Alex and Bobby are joined by CHGO writer and podcaster Janice Scurio for the second installment of Baseball Butterfly Effects, this time focusing on hugely consequential what ifs surrounding the White Sox, Twins, and Expos. Follow Janice on Twitter @scuriiosa.
Links:
Join the Tipping Pitches Patreon
Tipping Pitches merchandise
Songs featured in this episode:
Paramore — “The News” • The Beatles — “Dig a Pony” • Booker T & the M.G.’s — “Green Onions”
Episode Transcript
[INTRO MUSIC]
Tell us a little bit about what you saw and, and, and being able to relay that message to Cora when you watch Kimbrel pitching and kind of help out so he wasn’t Tipping his Pitches. So Tipping Pitches, we hear about it all the time. People are home on the stand, what Tipping Pitches it’s all about? That’s amazing! That’s remarkable.
BOBBY: Alex, I’d like to share a little secret with the listener. And with you, I guess, you don’t know this.
ALEX: Wow, a rarity.
BOBBY: Well, you kind of do know this. But the secret is that, the business of podcasting is an imperfect science. Last week, was our first episode, you know, of our big “what ifs” with Grant Brisbee. We talked to him about, we talked to him about what if Joan Kroc was able to give the San Diego Padres to the city of San Diego. He talked about what if Randy Johnson had actually signed with the Atlanta Braves when he was drafted out of high school by the Braves in the 1980s? And that, that whole episode, I was just calling them baseball’s biggest what ifs, because I hadn’t thought of a better title, which was Baseball Butterfly Effects. Which, in my opinion, sounds better and is more memorable and it’s catchier. And so do you know what I did? I just changed the title before I went live. I just without–
ALEX: That’s your prerogative.
BOBBY: –without signaling that that’s what I was going to call it in the episode at all. And calling it a different thing many times in the episode. I just changed it because you know what? We make the rules.
ALEX: We do.
BOBBY: We follow a standard that only we can set.
ALEX: Well–
BOBBY: As the Tipping Pitches patrons if they really hated Baseball Butterfly Effects, we would go back to Baseball What Ifs, but–
ALEX: Right. Well, luckily, we don’t have to deal with that too much longer. Because today is the final episode of Baseball Butterfly Effects.
BOBBY: Well, the final for now, I guess.
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: We can, we can, we can keep this idea rolling.
ALEX: If, if–
BOBBY: More people hear it and want to come and share their baseball butterfly effect. Or maybe if the Tipping Pitches patron’s. Or just Tipping Pitches listeners want to call in to our voicemail or email us and let us know who they would want us to talk to, as part of this ongoing series. It doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be over, you know, we just, we keep it going. Keep the good vibes flowing.
ALEX: I do, I encourage those in our Slack and, and on Twitter to drop your favorite “what if” to ponder. Because you all have such hyper specific knowledge about your teams that, that I clearly am just not, not privy to. So I want to know what, what instance would have impacted the directi- the direction of your franchise? Let us know.
BOBBY: Yes, please feel free to share your baseball “what ifs”, maybe mess part–
ALEX: The butterly effects to me.
BOBBY: –of email. Oh, God. See? See? See? See? See the, the person the, the Bobby who’s writing the copy of the episodes whenever I do that on occasion when, when I’m writing it well ahead of time and, and I don’t get your copy. Or, or just the Bobby who’s thinking about podcast ideas in the future is much better than the Bobby whose actually sitting down to record them, in almost all instances. Yes, please, please feel free to share your butterfly effects about baseball or the wider world, you know? I’ll read your butterfly effects–
ALEX: Yeah, it doesn’t, it doesn’t–
BOBBY: –fuckin’ any–
ALEX: –it doesn’t about baseball. Yeah.
BOBBY: We have another Baseball Butterfly Effects episode, cued up and ready to go for you coming up just shortly with Janice Scurio. The, the wonderful writer at many different places including Sports Illustrated, Baseball Prospectus, South Side Sox, NBC. We’re really excited to hear what she has queued up for us. I’m also excited Alex to hear what you have queued up for us. But before we can do that, I have to give a shout out to the new patrons from the last two weeks. Since last time we were recording so far ahead of time I wasn’t able to shout those people out. So thank you to Jack, Lauren, Callum, Kyle, and John. Do you want to before the cold open here, Alex, before the cold open is done here, Alex? Do you want to talk about what the fuck is going on with Carlos Correa at all? Or should we just, should we just pretend that that’s not happening?
ALEX: I don’t know!
BOBBY: By the time people are listening to this Carlos Correa could have a 12 year $315 million contract with the Doosan Bears. I don’t know! He might not–
ALEX: And I’ll watch, I’ll watch that.
BOBBY: –be playing third base for the New York Mets next year. Who knows?
ALEX: Passion that good good Doosan check? Oh my God.
BOBBY: I’m uh, I’m just pretending that none of this ever happened. Because I was, I’ve been pretty offline for the last few days or so or week week-ish since our last episode with Grant Brisbee. Mostly ’cause of the holidays and ’cause of travel and all that sort of thing. So I’m not really following this Carlos Correa story at all. I’m in the not- there’s not really anything to follow.
ALEX: Luckily, yeah, there’s nothing to follow. We got the, the, the news about the holdup, like last week.
BOBBY: Ken Rosenthal lives for the drama, loves the mess. Are you aware of fact that Carlos Correa last name is actually Oppenheimer? That’s actually true. That’s not a joke, for a bit.
ALEX: I, no I know. I, I think I, I think I learned that years ago and then proceeded to wipe it from my brain just because I, I couldn’t really process that.
BOBBY: Carlos Javier Correa Oppenheimer Jr. What’s–
ALEX: Carlos Oppenheimer.
BOBBY: –what’s, what’s going on there? That’s not a name you hear every day.
