I Dislike Your Favorite Team

It was funny, as this Twins season began, that there was a lot of talk about how the public and Minnesota legislature should look to Target Field and how great it is, and why wouldn't any sane populace do something similar for the Vikings?

I've stated, a few times, why comparing the partially publicly financed Target Field to a new partially public financed Billion Dollar Vikings Stadium is an illogical conceit from the get-go. If you want to know why those comparisons are ridiculously stupid, you can click those links.

But a new aspect has entered the batter box and swung wildly enough to gain my attention--the argument that every team uses when they demand new fancy boxes from which to sit and watcj their guys play--"We need the kick-ass new stadium with fancy suites to COMPETE! We can't compete with everyone else in the league in our horrible, terrible, no good Metrodome."

That argument actually held more water for the Twins than it does with the Vikings, since Major League Baseball hasn't yet realized (or rather, has realized but hasn't hasn't bother to address) how the terrible financial imbalance in its league is hurting its product. Some day, perhaps, they will. Or maybe they are hoping that Billy Beane will find some even more obscure stats and find a crazy way to win, and they can get in on the ground floor with the next Moneyball movie. In the MLB, one could argue that one's stadium situation does have a real impact on the moves one can make and therefore, its financial stability. In the NFL, profit sharing makes an argument for putting together the cheapest stadium possible. But everyone pretends that fact isn't true.

Let's not pretend that the Metrodome Problem has ever resulted in anything but massive profit for the owner who sold it. Consider one of our least favorite, most recent owners, Red McCombs, who bought the team in 1998 for only $250 million dollars, and sold it seven years later to the Wilfs for a cool $600 million. That's a pretty good return on an investment. What's the last thing you bought that more than doubled in value in under 10 years? I'm going to guess "nothing", because makes money like at that kind of clip. Amazing Fantasy #15 doesn't make money like that.

The Vikings are now only worth around $850 million, give or take, which means that the Wilfs haven't experienced the rate of growth that Red McCombs did, but they ain't losing money, either.

Heavens! I've lost my plot. Here it is--Target Field! It allows the Twins to compete! They'll sell out every game! They'll sign free agents! They'll be the Yankees of the Midwest, like Macalester is the Harvard of the Midwest! Except that the Twins are currently mired in one of their worst seasons. To find a season as bad as this one, you have to go back all the way to last year, when they lost 99 games. Might they lose 100? Given the sheer number of hitless innings they've put together on the road trip they are on right now (3-hit game against the Angels, no-hit against the Angels, 1-hit against Seattle), one could argue that this might be a historically bad week, if not a season (time will tell, but Morneau and Mauer are both already on the shelf, and in case you've forgotten, the big free agent signing this year was Jason Marquis.)

It is beautiful, though!

So the great new stadium created one damn fun year, which led to some overspending, which has led to some really disastrous non-spending. Target Field stands out, like a giant beautiful pimple, reminding folks in the Twin Cities that stadiums don't win championships. Management wins championships, and ask the Chicago Cubs fan base what happens to idiots who show up regardless of the talent on the field. They watch losers, year after year.