and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

You can try and tell me that it's a shame that the Expos got booted out of Montreal and sent down to play for the Yahoos in D.C. You can try and explain that it's a fall of great tradition and that if the Montreal Expos were a man they'd be a man's man but now in the District the Nationals are barely a woman's man. You can say alotta things and you know what?

I call bullshit.

Canada, my friends, is not the land of the free. Canada is not the home of the brave. And baseball is America's game.. no matter how many cheaper-faster-better pro teams the Japanese try to make.

The Expos were averaging about 9,000 attendees a game in their last year as a professional baseball team. Two of those games I attended personally at the Big-O stadium and you know I had a good time but it was nevertheless indoor baseball on astro turf. Which is another word for cement.

Baseball, my friends, was never meant to be played on cement. Tennis, maybe. Dodgeball, perhaps. But not baseball.

The Nationals, I hear, are pulling in over 30,000 people a game. Nevermind that those numbers include the President of the United States.. those numbers include 30,000 people watching live baseball.

and I hear RFK has grass.

I don't care much for teams moving from one town to another. I do think it kills a bit of the tradition behind sports. I don't think it all has to be about money. But honestly.. I don't think it is.

People are known to have a passion about these things, sports, and even waste money on them. Take Chris Peters for example. A former "Microsoft Millionaire" - a programmer who had made a bundle off his Microsoft stock options - retired from the computer industry and bought the Professional Bowlers Association with some friends as investors:

"I was not very athletic" as a child, Mr. Peters said by way of explaining his new career, "but I always loved bowling with my father."

He's working towards a profitable year in 2005, five years later, having opened up the league to women players and increased the 18- to 34-year-old viewership by 80 percent.

Even better, people are known to put their energy into philanthropic and/or social change - *gasp* - despite money:

Stephanie DeVaan cashed out of Microsoft in 1995 ... Just 34 at the time, she went on to spend several years volunteering at charitable institutions. But by 2002, she was itching to do more, so she put her wealth to work in support of abortion rights and helped to found a political action committee called Washington Women for Choice.

Another endowed a professorship in his name at Oxford University.

None of this, of course, would have happened if not for the capitalism that drove Microsoft to it's infamous position at the top of the heap.

Nor does baseball get anywhere playing games to less than ten thousand quebecois fans.

It's a shame and I'm not saying that those fans should be stripped of their team. It's a travesty and for sure it would have been nice to save the Expos.. but if you throw a party and nobody shows up, well.. how ya gonna get laid?

There is no doubt that the Expos move was financially driven. There is no doubt that the league hung them up to dry and when they did, beat them till their parched skin cracked. There is no doubt that MLB suffers from it's poor financial policies in a way that the NFL has thus far been very good at avoiding. There is no doubt that a team such as the Expos with no television contract and the rest of the league literally digging their grave for them, pushing for their elimination as a team, cannot compete year in and year out with the likes of, say, America's Team the Atlanta Braves. There is no doubt that baseball's unique exemption from antitrust laws has perhaps caused the failure to develop reasonable revenue sharing, has caused the astronomical rocketing of player salaries, has lead to player strikes ('94) and the subsequent greed (mismanagment?) of unsustainable league expansion ('98). There is no doubt that excellent scouting and rookie aquisitions by low-market teams like the Expos are quickly goobled up by richer teams (take for example the Expo's Pedro, and didn't they have Walker, too?). There is no doubt that the team owners - all but the Expos and the Twins - voted to eliminate the Expos and the Twins at the beginning of this decade, just a few years AFTER the expanded the league. There is no doubt that the Expos had a hard run of things, what with 3 ownerships, almost yearly threats to move, a player strike right when they were making a formidable World Series run, false hope of a new downtown stadium, and then last year playing a quarter of their season in the Carribbean?! Nevermind that the Big-O was a shithole.

There is no doubt that MLB is a horribly managed league.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that baseball is America's game and, by god, our NATIONAL FUCKING CAPITAL should have a goddamned baseball team.

It's just too bad it had to be the Expos.