Public Scrutiny for National Past-Times

THERE HAS been no better time to own a professional sports team in America. Every year the National Basketball Association shatters attendance records set the previous season. Last year, for the first time, two baseball teams drew more than three million fans. And thanks to the cable revolution, all of the four major sports leagues have a host of lucrative broadcasting options from which to choose.

This surging popularity has provided the owners with a new weapon in their already bristling arsenal: blackmail. First, a "struggling" team announces that it's home city no longer provides the support it needs to stay in town. Then it begins to court the many hungering municipalities which lack franchises of their own and are willing to promise the moon for a prospective pro team.

The Dolphins pulled this gambit not too long ago, and forced Miami to subsidize the building of a new stadium. Now (football) St. Louis Cardinals are making loud noises about filling the football gap left in Baltimore by the flight of the Colts to Indianapolis.

SKEPTICS, THOUGH, doubt that such "troubled" teams are justified in threatening these moves. The teams which squawk loudest about the need to move to greener (astroturf) pastures are usually the most ineptly run franchises in professional sports. Owner-weasel-extraordinare Robert Irsay stole his Colts away to Indianapolis even after the city of Baltimore met all his demands. But even the most-loved and best-supported franchises are threatened by the machinations of greedy owners. The Raiders sold out more than 80 consecutive home games in Oakland before Al Davis took them to Los Angeles.

The refusal of the owners to open their books hardly makes their claims to poverty credible. To top it all off, pro sports have an ambiguous legal status that stifles the mumblings about violations of antitrust laws that crop up periodically. Many years ago, the U.S. Congress granted Major League Baseball an official exemption from the nation's antitrust laws because of the sport's "unique" position in American society. But the courts--as in the recent USFL case, appeal of which is still pending--have refused to cite the other major leagues with monopolistic conspiracy.

Such a position, of course, is not unique. It is held by the gas, telephone, and electric companies. They have been recognized as public concerns requiring monopoly status. But because of the capacity for abuse this entails, their license to monopolize is accompanied by strict public supervision.

It is time all the major profesional sports leagues officially be granted such status as well. Sports teams are as much a public concern as the utilities. The recent franchise-swapping wars prove just how important teams are to a city. Not only do they generate tax revenues, but they are crucial in establishing a city's image and morale. The Red Sox and Celtics play a major role in defining Boston's national image, just as the Bears and Cubs do for Chicago and the Dodgers and Lakers do for LA. A city without pro sports is a third rate city with a huge disadvantage when it comes to attracting tourism and business.

AND, OF course, professional sports leagues should be supervised accordingly. Their books should be open to public scrutiny, and regulatory commissions should closely monitor the behavior of the leagues as a whole and the individual teams within them.

Of course, all on-field issues should be left to the owners, and fair profits should be allowed. But major decisions regarding ticket price hikes, pay cable plans, labor relations, and stadium accomodations should be made only with the concurrence of a comission responsible to the municipality in which a team is located.

With this new municipal power must come responsibility. Teams which cannot operate profitably should recieve apropriate municipal funding. Failing that--and only failing that--they should be allowed to move. It is time sports owners were stopped from jerking the public around with impunity. Until they are made to face the music, the robber barons who own professional sports franchises can congratulate themselves for devising one of the most slimy and ingenious money-grubbing scheme since investment banking.