Build It, and They (Will) MIGHT Come

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The other evening, three guys ran across Candlestick Park brandishing a bed- sheet sign that read PLEASE DON'T GO! Stung by the announced sale of the San Francisco Giants to a consortium representing St. Petersburg, Florida, these three were exercising the birthright of any sports devotee: impotent pleading. This was the charge of the night brigade. But the trio might as well have been riding into the Valley of Death instead of invading the blustery pasture of America's crankiest ball park. The people who buy the tickets, whose taxes pay for the stadiums, who fantasize and fret over their team like anxious parents -- they are mighty Casey at the bat. All muscle, no magic. Strike three. You're out. Game's over. The fans fan.

Fan, of course, is short for fanatic. Nothing else explains the loyalty, the emotional servitude of otherwise sensible folks toward a professional sports franchise. Talk to the proprietors of major league teams and you will hear that many of the 26 clubs are losing money. With the average player's salary topping $1 million this year, attendance slumping and TV revenue due to drop in 1994, the owners seem noble just to stay in the game, given all that hemorrhaging red ink.

Perhaps the owners have more mercenary motives. Like going where the money is. As one of half a dozen owners with a fortune in excess of a billion dollars, Jack Kent Cooke probably has enough money now. Cooke owns the N.F.L. champion Washington Redskins, but like many a Joe Lunchpail, he wants to move to the suburbs. Move the Redskins, that is, to a rail yard in Alexandria, Virginia. No matter that Washington doesn't want the 'Skins to leave and Alexandria doesn't want them to come. In a secret deal whose conspiratorial bravado would have set Boss Tweed and Mark Hanna drooling, Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder offered $130 million to construct roads and rail links to a stadium Cooke would build and own. And Cooke gets to keep all proceeds from food and parking.

Some years back, the Virginia Retirement System, a state pension fund, paid $350 million for these 320 acres of land, intending to develop it for mixed commercial-residential use. This is still mixed use: Cooke has use for free land and Wilder for political glory. Virginians with sharp ears could catch the sound of a state pocket being picked. Says Congressman Jim Moran of a plan that would bring the city few economic perks: "It is a classic case of how not to conduct public policy." Officials in Washington could only fear that getting Skinned meant the town would be rubbed off the map. "Brooklyn has never been the same since the Dodgers left," keened D.C. council chairman John Wilson, whose own city lost two baseball clubs in the 1950s. "You don't even think about Brooklyn."