Off Wing Opinion links to an excellent three part series in the Washington Post on the behind the scenes scheming that will or will not bring the Expos to D.C. It's very long, but well worth the read. To sum it up as briefly as possible, MLB uses it's anti-trust exemption to cajole citites into paying for new stadiums. It's using the same tactics to get suitors for the Expos to pony up for a new stadium in order to get the Expos. Selig won't allow the team in Washington because he's now buddy-buddy with Angelos.

There is one quote I do want to share with you. Leave it to the A's to get things right:

The Bay Area is the prism through which Selig views the Baltimore-Washington debate. The market, he said, is not "a perfect analogy" but baseball needs to "learn from history" as it considers whether to put two teams so close together. His views were shaped by the struggles of the Giants and Athletics after A's then-owner Charles O. Finley moved his team from Kansas City to Oakland in 1968 "without any analysis at all," Selig said.

But recent developments have made Selig's views, along with many of the underlying assumptions shaping the debate in Washington, appear obsolete. Buoyed by the construction of a privately funded waterfront stadium, the Giants came within eight outs of winning the 2002 World Series and won the National League West last season by 15 1/2 games. The A's have drawn more than 2 million fans three straight seasons and had the second-best record in baseball from 2000 to '03.

"Competition is a wonderful thing; I believe in it strongly," said Steve Schott, the A's owner and one of the largest homebuilders in California. "If you don't have competition, what's to keep the other team from being very lax and complacent about trying to bring the best product they can to the marketplace?"

The population of the Bay Area, including San Jose, is 7 million. The population of the consolidated Baltimore-Washington metropolitan areas is 7.6 million.

Eric at Off Wing is concerned that a team in DC would devestate the Orioles television revenue. I would point out that would happen only if the Washington Expos were given exclusive rights to the TV markets Baltimore now serves. Let's follow Steve Shott's idea and introduce competition into the market. Why not let Philadelphia/Baltimore/Washington share a TV market. Let people watch their favorite team. One of the great things about growing up in the NY broadcast area in the 1970's was that with the Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers and Islanders, there was always a game on! (And five of those teams were on one channel.) Let these teams duke it out on the dial.