Bud Selig's Hall of Fame plaque should come with a date stamped on it: November 6, 2001. That was the day the owners met in Chicago and voted 28-2 to drive two baseball teams out of existence, with the Twins and the Expos casting the only two votes against signing their own death warrants. The official story was economics. The real reason showed up on the calendar.
The vote landed the day before the sport's labor agreement expired. You don't need a decoder ring for that. A commissioner who genuinely believed two markets couldn't support baseball wouldn't need to schedule the execution for the eve of a fight with the players' union. He put the threat on the table at the exact moment it was worth the most, then acted surprised when people noticed.
The "unviable business" case fell apart in public, fast. On November 16, a Hennepin County judge ruled that the Twins had to honor their lease and play another season at the Metrodome, citing how much the team meant to the community. You can't argue a franchise is beyond saving and then watch a county judge order it to keep playing. The day after the vote, the players' union filed a grievance to block the whole thing. Within weeks the plan was dead.
Look at who was pushing it. The owner leaning hardest on Selig to erase the Twins was the Twins' own owner, Carl Pohlad, who stood to pocket a buyout for letting his club be folded. Both targeted owners were set to collect $250 million to hand their franchises over to be killed. That's an owner shopping for an exit, with the commissioner's office as the getaway car.
The man holding the keys had an obvious problem of his own. Selig had been the owner and team president of the Milwaukee Brewers. Critics said so at the top of their lungs: a sitting congressman and the former head of the players' union both called for his resignation, and the congressman pointed to a 1995 loan from a company tied to the Twins' owner. Selig waved it all away, calling the charges "childish" and "inane" and insisting the Brewers would gain nothing. Deny it all you want. The appearance alone should have disqualified him from running the process.
The strongest defense of the plan: if the Twins were truly bleeding money, contraction was just a brutal business call. MLB's own report pegged the Twins at an $18.5 million loss. Forbes looked at the same club and said it turned a profit, and Selig disputed Forbes. The central financial claim was contested at the time and never settled. Then the Twins went out the very next season and made the playoffs on a bargain-basement payroll, hardly the mark of a doomed franchise. This was a team that had won the World Series in 1987 and again in 1991. You don't quietly retire a two-time champion as unsalvageable.
The market math makes it worse. Milwaukee is baseball's smallest metro, under two million people. The Twin Cities sit around three million. Selig's plan aimed the gun at the bigger of the two markets while his old club, in the smaller one, kept playing.
Last week that old club, the Brewers, won the first World Series in its history, with Selig, now 92, on hand. The smallest market in the sport is the champion, a quarter-century after its former owner tried to convince everyone that two larger markets couldn't make it. He got a plaque in Cooperstown in 2017. He should be remembered as the man who held two cities hostage to win a labor fight.