ALEX: No, it’s not. You hear it in certain places.
BOBBY: Do you? Like Christopher Nolan films? Like, like what is happening there? Is he going to be in the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer? Is it actually about him signing with the New York Mets, that where Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster film, Oppenheimer is going to be about. The last two weeks of Carlos Correa’s life.
ALEX: That certainly would be one bomb, you could, you could drop on me.
BOBBY: It’s very powerful, you know, it’s very- man will not understand it until he sees it in action. Okay, why don’t we just bring in Janice before this goes in a direction that neither of us nor the listeners want it to go in. We’re going to do part two of Baseball Butterfly Effects. But before we do, I am Bobby Wagner.
ALEX: I am Alex Bazeley.
BOBBY: And you are listening to Tipping Pitches.
[6:17]
[Music Theme]
BOBBY: Baseball Butterfly Effects Part 2, which we are calling this now, even though I didn’t call it that last week, but I thought of a better title and change the title on everybody. So Baseball Butterfly Effects Part 2. We are lucky to be joined by Janice Scurio, White Sox writer, multi utility player at CHGO Sports. Janice, hello, welcome to the show.
JANICE: Hello, guys. Thanks for having me on.
BOBBY: It’s so nice to have you here. So you’re here as part of our Baseball Butterfly Effects. We reached out to you and asked if you would want to participate in this big Baseball’s Biggest “What Ifs”. Alternate realities, alternate universes if one thing changed, what would have resulted from that? So we posted this question to you. And you were excited to jump all over it to share a White Sox related thing. But I think one that not a lot of people know that much about but definitely checks a lot of Tipping Pitches boxes. So why don’t you lay out your “what if” and then we can sort of pry into it and dig a little bit deeper and find out how different the world would have been had this gone differently?
JANICE: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll start backwards. So when I was researching this topic, this is something that has been in the back of my mind for forever. And it happened when I was very young. So it is something that I don’t consciously remember, it’s talked about a little bit in circles. But for the most part, when I was doing my research, I went on eBay, and I typed in the phrase Florida White Sox. And so what came up was a series of very ugly hats and shirts. So that is probably my least favorite part of this “what if”, is that if this actually happened, we get just a barrage of very ugly merch.
BOBBY: Oh, God, I looked up the logo, it, it really is very ugly.
ALEX: It’s so, it’s really bad.
JANICE: It’s, it’s absolutely terrible! I think one of the hats is a trucker hat, which of course, you know, was the norm of the 1980s, late 1980s. But uh, yeah, it’s just Florida and of course, two very creative graphic design. The letter F is in the shape of the state of Florida, I know.
ALEX: Ahh, clever.
JANICE: Think the rapper, Flo Rida appropriated that as well for his logo. So good on him for doing that.
BOBBY: You’ve got some hits, though. You know, I was spinning right round in middle school.
JANICE: As was I as was everybody. But yeah, a lot of this merchandise is just absolutely hideous. The colors, it looks like they were going to go with a green and orange motive, and I don’t know. I, I really don’t want to offend any people who may be fans of sports teams who use green and orange but it’s I’m sorry, it’s ugly. It just does not go good together. But, but yeah, essentially what happened here in 199- 1988, there was a threat, and I call it a threat very loosely that the Chicago White Sox we’re going to move to St. Petersburg, Florida. But some last minute legislating saved the team from making that move. So no one at the time, properly called Jerry Reinsdorf’s bluff for those of you keeping score at home, Jerry Reinsdorf is the owner of the Chicago White Sox. Still is, to this day, to the chagrin of many White Sox fans who may be listening to this. But yeah, in the- in the 1980s. To give you guys some background, Tampa Bay was actually very desperate to bring the first Major League Baseball team to Florida. So the team, the stadium that we now know as Tropicana Field, was originally called the Florida Suncoast Dome, which is just a very [10:11]–
BOBBY: It’s probably a bank.
JANICE: –name.
BOBBY: It’s probably a bank, honestly. Like it’s one of those things that–
JANICE: [10:14]
BOBBY: –sounds like it’s not a bank, but Florida Suncoast Bank is probably a bank. You know, like Great American Ball Park bank. Sounds like it’s not a bank, but it’s a bank.
ALEX: It’s either that or, or like a pop punk band. You know, Florida Suncoast, man, that’s just like me and my friends, you know, just hanging out eating pizza.
JANICE: So I think you guys are around my age, right? You’re, you’re in your 30s, is 30-ish, kind of. Do you guys remember Suncoast video? The store in the mall? I, I just thought of this when I was–
BOBBY: We do, I do not. We are actually in our mid 20s.
JANICE: Oh, oh my God. I’m so sorry.
BOBBY: We’re a little bit behind. No, that’s quite alright. We, we wear it poorly. So some people think we’re in our, in our 30s and 40s.
ALEX: Other people think we’re in our teens. So [10:55] both ways.
JANICE: Right. I was mainly going more off wisdom rather than appearance.
BOBBY: I like it, that was a good, good save Janice.
JANICE: Thank you, thank you. But yeah, Suncoast video of just a relic from the mall age of the late ’80s, early ’90s. Kind of along the same lines of You know, Sam Goody, trying to think of any stores that were kind of along the lines. And this is completely just not making any sense to you, that’s totally fine. But anyway–
ALEX: No, this is, this is crucial context, honestly.
