Ten years after the idea of “contracting” baseball teams died a merciful death, it’s back in the news. Who’s trying to get what out of whom this time?

This time, it seems, it started with Ken Rosenthal. Two days after Hank Steinbrenner let fly with an attack on baseball’s revenue-sharing plan that concluded, “if you don’t want to worry about teams in minor markets, don’t put teams in minor markets, or don’t leave teams in minor markets if they’re truly minor,” Rosenthal penned a Fox Sports Exclusive that significantly upped the ante: “Don’t be surprised if the “C” word—contraction—returns to the baseball lexicon soon,” he wrote, noting that he’d been “hearing rumblings” that “certain big-market teams” wanted to whack the Rays and A’s. In one scenario, wrote Rosenthal, Rays owner Stuart Sternberg would end up buying the Mets from the troubled Wilpons, while A’s owner Lew Wolff did the same with the McCourt-wracked Dodgers, before watching their old teams go poof… [read more]