TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Olympics Watch: Go Team, er, USA!

Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, has been instrumental in putting together the Greek National Olympic baseball team. You can read all about it on the Baltimore Orioles web site, which is doubling up for a Greek team site.

Of course, what the Greek team is going to be -- just check out that roster, featuring great old Greek names like Bellinger, Kingsbury, Harris, Brack, et alia -- is the best American baseball players who have any kind of Greek ancestry whatsoever. You don't have to be a citizen of Greece to qualify for its Olympic team, you just have to have "Greek Blood", a strangely old world concept. (This is not anything new: the Italian baseball team in 2000 was made up largely of Americans.) The Greeks, of course, get a team in the tournament because they're hosting the games, and the host country is allowed to put in a team in whatever event it wants without qualifying through international competition.

Team USA, which consisted at the time of a hodge podge of amateur players and minor leaguers playing winter ball, lost to Mexico in the olympic qualifying tournament in Panama last November. It was described in the media as a stunner, but the only people who were stunned were the ones who took it for granted, without checking, we'd be defending that gold medal Tommy Lasorda finally won (with some small help from an all-star team of minor leaguers) in Australia in 2000. We haven't taken international baseball competition very seriously, in large part because it's hard to keep a meaningful team together for any length of time when the players have better things to do (go to college and play, earn a living). If you're a genuine prospect, and you get hurt playing for a piece of metal, you're out of luck forever. I'm not sure national pride was enough of an allure to attract a lot of talent to the team when the competition would be ignored by the majority of their countrymen, especially when the tournament experience will consist of shuttling between security lockdown in their hotels through the greek smog to play in stifling heat before sparse audiences in slipshod fields.

However, I tip my cap to Angelos for supporting Olympic baseball. No matter that he seems to be doing it out of ethnic pride, not national pride for the US of A. It's the most you'll see Major League Baseball supporting international "amateur" baseball this quadrenniad.

Speaking of Peter Angelos and the American Way, it seems likely that MLB will be selecting Northern Virginia as the next venue for the Canada-Puerto Rico Expos. The focus has been heavily-centered on the nation's capital, with three different venues -- Dulles, the District of Columbia, and Norfollk -- vying for the Expos franchise. Dulles appears to me to be the front-runner, because they've lined up a way for taxpayers to pay for a new ballpark (via a Pittsburgh-style Plan C that won't require voter approval), and despite issues surrounding traffic, congestion, and the lack of a real 'center' to the area, it should be feasible. Commissioner Selig likes nothing better than a publically-financed ballpark.

The reason why Washington is the focus of a new ball club, of course, is that MLB wants to continue to cozy up to the people who keep its anti-trust exemption alive. It's another example of how the power elite of the country and the power elite of baseball walk hand in hand, and feed off the taxpayer along the way. Angelos has objected to the territorial incursion, and baseball will likely duck his objections via the Northern Virginia route via loopholes (Virginia was not "assigned" to Baltimore when the Senators left town for the second time - for Texas). Angelos is also a significant outsider within the baseball ownership. He's been on the losing side of many ownership votes, often all by himself. He's argued the move for a new franchise would hurt him as much as the Giants say Oakland moving to San Jose would hurt them. But Angelos is also a Democrat, capital D, in a sport that is very tight with the Corked Bat administration, and that's going to leave him squeezed out of the decision-making.

(And as for why Portland, Las Vegas, and Monterrey will be cut out -- beyond more substantive differences in those cities' plans for new ballparks, Commissioner Selig would have a huge realignment headache in trying to relocate a team from the NL East into a Pacific or Mountain time zone. That's doomed them from the start, although I suspect Oakland will be asked to move to one of those locales sometime in the next decade.)

Incidentally, I didn't see too much coverage today on either Sports Center or CNN about an incident at the Yankees-Red Sox game last night. Vice President Cheney emerged from an undisclosed location long enough to hang out with Gov. Pataki and former Mayor Giuliani in a luxury box, and then made his way down to the field for a photo opportunity during New York's now-celebrated seventh-inning stretch rendition of "God Bless America". George Steinbrenner (whom, I should remind our readers, is a convicted felon -- he funneled illegal campaign contributions to the Nixon re-election campaign in 1972 -- I wonder if he, as a Tampa Bay resident, can vote legally in Florida?) obligingly arranged for Cheney to be shown on the jumbotron during the half inning. The crowd booed him -- booed him loudly, roundly, and intensely -- and they quickly cut away from him.

I'm definitely rooting for the Greek-American national team at Athens this year. So many battles are fought and won by proxy.

posted by The Crank 11:07 AM