to appease the players' union, most likely by making free agents of the players under contract to the soon-to-be-extinct franchises, rather than dispersing them via contraction draft. But the owners seem to have finally realized what the rest of us knew long ago -- there simply aren't enough good players to stock, nor fans to support, 30 major-league teams.
Montreal and the Minnesota Twins shape up as the most likely targets for the franchise turk, with shallow fan bases and owners more than willing to get more than twice their properties' book value from their colleagues.
When the National League took up expansion in the late 1960s, Montreal was a darkhorse contender, at best. A much more likely home for the league's 11th team -- Buffalo. Still a relatively booming steel town, Buffalo made an attractive expansion site for several reasons.
The locals rabidly supported the Bills, particularly through their mini-dynasty from 1964 to '66, when they won three AFL Eastern Division titles and two league championships, coming within one game of facing the Green Bay Packers in the first Super Bowl.
Plans for a domed stadium to house the Bills and a baseball team were also in place, either downtown or in Lancaster.
The National Basketball Association and National Hockey League were also eying Western New York, with both ultimately putting teams in Buffalo for the 1970-71 season.
Baseball, though, had the first shot at becoming the second game in town. Thanks to effective backroom politicking by aspiring Montreal owner Charles Bronfman, bolstered by baseball's desire to build an international market, it never happened.
Given what's happened over the ensuing three-plus decades, both to the region and to the sport, that's a very good thing.
While closing factories and lousy civic planning destroyed Western New York's economy during the 1970s and early '80s, players' salaries throughout sports skyrocketed. Baseball was the launching pad, with arbitration and then free agency redistributing the revenue split between players and owners and spiking ticket prices.
That calculus, along with the duplicity of Paul Snyder and John Y. Brown, drove the basketball Braves to Southern California. Had there been a baseball team to further dilute the shrinking local sports market, it might have wound up in Florida or the Washington, D.C. area.
Or, if a major-league version of the Buffalo Bisons had managed to survive this long, it would likely be at the top of the owners' contraction hit list.
Its presence would likely have had a damaging, if not fatal, effect on the Bills and Sabres. Domed multi-sport facilities were the rage in the late 1960s and '70s, with Detroit, Seattle and Minnesota following Houston's lead.
But the move to sports-specific stadiums of the last decade would have forced the area to build two new structures to keep the football and baseball powers happy. Even if Erie County and New York State could have ponied up the loot, that may not have left enough money for HSBC Arena, a step necessary to keep the Sabres in town.
So, instead of two relatively healthy franchises, Western New York might have ended up with none if it tried for three.
As for the owners' present proposal, it doesn't address baseball's primary problem -- the inherent inequities between big and small markets. And putting players like Vladimir Guerrero and Brad Radke on the free-agent market would only serve to widen that gap.
While contraction has its merits, it sounds like the owners saying, "See? We did something."
You also have to question their motives and timing. The vote came on the eve of the expiration of the collective bargaining agreement with the players.
The owners maintain that they won't lock the players out, but unilaterally eliminating two teams and hundreds of jobs for players (counting the minor-league systems) looks like a sign that they're itching for another labor war.
After all, that worked out so well the last time.