JANICE: Absolutely. But anyway, Tropicana Field originally the Florida Suncoast Dome, was used in an attempt to entice the Chicago White Sox to relocate if a new ballpark was not built to replace the aging Comiskey Park. And so the, the Comiskey Park that we know, to this day, now has gone through several name facelifts. Now it’s called Guaranteed Rate Field. Before then it was called a US Cellular Field. But it’s a first name, the new ballpark was Comis- a new Comiskey Park. So old Comiskey Park was essentially right across the street from the new ballpark. It was just completely dilapidated, concrete was falling down. Just it, it was in shambles, it was very obvious that the White Sox needed a new ballpark. So that was one of the reasons of course to in the late 1980s. The Cubs were more popular, and that might hold true to this day. But the main reason why the Cubs were more popular was definitely because of broadcasting rights. So Cubs games were viewed for free on WGN, which was a nationwide channel. And that also explains why there are plenty of Cubs fans around the country just mainly because due to WGN. So in Tampa Bay, the White Sox would have been able to make at least 1 million more in broadcast rights per years. And in 1988 dollars, that’s quite a lot of money. So at the time, only 34% of Chicagoans had cable TV, which I thought was very interesting. And were able to watch the White Sox at home. So essentially, the broadcasting deal was one of the carrots that a Tampa Bay was holding up to bring the White Sox to Florida. So yeah, essentially Jerry Reinsdorf thought that this was very attractive. And definitely just started telling Illinois lawmakers, hey, look, if I do not get funds for this stadium, I am packing up and leaving the city of Chicago and leaving for more sunnier territories. So, so yeah, that essentially was the landscape back in the late 1980s.
ALEX: But the more things change, the more they stay the same.
BOBBY: Exactly.
ALEX: Like this, like this story could be from yesterday, you know.
JANICE: Exactly, exactly.
BOBBY: This story is basically like if Las Vegas had already built a stadium and was trying to coax the A’s to come there. Like this is like it’s so similar to, and it’s like such a blueprint for how baseball owners and the league really operates. Because the league has to give sort of approval or like tacit approval to an org- to a franchise to threaten to leave a city, to leave a market to open a new market. Because that has to be approved by the rest of the owners. And so this, this comes with the full force of the league behind it. Comiskey Park, the original Comiskey Park, was built in 1910. So by 1988, it’s 78 years old, and that’s a, that’s a rough 78 years. That’s a two–
JANICE: Yes.
BOBBY: –world wars, 78 years in there. And so it’s like, they definitely need a new park, right? And, and of course, Jerry Reinsdorf, I mean you can speak to this, even more than us. Jerry Reinsdorf doesn’t want to pay for anything. He doesn’t want to pay for the White Sox. He doesn’t want to pay for the 1990s Chicago Bulls to stay together. Let alone for the White Sox to build their own new stadium. And so I’m curious what you think aside from the obvious of the White Sox Being in Florida. Like how much in the baseball world do you think is different? Obviously we don’t get the Tampa Bay Rays, we don’t get them as an expansion franchise. So there are so many different ways that this can go. But what do you think is the, the biggest difference in 2022?
JANICE: I think the biggest difference? Definitely. And I actually kind of did a, a “what if”. Like, what if Reinsdorf wasn’t bluffing? What if Governor James Thompson looked the other way? And was like, nah, I’m not giving you millions of dollars in public funds to build a stadium. So essentially, I predicted that relocation would be back on the table for the Florida White Sox in 2022. I would predict that they would probably have the league’s, a one of the league’s worst team attendance. Even though, yeah, maybe they would have made the postseason once or twice. Just kind of gauging from what the Rays have done. So with plans for a new park in Montreal, kind of slipping through a new contender would step up. So I would predict that perhaps, again, I’m kind of going along the lines of, hey, let’s use millions of dollars in public funds again. Yeah, the White Sox rightfully returned to their home on the Southside of Chicago at 35TH & Shields in 2022. With a new ballpark to be built across the street where the old stadium was 30 plus years ago. So the one thing that I also thought about is all right, so if say the stadium was demolished, if the team moved, what would, what would be a good use case for the land? And of course, my, the first thing I that came to my mind are condos, it would probably just be nothing but condos in that area.
ALEX: Yup.
JANICE: So I actually do live in the neighborhood. I, I live not too far away from the ballpark. So Bridgeport is the name of the neighborhood. It’s about, I wouldn’t say it’s entirely gent- gentrified, but it’s definitely heading in that direction. So we have seen a condos kind of spring up within the last 10 years, a lot of trendy restaurants, a lot of, you know, people my age and younger moving in young professionals. So yeah, I would imagine that the neighborhood would probably still progress in that direction. So yeah, we probably see plenty of condos, we definitely see maybe a lot of mixed use case scenarios. Perhaps so the urbanus nightmare of just having a bunch of condos with like a Chipotle down at the very bottom. Probably something along those lines. But yeah, I think I would predict that the White Sox would eventually move back to Chicago. I’m not exactly sure how or why. But, but yeah, it would be something that I would like to see in my future simulation.
ALEX: I love it, I love how you having built out like the, the dominoes that, that would fall. I mean, it’d be interesting, because that would be kind of a you would think a moratorium on baseball in that part of Florida, right? The Major League Baseball is not going to move a team there, then move one out and then cycle another one in, right? They would, you would think that they would realize the writing on the wall. And say this is this is not a place for baseball. So, so even in that sense now as Major League Baseball does kind of look at relocating teams or expanding teams, whatnot. You probably have a couple teams in different spots around the country, right? I know North–
JANICE: Yeah.
ALEX: –Carolina was, was kind of a popular option at the time, as well as the usual suspects. But the, the face of baseball looks very, looks very different. Even if the White Sox end up back in Chicago at the end of the day.
JANICE: Yeah, absolutely. And I thought a lot about the, the threat. I keep using that word, because it’s the first thing that comes to mind. I guess it’s very threatening, we’re going to take your baseball team away if you don’t give us money.
BOBBY: Yeah, definitely.
ALEX: The hakedown.
