Baseball’s Mind-Set Expands

Sunday in Denver: The Colorado Rockies become the first team in major league history to draw one million fans in their first 17 home games, putting the Rockies on pace for a record 4.95 million in attendance in 1993.

Monday in New York: Bret Saberhagen’s three-hit, 1-0 shutout enables the Mets to salvage a split at home against Florida, moving the last-place Mets back to within two games of the sixth-place Marlins.

Did I hear someone say expansion was going to be the ruination of baseball?

Let me see if I can recite the litany again.

1. Expansion will over - saturate an already glutted market.

On the 11th of May, the two expansion teams, Colorado and Florida, ranked first and fourth in major league home attendance. The Rockies, offering the only big-league baseball between Los Angeles and Kansas City, were averaging better than 59,000 per game while building a mighty cable-linked regional fan base in New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah and Nebraska. The Marlins, offering the only big-league baseball south of Atlanta, were averaging just under 42,000 in a 48,000-seat stadium, suggesting that interest in baseball in the state of Florida extends beyond the month of March.

2. Expansion will dilute the existing talent pool, force mediocre teams to load their rosters with triple-A players and turn the pennant races into runaways for the incumbent superpowers.

As of May 11, defending world champion Toronto was in fourth place and the on-deck dynasty of Atlanta was in third, two games above .500. Philadelphia, which lost 92 games in 1992, was leading the National League East by seven games. The Angels, 72-90 a year ago, were 1 1/2 games back in the American League West. Detroit and Houston led their divisions. Oakland had the fewest victories in the majors.

3. Expansion will make a farce of major league pitching.

League earned-run averages are up, but not dramatically--the American League at 4.20, up from 3.94, and the National League at 3.89, up from 3.50. Overall, that’s an increase of about one-third of a run per game, certainly nothing worth burning the Baseball Encyclopedia over.

4. Expansion will mean more bad baseball, especially in Denver and Miami.

Florida has a better record than both the preseason favorites in the American League--Baltimore and Minnesota--as well as Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City, Oakland, the Dodgers and the Mets. The Marlins have more .300 hitters than either the Angels or the A’s--two, Jeff Conine and Dave Magadan--and their team earned-run average of 3.62 is fifth-best in the National League.

Colorado is seventh in the NL West, fulfilling spring expectations, but the Rockies rank third in the league in hitting, with Andres Galarraga batting .395 and leading the majors in RBIs. Charlie Hayes has as many home runs as Darryl Strawberry, Eric Davis and Eric Karros combined, and Alex Cole shares the league leadership in stolen bases.

5. Expansion will gut the Angels bullpen.

Four out of five ain’t bad.

Unlike the NBA and the NHL--Motto: Be fruitful, multiply and shouldn’t we start looking into Mexico?--baseball was crying for expansion. There hadn’t been a change in the current membership since 1977 and in 30 years, the baseball fraternity had grown by just six--two new teams every decade.

The delivery of the Rockies was at least 15 years overdue; Denver has long been more of a major league city than Seattle or San Diego. Florida was a brimming mother lode, just waiting to be tapped, but baseball thought it better to go with two burgs in the Canadian bushes than squeeze the grapefruit already in hand.

Five weeks in and one team in Florida is not close to enough. St. Petersburg won’t rest until it gets one, too, and if the Giants or the Mariners aren’t coming, Tampa-St. Pete will keep lobbying the corridors of power until another round of expansion is shaken loose, which could happen a lot sooner than the purists can stand, so they had better take the following news sitting down.

Read between the lines of baseball’s new take-a-little, give-the-store television agreement and you will see that more expansion is coming, probably before the 1990s run out. Television wants an extra tier of playoffs. You want it, you got it, baseball says. To do this, baseball had to commit itself to a three-division realignment--consider it done by 1995--but three divisions of five teams apiece requires a total of 30 franchises.

At the moment, baseball remains two franchises short, but the Tampa-St. Pete Roses and the Washington Senators (Vol. III) stand in the wait, ready to remedy the situation at the drop of a $95 million start-up fee.

Can the owners use the spare change?

Have you ever met one? Basically, the introduction goes something like this: “Hi, I’m Bud Selig, have you heard how much money we’re losing?�

The new television contract won’t help matters any, very possibly because the owners didn’t want it to. The switch from CBS to NBC/ABC could slice per-team revenue by as much as 50%--and hadn’t the owners, jockeying for labor negotiating position, warned the players for months that the golden egg will be cracked and scrambled by 1994?

According to this ill logic, the owners figure Premonitions Of Doom plus Bad TV Contract equals Salary Cap, minus Arbitration.

Donald Fehr’s chalkboard maps it out somewhat differently . . . and isn’t this the kind of talk that got baseball pushed behind basketball and football in the first place?

Expanding was the best thing baseball could have done for itself, considering the current climate.

Purple and teal have caught the fans’ eyes these last few weeks. Better that than the black clouds supposedly hovering overhead.