Don’t Allow Angelos to Detour From Virginia

One strong hint that the Montreal Expos might indeed be sold soon is that Peter Angelos has already suggested a possible site for the team if it moves to Virginia: Richmond.

The message from the Baltimore Orioles owner isn’t exactly subtle. Indications are he’ll fight to keep a team out of metropolitan D.C.

Every reasonable effort should be made to make sure Angelos loses.

When exactly did the owner of the Baltimore baseball franchise become the determiner of what’s right for metropolitan Washington, particularly Northern Virginia? When did we become beholden to him?

There’s a very, very good chance the Montreal Expos, since they apparently will not get a new stadium, will be sold this fall. There’s a reasonable chance the group led by William L. Collins, which was in there slugging for an expansion franchise a few years ago and then for the Houston Astros, will have a chance to buy the Expos and move them to Northern Virginia. There have been probably a dozen attempts to secure a team to play in the D.C. area over the past 27 years, and few of them had a chance to succeed.

This does. And Angelos, from all indications, will try his best to stop it.

Peter Angelos has clearly forgotten how his Baltimore franchise came to be. Let’s refresh his memory. The Washington Senators waived this area’s territorial claim to exclusivity nearly 50 years ago , which allowed Baltimore to have a team. Angelos obviously has come to believe Washington exist as some suburb of Baltimore, subject to his narrow wishes.

But as Gabe Paul Jr., the executive director of the Virginia Baseball Stadium Authority, pointed out Thursday in a meeting with editors and reporters from The Washington Post, Baltimore and Northern Virginia “are separate, designated market areas, they’re in separate states. The (Potomac) river is a natural divide. ... Peter would love to control the whole east coast; he’d love to have no competition.”

Wouldn’t every businessman in America? There’s only one apparent way to say no to Angelos and his attempt at monopolizing an entire region, and that’s to put the Expos in Northern Virginia.

My personal choice would be to have a team in downtown D.C., a stadium snuggled right into the city’s streets, the Capitol rotunda visible just over the center field wall. It would be the kind of retail/sports/transportation, private-public co-op that has revitalized Cleveland and will further enhance San Francisco.

Asked about the attractiveness of a downtown stadium, Collins said, “No doubt, it would be incredible. You’re not going to hear me say one negative word about a stadium in D.C. It’s jut that we’ve got a unique set of circumstances that prevents that.”

Problem is, of course, downtown D.C. is simply too close to Baltimore’s Camden Yards. Baseball owners aren’t going to go for a franchise located 30 miles down the road from Angelos. Collin estimates he would get four to five more votes for a move to Northern Virginia than he would get for downtown D.C.

That’s because Northern Virginia isn’t at the other end of New York Avenue. My home in Northern Virginia is 60 miles from Camden Yards, which isn’t much closer than Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium is from Camden Yards.

When Collins was asked why his attempt to buy the Expos and move them here should be viewed by the metropolis any differently (or more optimistically) than all those previously failed attempts, he said, “Because the times have changed so dramatically. . . .There is a stadium financing plan in place. There is a legislature and a governor who have said, ‘We are ready to support this.’ ” Collins added, “We are known in major league baseball. . . .We’re the seventh largest market in the U.S.; it’s the missing link.”

Not having a firm stadium site works against him, but Collins has indeed been around the owners long enough to have acquired some simpatico with them. And he’s come to understand just how the owners think, which can be frightening to many of us.

Most didn’t know Northern Virginia existed until the strike talks of 1994 when they flew into Dulles Airport, wined, dined and hoteled at Tyson’s Corner and fell in love with Reston Town Center.

Also Phoenix, Denver, Miami and Tampa/St. Petersburg already have been given expansion franchises. And something that may be more important than all of that is the fact that quite a few major league baseball teams--the Pirates, Phillies and Twins among others--are pressing for new stadiums. The NFL, generally speaking, gets what it wants faster because cities know pro football franchises will bolt in a moment for a new stadium deal.

In order for baseball franchises to have any leverage--and whether you like it or not, the No. 1 issue for any club is its stadium situation--cities might have to be shaken up a little bit by seeing one franchise hit the road. Who better to be sacrificed than the Expos? It’s about time that somebody else’s loss is potentially our gain. And anybody who stands in the way, including Peter Angelos, should be stiff-armed at once.