JANICE: Yeah, exactly, the shakedown. I definitely thought a lot about the split plan to, for the Rays to split their home schedule between Florida and Montreal. And it’s, it’s just kind of a terrible idea all around, considering you’ve got the players and we have to consider moving their families between two cities, two countries, actually, which makes it even more difficult. And you’re also dealing with different currencies, you’re also dealing with a bunch of other factors as well. So I thought about that. And yeah, I’m actually kind of glad that owners rejected that proposal, because it’s, it’s just, I don’t know, just, logistically, it just seems absolutely terrible. I mean, as much as I would also just love to see a major league team return to Montreal. I, I love that city. And I, I do miss the expos. I remember a sliver of what the Expos were like–
BOBBY: Yeah.
JANICE: –but yeah, this just was not it.
BOBBY: What do you think White Sox fandom looks like if they move to Florida? Because I think a majority if not, most of the fans would probably not follow their fandom to Florida. I think that’s, that’s the case for a lot of teams. Now it’s not, like if you use the NBA as an example, the Oklahoma City Thunder were relocated from Seattle as the Supersonics. And the Thunder just changed everything about their team is new ownership. It was, you know, a new team name, a new logo, it’s basically a different franchise entirely. Though it is considered the same, like legal entity, I suppose. But for the White Sox, they were going to keep their name, there were, I imagine going to keep their same owner unless Jerry Reinsdorf was going to turn around and sell the team not that long after that. And so, which is a definite possibility. And I wonder what you think about that too, as to whether Jerry Reinsdorf would have kept the team or not after moving to Florida, if he was, would have just used it as an opportunity to cash in. But do you think that they would have like for yourself? Would you have remained a White Sox fan?
JANICE: Ah, this is a question that has been posed to White Sox Twitter several times, actually. And that’s a pretty great question. I think it all depends on where they go, really. So I, I think probably my first knee jerk reaction would probably to just support the closest or at least that the physically closest team to me. And for me, I mean, the Cubs are definitely not going to be an option. So the Milwaukee Brewers would definitely be- they, they would win my loyalties.
ALEX: It’s 2022, the White Sox are still in Chicago. And obviously, they’re still kind of teetering on this. Are they a big market team? Are they, are they not, right? It kind of depends on the flavor of the day for a Jerry. But, but that does change significantly if they moved to Tampa Bay, right? Where we know that the, the market is very, is very different. It’s hard to build a baseball team that people actually want to come see there, at least in St. Petersburg. And so there does feel like a very real possibility that they move to Florida, things don’t go as planned. And Jerry Reinsdorf disguise- decides to cash out, right?
JANICE: Yeah. I think one impor- really one really interesting thing that I came across during my research is that a lot of people think that it was certainly just a bluff. And so I pulled up this article from Cigar Aficionado. Yeah, I know. Jerry Reinsdorf did an interview with Cigar Aficionado back in–
BOBBY: Oh, my God.
ALEX: Wow!
BOBBY: Amazing!
JANICE: Yeah. And he said this, “A savvy negotiator creates leverage. People had to think we were going to leave Chicago.”
ALEX: Nice.
BOBBY: Okay. I, I, this is why I really liked this hypothetical, because it allows you a very clear and obvious window into the mindset of an owner. Like if you think about it from the outside, why would Jerry Reinsdorf take the Chicago White Sox, a storied franchise that has such strong ties to the Southside of Chicago and a loyal and vibrant fan base that has stuck with the team throughout all of the bullshit that he has been a large part in putting them through and move them to Florida, where it’s just a complete unknown? Unless he like cared a lot about the team, which is up for debate, sort of. And then therefore, he would not really be able to sell the team in Florida, too. Because you don’t really know how much that team is worth if you move it right after that. Because you don’t have a built in fan base, like you’re not sure what the long term prospects of a team in Florida are gonna look like. Like Florida was, I think, much more ripe for an expansion team, which is why it got to expansion teams in the Marlins and the Rays. And, versus moving a team there. Especially with an owner who’s not motivated to like stick it out for the long haul. So I don’t know, like I, I have remained so skeptical of all of these different owners who say, oh, well, we might up and move the team to Las Vegas or like we might move the team to wherever Montreal or wherever these other cities that want a team so bad. Because it seems really hard, like it seems like hard work, you know. And most of these owners don’t really want to put in hard work particularly, especially someone like John Fisher with the A’s or Jerry Reinsdorf with the White Sox. Like he has not wanted to put in the work to make it a sustainable–
JANICE: No.
BOBBY: –winner and, you know, model franchise, so to speak.
JANICE: He absolutely was not willing to put any of the work in and definitely was not willing to put in any of the money, too. So I do want to talk a little bit about James Thompson. So he was the Illinois Governor at the time. So, how he managed to pull this through? So June 30 at 1988, that was the last day of the legislative session. So essentially, he got enough votes for the General Assembly to approve this tax subsidized $167 million Sox stadium. And the bill passed at 12:03 am. So what’s funny here is that three minutes later, there was- three minutes earlier, there was a Florida TV station saying that, hey, that that’s it, the Sox are going to Florida. So everyone in St. Petersburg thought that the deal was done and set in stone. But that wasn’t the case. James Thompson came through, like, like, literally with the buzzer beater, and approved the funds. So yeah, that is the, the short story of how Jerry Reinsdorf got $167 million in public funds to, to get the White Sox, a new stadium. And so, I think about this a lot in the sense that, alright, so public funds were used to build the stadium, but the way the stadium operates to this day kind of makes me a little ill in the sense that, so Guaranteed Rate Field is one of the only major league ballparks. If, if you hold a ticket for the 500 level, you cannot go to other areas of the ballpark. So essentially, if you, if, if you, if, if you’re in the cheap seats, you’re a peasant that stays up there the entire game. There is no roaming, you cannot go down to the 100 level. A lot of the fan experiences that they came out with in the past, like 510 years, inaccessible to people who buy tickets for the 500 level. And so, I don’t know it seems a little ass backwards when you think that, yeah, in a stadium that was built with public funds, say White Sox fans are a very working class for the most part. That’s a, that’s a generalization, but it is true, White Sox fans are meant to be or at least they have a reputation for being very blue collar kind of working class. You know, kind of like the, the everyman or every person I guess I should say. And yeah, if you buy a ticket for that 500 level, you can’t go down. It’s, it’s complete bullshit.
