Karl Ravech, the host of ESPN's Baseball Tonight, has written an article voicing the opinion that not only is contraction still inevitable, it has always been a good idea. In general I am fairly tolerant of the opinions of others. However, Mr. Ravech's daily commentary reaches a wide audience and he is in such a position of influence that I feel the specific need to argue with almost every line of his article.

Mr. Ravech begins by implying in a rather rude manner that there is widespread support for contraction. Of course there are people outside the ownership circle that believe in contraction. Bad ideas are frequently supported by large groups of individuals. However even if the contraction supporters were to outnumber its detractors, contraction wouldn't become less of a bad idea. Of those supporters that I have encountered, the basis for their backing of contraction revolves around misinformation. They are founding their opinions on interpretations of the labor situation that have been warped by years of anti-union coverage by the sports press and on statements from Commissioner Selig, which are about as reliable as claims from cigarette companies that smoking isn't addictive or deadly.

For the most part, I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of journalists who appear to grasp at least enough of the situation to understand that contraction is a bad idea. However, like Mr. Ravech, a good number of personnel in the press continue to fall victim to the propaganda and pass it along to their audience.

His column's primary misconception is that "Expansion came at a cost and watering down the level of play was a major one", as "there are currently players wearing major-league uniforms who should not yet be in Double-A." I will ignore Mr. Ravech's plea and deny the accuracy of his statement, since we can't find a single major league player from 2002 or even 2001 who should have been lower than AA when they were added to the major league roster. The only two players even mildly questionable are Tampa Bay's Dewon Brazleton in 2001 and Jace Brewer in 2000, and neither player saw any game time after their promotion. Having more teams doesn't even unequivocally make for a more shallow talent pool, since with the additional major league clubs you have more minor league teams in which to develop talent and a larger arena for players to demonstrate their skills and earn recognition.

Admittedly there are players who while worthy of AA should not be receiving playing time in the bigs, but the key to understanding why expansion hasn't caused a talent shortage in baseball is that for every player who shouldn't be in their major league uniform, there are probably at least 2 players that deserve a roster spot. For the purposes of his fantasy baseball column, Tim recently reviewed every player who played in the majors last season as well as all of the minor league free agents, every player selected in this year's Rule 5 draft, and those players at AAA and AA who have prospect potential. The talent clearly exists; it just needs to be properly utilized.

If the phenomenon of rostered players unworthy of their major league uniforms is to be blamed on expansion, it should be because the accuser is attempting to say that after expansion, the number of intelligent people in major league front offices was spread too thin Though that argument doesn't work because there are plenty of qualified candidates for front office jobs, its just that very few of them have been able to breach the inner sanctum of stupidity that governs baseball's traditional front office.

The problem is that managerial practices have not evolved with the game. Front offices now have improved forms of statistical measurement at their disposal, research and studies explaining the value of that information, and computers that make analyzing and accessing it all possible. The rate at which MLB is now scouting the foreign market has risen so astronomically in the last two decades that the primary thing standing in the way of a worldwide draft are the impossible logistics of such a draft. Even in its current form, that newly tapped source of talent more than compensates for the additional players needed for the rosters of new teams.

Many fans argue that they don't want to watch players who are only going to be around for a couple of years, but there are scores of players capable of making significant contributions during their prime who shouldn't really be rostered outside of that time. Teams run into trouble when they sign these players to expensive extended contracts and can't replace them with the next wave of similar talent from the minors. This is why we have Pat Meares seeing playing time over minor league free agents like 2B Richard Paz, and why LaTroy Hawkins has a prominent spot in a big league bullpen over RHP Doug Bochtler and RHP Jamie Brewington.

In other instances players are rushed to the majors because organizations become over-excited about their potential and ignore ideal development conditions. Although the best of these prospects will recover, many players will suffer irreparable harm from these over-promotions. The Oakland Athletics and most recent Yankee squads have demonstrated the benefits of stressing plate discipline, but the majority of franchises are still enamored with the tools' goofs and fail to provide them with the necessary tutelage to develop those tools into skills. Countless pitchers have had careers damaged, cut short, or even ended by clubs who don't inform their institutionalized managers about safe usage patterns.

Fix the front offices and you will go a long way towards fixing all the ills of baseball, since not only should you have plenty of good talent on the field, those players should be receiving salaries approximating their worth.

In answer to Mr. Ravech's question of "How is that Major League Baseball is the only industry on the planet that hasn't had a team shut its doors when business failed?", I would advise him to look into MLB's anti-trust exemption. The owners of baseball are allowed to do any number of things because of that exemption that typical businesses, including other sports, are not permitted. This anachronistic law allows them to maintain the structure of the league and bring in new ownership when individual owners decide that the problems have started to outweigh the benefits and sell their teams, mostly because poor management has dug them into a hole. The benefits of owning a baseball team are so extensive, ranging from a five-year tax shelter to civic pride, that "greater fools" will always line up to buy teams.

As for whether or not the players were ambushed by the owners' pursuit of contraction, I think that Mr. Ravech is again looking at things from the wrong angle. Certainly the term has been tossed around for some time and it was probably more frequently mentioned this season. However how many times do people idly discuss murder, as an exaggerated expression of what they would like to do to someone, without ever having any intention of following up on those actions, because they acknowledge them as wrong and as having unpleasant consequences, not necessarily in that order? The owners were able to surprise the players because no one negotiating for the union believed it was anything more than a pipe dream.

Finally, to conclude his article, Mr. Ravech shares with us that "more than a dozen players tell me that 'yes, we need to eliminate teams.'" This revelation does nothing more than bring us back to our original point that there is frequently abundant support for bad ideas. Players are admittedly less subject to misinformation than the general public due to the efforts of the MLBPA, but the problem still exists. I spent some time attempting to think of an argument for why contraction would be better for even one or two percent of the player population, but I can't find any economic reason that suggests even one player would benefit financially from such a move. The reported comments about player's disliking the Montreal venue are more appropriately remedied by relocation rather than contraction.

As I have repeatedly argued, the only benefit of contraction is the quick fix from the influx of cash when the owners subsequently expand again in a few years. That's not a part of a solution; it's an encouragement of the problem.