Baseball's blunder.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The irony is gigantic. Only two days after the Arizona Diamondbacks defeated the New York Yankees in a World Series that ranked among the most exciting in years, major league baseball owners announced that they were jettisoning - or, in baseball terms, ejecting - two of the big leagues' 30 teams.

While the owners didn't identify the victims of baseball's first "contraction" since 1899, the general feeling among those who follow the game closely is that the teams to be bounced will be the Montreal Expos and the Minnesota Twins, two franchises that have fallen on hard times in the cutthroat world of sports economics. Also mentioned as contraction possibilities have been the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Florida Marlins or the Oakland A's.

The engine driving the cutback of baseball franchises is baseball's stubborn and shortsighted refusal to follow the lead of the National Football League and National Basketball Association in adopting a revenue-sharing system that can protect small-market teams from being gobbled up by enormous free-agency salaries and the take-no-prisoners 19th century mindset of team owners. In the NFL, a small-market team such as the Green Bay Packers thrives. The same is true in the NBA, with sterling examples being the Sacramento Kings and, yes, the Portland Trail Blazers.

But baseball's owners have shunned revenue-sharing to the detriment of the game. Big-market teams such as the Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs and White Sox can get by on their huge fan bases and radio/television audiences. Small market teams can't, and when free-agency depletes their rosters of whatever superstars they might have developed through their farm systems or trades, and they start losing year after year, their fan base erodes.

It shouldn't be overlooked that 28 owners instead of 30 would each get a larger share of baseball's six-year, $2.5 billion TV contract.

In the past, baseball progressively - if baseball can ever be called progressive - looked to expand into new areas of the country rather than contract. In 1960, there were 16 major league teams. Today, there are 30. If revenue-sharing were in place, and if the players' union would accept some sort of salary cap system common in football and basketball, baseball could look to salvage the Expos and Twins - or, better yet, move them into new cities.

One such city is Portland, which came close in this year's legislative session to getting an innovative financing system for construction of a new big-league stadium in the city's downtown. Portland has shown it can support a major league sports franchise with the longrunning success of the Trail Blazers. Given baseball's universal appeal and the population base in Portland and the Willamette Valley, it seems obvious that a Portland major league baseball team could at least succeed economically if not, at first, on the field. And Washington, D.C., which lost its Senators in 1972, would be an ideal home for a big league club.

Of course, all this talk of contraction could be moot. The players' union must approve the owners' contraction plans and if it doesn't, the matter will likely go to an arbiter or into court, where any outcome is possible.

Baseball has suffered through eight work stoppages since 1972, including owner-imposed lockouts and a 232-day strike by players that wiped out the 1994 World Series. And now contraction. Baseball's owners, and to some extent the game's players, need to follow the model of the NFL and NBA and adopt a revenue-sharing system that allows all teams - small-market as well as big-market - to compete and to survive. Anything less is folly.