ALEX: I completely didn’t know that.
BOBBY: Yeah.
JANICE: Yeah!
BOBBY: Me either. Uhm, doesn’t it just make sense, though, with like, all the other stuff that this ownership group does, like, does it it just makes sense that they would have that policy? I, okay. I’m thinking about any silver lining that we could have to the Florida White Sox. And here’s what I’m coming up with. Here’s the only thing I’m coming up with. We don’t have the Rays. Therefore, we don’t have to deal with every couple months a discourse cycle about how the Rays are actually the best run team in baseball. And how spending only $80 million on payroll is actually a good thing. And never extending guys and never paying guys what they’re worth and free agency is actually the only way to build a team. That’s, that’s the only silver lining I can come up with guys.
JANICE: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, too, if, if you trade with the Rays, there’s something that is afoot. That there is always something afoot that if you make a trade with the Rays, the Rays, the Rays have something just right underneath just the, the surface there that they are plotting. So yeah, that that that is the silver lining there that we no longer have to deal with that. insidiousness, I supposed.
ALEX: I, I’m curious who then becomes the Rays, right? Because it’s not like the people who would go to the Rays than just disappear from baseball, right? Erik Neander ends up somewhere else Chaim Bloom ends up somewhere else.
JANICE: Hmm. Yeah, that that, that is a really great question. I feel as if someone will have to fulfill that role, that someone will have to be the Rays. It’s not going to be the White Sox.
ALEX: Like do, like do the Marlins, that ultimate–
BOBBY: Wow!
ALEX: –expansion team become the Tampa Bay Rays?
BOBBY: Wow! Wow, okay! I think–
JANICE: Maybe it’s the Diamondbacks, perhaps?
BOBBY: Yeah!
ALEX: Diamondbacks, yeah.
BOBBY: Here’s, here’s a thought, the Rockies, the Rockies are the new Rays.
JANICE: Oh my, I.
ALEX: We’ve moved into nightmare territory.
BOBBY: Can you imagine the Rockies with the Rays brain trust, with the built in advantage of playing your games at home in, in quarters? Like being able to use that in building a good team around it? Wow, I love it, I love the concept.
ALEX: Yeah.
JANICE: Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, you need to reset the simulation here.
BOBBY: Yes. We’ve reached our peak in, in butterfly effects. So Janice, thank you so much. That was, that was excellent. Now Alex, I’m going to turn it over to you to share your Baseball Butterfly Effect with us.
ALEX: I’m glad, because mine Tyson relatively new lately with a lot of the stuff that we were just, we were just talking about. And it actually has implications on teams like the, the Marlins, and the Diamondbacks, and the Expos and, beyond. And that was Major League Baseball’s proposal, and near plan to contract the Expos, and the Twins in 2001.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: This is, because it didn’t happen. I feel like it gets kind of overlooked. But it was, it could have ended up being one of the most pivotal kind of moments in baseball history.
BOBBY: I can’t believe we don’t talk about this more, honestly.
ALEX: I know.
BOBBY: Given what the subject matter of our show.
ALEX: Right. So I mean, just a little bit of background, right? And it’s, it’s 2001, the Twins and the Expos are, are kind of in dire straits. Their payrolls are ranking near the bottom of the league consistently in their teams aren’t performing very well. And the, the, the Twins the Metrodome is just a mess. As far as the Expos go, Jeffrey Loria is trying to get out, no teams are coming the, no fans are coming to the games. The stadium is a mess. The local government doesn’t give a shit. Like it’s, it’s bad news over there. And Bud Selig, and the rest of the owners say the league is in really bad economic conditions right now, these two teams are facing the worst of it. We can’t have teams that are, that are running out payrolls like that every day. That’s just, it’s anti competitive, we can’t have that. We got to get rid of them. And the owners actually vote to do it, 28 to 2 on November 6, 2001. Obviously, the two dissenting teams were the Expos and the Twins, which doesn’t really count.
BOBBY: Honestly, honestly, though, there are some owners in baseball today who I think would vote yes to being contracted.
ALEX: No, here’s, here’s–
BOBBY: They were gonna get a payout for it?
ALEX: No, both the, both Jim Pohlad and Jeffrey Loria were probably the two biggest boosters for this. Because they were each gonna get about a quarter of a billion dollars for their troubles. So like they would have been, they would have been good. This ends up not happening because there’s, there’s like a Minnesota like sports stadium commission whatever that says the Twins you have another year left on your lease. You have to play it out a, a local judge issued a temporary restraining order basically in says, the Twins do have to complete their, their lease here at the, at the Metrodome. And by that time, which is like in late 2002, that that gets all wrapped up. There’s a new CBA in place, the owners have agreed they’re not going to try and contract any teams at least for the next few years. And the idea is dead in the water. But it kind of belies how close this actually came to happening. Which is to say really, really close. And the implications would have been really, really far reaching. So it would have been let’s contrast the expos and Twins move the Arizona Diamondbacks who just won the World Series to the AL West. Move the Rangers from the AL West to the AL Central. Move the Pirates from the NL Central to the NL East. I hope you guys are keeping track of all this, it’s very straightforward.
BOBBY: Oh, my God, yeah.
JANICE: [33:36]
BOBBY: Pirates in the, Pirates in the NL East, that’s 17–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –guaranteed wins for the Mets every year.
