Free Republic

[snip]Washington area residents share a reverence for the same snaking river, get snarled in the same inching traffic, sweat in the same soggy air and enjoy the same upsides, annoyances and dangers that come with the seat of American power. [snip] But a dust-up over the right place to host a Major League Baseball team -- the nation's capital city or the country's fastest-growing county, 20 miles west -- is pitting area residents and officials against one another in a way that reopens old city vs. suburb debates.[snip]

<p>The self-anointed Grand Poohbahs of Major League Baseball (MLB) have deigned to grant local elected officials an audience sometime next month to measure just how desperate D.C. politicians are to attract a big-league baseball franchise. The poohbahs' unit of measurement, as it has been in every other city, is the dollar bill. Specifically, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and his fellow extortionists want to know how many hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds D.C. officials are willing to provide his multibillion-dollar industry in order to build a state-of-the-art stadium where players earning nearly $2.5 million per year will ply their trade.</p>

<p>Two proposed baseball stadium sites near Mount Vernon Square, long the center of baseball discussion in the District, received a tough reception during a public meeting last night on the city's quest for a major league team.</p> <p>Most of the more than 250 people who packed a meeting room in the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library were unabashedly in favor of Washington-area baseball. But the wide divergence of opinion on preferred stadium locations and financing models showed a community not yet in clear consensus on those two key points.</p>

Johnson, Snyder Join Forces for Baseball BET Founder, Redskins Owner Want to Bring Team to D.C. By George Solomon and Mark Asher Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, April 6, 2002; Page D01 Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder and Black Entertainment Television founder and chief executive Robert L. Johnson are teaming up in hopes of buying a major league baseball team to play in Washington. [snip]