ALEX: Jeffrey Loria would have still taken over the Marlins from incumbent owner John Henry. He would have been able to take a few players with him like say Vladimir Guerrero. John Henry would have assumed ownership over the Angels and taken a similar number of players with him.
BOBBY: Oh, my God! Oh, that’s the one that really just broke my brain.
ALEX: That- right? Like–
JANICE: Like a lot! I got like see A Beautiful Mind board like I–
ALEX: Right, exactly. Like thinking about- so there’s no John Henry Red Sox, right?
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: Vladimir Guerrero is maybe goes down in history as Miami Marlin.
BOBBY: I love that.
ALEX: I, there’s no–
BOBBY: It feels kind of Marlin desk, to be honest.
ALEX: He, he, he does, honestly. He has, I mean, I feel like Expos and Marlins kind of, kind of soul sisters there. Things look very different. I’m, I’m curious to hear your guy’s sort of knee jerk reactions to what would have been a very simple, simple transition period back in 2001.
JANICE: I, I think the, the whole realignment of the divisions is, is probably like one of the things that I’m just thinking would definitely affect present day baseball. And just how we view it and how we think of it. Uhm, I’m, I’m honestly just thinking more about the Diamondbacks in the, in the AL West. Like, like, like what the hell?
BOBBY: Yeah. They do feel like a very NL team.
JANICE: They do, they absolutely do.
BOBBY: I, I don’t want to, like, overstate things here. But I think that this is like the biggest baseball “what if” in the last 30 years. Because I, I guess, I guess maybe what if the strike didn’t happen is bigger than this. But like that, that’s like 30 “what ifs” rolled into one.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Like almost feels like–
JANICE: Right.
BOBBY: –cheating. Like, what if we just made the strike go away? Doesn’t, that’s, that’s, that’s sort of like a deus ex machina kind of. Like, it’s not really interesting for conversation. I think this is really interesting, because if you take two teams away, I feel like that kills your league. Like I feel like MLB does not recover from that. Certainly not in the way that we saw them recover by keeping the team. So 2002, it’s a weird time for the league. It’s post steroid boom, and post people finding out about the rumors about steroids. So there, those are like starting to really creep in. Like late ’90s is when people are like, Oh, okay, everybody’s hitting a bunch of home runs, home run chases. No one’s talking about steroids. And then as we roll into the, the 2000s, early 2000s, we have lowering viewership numbers still carrying over from the strike in some places. And we don’t, we don’t have teams, diversifying income streams in the same way that we do in the, in the late 2000s, and particularly in the 2010s and into the 2020s. And so if you’d contract two teams, I almost feel like baseball is a, is a, it’s not ruined as a commodity in the United States. But it’s certainly devalued as a commodity in, in the United States. We don’t get like the same increase in team franchise values. We don’t get the same desire to own these teams as an asset. And maybe that is ultimately good in the long run for the sport if we have like a reckoning about what the financial state of baseball is in 2002. Like a serious hard reckoning, we hit the rock bottom of what this situation is. But most of the time when we have like financial reckonings in the United States, it doesn’t result in good things. It just results in somehow rich people getting richer. And so I don’t, I think that like the league is completely different if we look back on it now. We don’t have like the financial health in smaller markets, which I think is honestly better for the game.
ALEX: Yeah, well, this, you’re right that like this very much was a, a labor issue as much as a baseball issue, right? That the league was contending with waning attendance, stemming from the ’94 strike. They claimed that revenues were in the toilet, although as it turned out, Bud Selig was not being entirely truthful about that, it’s new.
BOBBY: No.
ALEX: Right. But, but there was the expectation that the players were not going to let this happen without a fight, right? The owners wanted some sort of leverage over the players after the strike had kind of given them more power. And so they said, We’re going to force them to the table by basically eliminating 50 jobs. And bringing it along with steroid testing, and increase revenue sharing and the, and the luxury tax, and all these sorts of things. And it was a real political risk for them, because you thought one work stoppage was bad, try a second, in within the same decade. Like the sport very well, maybe doesn’t recover from that, right? And, and I think that no, neither side really wanted it to get that far. But they kind of got really lucky, they didn’t have to make that call. And it was just a, a Minnesota judge, who kind of said, Yeah, you guys got to stay here for the next year. And by that time, they’ve figured out a solution. But it’s interesting thing about if it hadn’t gotten to that point, I really do wonder kind of what the state of baseball even is in 2022 if it exists, kind of at all.
JANICE: I think it’s absolutely wild, but it just took a judge to say, nah!
ALEX: Yeah.
JANICE: And it just completely kind of changed the course of, of baseball history. That’s, yeah, that that is wild to me. Because it just seems so inconsequential and so small, right?
ALEX: Right.
JANICE: And you see that oh no. It is a decision that has a lot of just like drastic impact.
ALEX: Yeah, that’s, that’s Hennepin County Judge Harry Seymour Crump to you all.
BOBBY: Hey!
ALEX: Remem- remember the name.
BOBBY: Harry Se- new Tipping Pitches logo with Harry Seymour Crump’s face instead of–
ALEX: That’s right.
BOBBY: –instead of–
ALEX: Getting my, my custom jersey made.
BOBBY: The likeness of Rickey Henderson maybe, inspired by Rickey Henderson. I, God, this is so interesting, because, so four years later, the, the Twins get a new ballpark. And that’s part of their sort of revitalization, right? And they that the new ballpark costs just a little bit over half a billion dollars. The Twins only contribute 135 million of their own money to that. So this is basically like 80% funded by public funds. And I do feel like that drastic threat, and that much of a show about markets not being able to support baseball teams. Which is this sort of nebulous concept, like what does it mean for a market to be able to support a baseball team, there are small markets that thrive. And there are big markets that are not as successful in terms of getting people to actually come out to baseball games. Big markets, in terms of like, the amount of people who live in a place. And it does feel like the beginning of a gameplan for ownership in terms of how to leverage their importance in the community into direct financial benefit. And so, you know, to tie it back to your point, Janice, to tie it back to your butterfly effect. This is like, the logical outcome of the Reinsdorf threat in the late 1980s is, what’s one step further than this? What’s just take the team away entirely? They won’t even be a team anymore. And so, it they feel–
JANICE: Yeah.
BOBBY: –very other piece. And we didn’t even know that Alex was going to choose this. So it’s funny that they tie–
JANICE: Right.
BOBBY: –together in this place.
JANICE: yeah, it seems very punitive. It’s just sort of like, I don’t know, it just is like when you’re talking to your dog, and your, your, the dog is not like behaving. And you’re, and you’re just like, well, I’m just gonna take this toy away. Like, like now you’re never going to have a toy, how do you feel about that? I don’t know. It seems like the way the owners like treat these markets it’s, it’s just sort of like, oh, well, you just have to appreciate what you have then.
ALEX: Yeah. Well, I love the idea that it’s also the cities that get punished, right? The owners are sitting pretty, they get to cash out and make a return on–
BOBBY: I know.
ALEX: –their investment. Even though they ran a business into the ground, you still get that $250 million check. And the city is left with a jack shit.
BOBBY: Let’s um, let’s make this about ourselves real quick, Alex. What we’re doing a podcast in the 2000s been, what we’re doing a podcast about baseball ownership and the financial structure of the game have been like in the 2000? It was shit was popping off left and right. It was like alright, John Henry just sold the Marlins. Now John Henry’s buying the Red Sox. Now we’re getting rid of the fucking Twins, goodbye, Twins. Now we’re getting rid of the Expos. Oh, now Jerry Reinsdorf wants to move the team and his new, in his new stadium. He’s got to move the team. Like, I don’t, we don’t have that much instability in baseball anymore. All things–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –considered, baseball ownership is in a relatively stable place, if you place it in the context of its history. And I think that’s weird, too. Because this not contracting the league, almost like set baseball ownership up to be more stable. Because if they had contracted the league? I don’t know, I feel like anything’s on the table.
ALEX: Yeah, no, totally. Also, I feel like if we are doing that, this in the early 2000s, there are far more people telling us to just shut the fuck up and watch Barry Bonds. Like, which would be a fair criticism, if we’re being quite honest.
BOBBY: Look at the Trail Blazers that nobody listened to, but we were Trail Blazers.
ALEX: That thing I, you, you mentioned, making it about ourselves. So I’ll make it about myself if, if the Diamondbacks move to the AL West, and if John Henry takes over the Angels and brings over some of his successful players from Marlins. I don’t think there’s a Moneyball A’s, because they have–
BOBBY: Wow!
ALEX: –to, they have to contend with the defending World Champions at this point, a slightly strengthened Angels team. And things look maybe very, very different. If Moneyball, if that 2002 team does not go on its sort of historic run. Does Moneyball the book get beaten?
JANICE: Oooh!
ALEX: Does, does the idea of Moneyball proliferate sort of in the way it, it has? I mean, obviously, these ideas were around far before the book was actually written, Bill James was already established. And these ideas were already taken hold. But–
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: –but the A’s I feel like gave like a shape and like a voice to it. That, that I don’t know would have existed otherwise.
JANICE: Hmm. That’s, my goodness. Oooh!
BOBBY: Is that our, do we just–
ALEX: That’s the proper response to that, I think.
BOBBY: –do we just find our silver lining that we, that Bill James is not on Twitter? If we get rid of the Twins and Bill James never makes a Twitter account?
JANICE: I feel as if that’s a fair sacrifice.
ALEX: I think so, yeah.
BOBBY: Sorry to the Twins fans.
JANICE: No offense [44:59], yeah.
ALEX: Yeah, incredible lack of content, sorry.
BOBBY: Anything else to say on the Twins almost being contracted?
ALEX: You know the last thing I’ll say–
BOBBY: Sorry, the Twins and the Expos, I don’t want to short shrift the Expos. It’s just that they don’t exist anymore. So–
ALEX: Yeah, I know. Yeah. The last thing I’ll say because, because we mentioned that the Ray- the Colorado Rockies potentially being the Rays in, in Janice’s scenario. And I will note that, at the time of this proposal, Rockies’ Chair Jerry McMorris said, I just didn’t understand why we continue to spread the money to places that continuously showed they don’t have the type of support you need for baseball to survive. Which is a very rich thing for someone who runs the Colorado Rockies to say.
BOBBY: You know, for as much as we clown on the Rockies, they actually get people to come to games.
ALEX: They do, yeah.
BOBBY: They are always at the top of the league and attendance every year. And they’re like one of the franchise that was, that they’re one of the franchises that relies on cable deals less than other franchises. So maybe they’re, maybe they’re doing something right. Maybe we could–
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: –afford to have a few more Rockies out there in the world.
ALEX: It turns out all you need is a, is a stadium in the middle of the wilderness that looks out onto the mountains.
BOBBY: Yeah, that’s on them. It’s in, it’s in downtown Denver, it’s a, it’s a real City. Okay, Janice Scurio thank you so much for joining us for our Part 2 of Baseball Butterfly Effects. Can you please let the listeners of the Tipping Pitches Podcast know where they can follow you, find your work, get more of you in their life?
JANICE: Absolutely. If you decide to go down that route, you can follow me on Twitter. My handle is scuriiosa, spelled s-c-u-r-i-i-o-s-a. I’m realizing now that it’s perhaps one of the most inaccessible Twitter handles, it, it is a just a vast bastardization of my last name. A lot of people think my last name is Scuriiosa, it is not.
BOBBY: Yes, Alex and I–
ALEX: I, I, yeah.
BOBBY: –thought that all the way up until double checking before the pod and, and seeing your LinkedIn but I’m glad–
JANICE: Yes!
BOBBY: –that I didn’t mess that up.
JANICE: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I mean, like I already have, like just a large digital footprint. But like strangely enough, it is my Twitter handle that is somehow causing this barrier. And I don’t know why I’m talking about it, I, I did it to myself. So I don’t know, maybe I’ll workshop better Twitter, Twitter, Twitter handle in the future. But anyway, yeah, you can find me and all my work there. I currently drop in the CHGO White Sox pod from time to time. Basically just dishing out all of my hot Leroy Garcia takes. So, catch me on there.
ALEX: Janice Scurio, get a blast. Thank you so much.
JANICE: Thank you guys. Thanks for having me on. Very honored to have it, have graced Tipping Pitches, thank you.
[47:57]
[Music Transition]
BOBBY: Alright, Thank you to Janice. Thank you to everybody for listening. Thank you to you, Alex, for sharing your Baseball Butterfly Effect. Which, at the time of recording this outro, I don’t know what it is yet.
ALEX: That’s true, [48:17] over.
BOBBY: Before we record the outro, before we record the actual podcast and I’m your live revealing it to me on the podcast. So now that we’ve sufficiently confused everybody, with the timeline of how this podcast was recorded.
ALEX: Ourselves included.
BOBBY: And, and we made Christopher Nolan jokes to start the podcast out. I think everybody’s in the right headspace to just end the podcast in a daze.
ALEX: You mean like the this episode or, or period? Like this was it.
BOBBY: Well, I told you that I was going to continue to make the joke, this is our last episode.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: To see if people enjoyed that bit. But like a week later now, I don’t even think it’s a good bit. It’s not even good enough to keep going, you know. That’s not even good as a joke groundball the Joe Panik, that bit.
ALEX: Yeah, I don’t, I mean, we’ve seen how the A’s doing the same thing to their fans like every couple years for two decades has, has turned out. So we could have done that path–
BOBBY: Oh, my God, the A’s.
ALEX: –I just don’t turn out for us.
BOBBY: We didn’t even talk about Liberty Media, we didn’t even talk about the Braves extending Sean Murphy for under market value. We can even make fun of all of the writers saying, oh I’d rather have Sean Murphy at this price than J. T. Realmuto. So much unmined content.
ALEX: I just that’s, that’s what the holidays are for. We need time off from this.
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: I just it was, I was actually on a plane when the, when the Sean Murphy news broke. So, so I got all the alerts when I, when I got off. Which was such a blessing to just avoid Braves discourse for like six hours.
BOBBY: But well, it’s still going, so if you want to tune back in and get your fill, now’s the time. There’s no time like the present.
ALEX: That’s true. That’s it’s on your local channel every night, 11 pm.
BOBBY: Murder and carjacking in the city. Braves extend, young star for under market value more at 11.
ALEX: Should we wrap this up and get out of here?
BOBBY: Yes, let’s do that. Thank you, to, thank you to everybody who has signed up for the Patreon. Thank you everybody for listening. Thank you to everybody for all the wonderful support in 2022. This is our first episode of 2023. Which I hope is an exciting year full of twists and turns, all of which are good for us. None of which are bad for us. That is what, that’s what I hope as we head into the New Year.
ALEX: Once again, I’m, I’m just hoping for a collective bargaining agreement. That’s my, that’s my one New Year’s wish.
BOBBY: Do you think like after a full year, you can start like a campaign, you know? Like you can start a change.org petition. One year removed from the, the tentative agreements of the CBA. We need to demand accountability.
ALEX: Something tells me that wouldn’t really pick up much, much traction these days. I feel like once the CBA was negotiated, fans were like, okay.
BOBBY: Cool.
ALEX: I, I now don’t have to think about that again for five years. Which is, which is fair, that’s a fair reaction to that.
BOBBY: I–
ALEX: Anyway, you, you and I would be able to add our, add our names.
BOBBY: –more people should put CBAs on their reading lists. Like here’s all the books that I- here’s my favorite books from 2022, the Major League Baseball CBA.
ALEX: Major League Baseball CBA. Wow, you sound fun at parties.
BOBBY: I am fun at parties, please invite me to your party. I’ll have a great time.
ALEX: It’s like, it’s the, it’s the meme where the guy standing in the corner, right? Like, they don’t know that–
BOBBY: I read the entire MLBPA CBA.
ALEX: Exactly that owners are exploiting the players to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
BOBBY: They don’t know that the CBT could have been so much higher.
ALEX: Right. Everyone else is like no, we know we just, it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter to us [51:54]–
BOBBY: If there’s one thing that I actually don’t talk about at parties, it’s baseball. Because I’m not at parties where people know anything about baseball. I am more often at parties where people are like, Oh, you like baseball? Weird. Alex and I are not like crushing it with the lefty baseball Brooklyn community, you know. Most of our friends don’t know anything about baseball.
ALEX: I know, well, and now we lost the one storyline that like kind of broke through to the wider public, right? People are like, Oh, contract? And you could be like, No, not yet, and now.
BOBBY: I think the Mets can break through to the wider public. I have faith, I have faith in people thinking critically about Steve Cohen.
ALEX: I’ll lead by Carlos Correa all that the Queens project.
BOBBY: Exactly. Thank you everybody for listening, we will be back nextweek.
[52:42]
[Music]
[52:55]
[Outro]
ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Hello everybody, I’m Alex Rodriguez, Tipping Pitches, Tipping Pitches. This is the one that I love the most, Tipping Pitches. So we’ll see you next week. See ya!
Transcriptionist: Vernon Bryann Casil
Editor: Krizia Marrie Casil
Tipping Pitches 
Leave a comment