That’s a picture of former North Stars owner Norm Green from 1991, along with dogs Charles and Rupert. That’s a good start to what Newbie has to say:

Frankly, I don’t understand moving teams. I realize whatever owner owns the team has the “right” to sell them to make a profit and it is a business, so they can deal with it as it fits their needs. However, with any other business nobody really cares if they get sold or moved. Granted the likes of Northwest/Delta hurt some folks, and not a lot of people were happy that Anheuser-Busch was sold to a Belgian company. But they also didn’t say to their main base of support, hey we don’t need you we’ll go find someone else. Budweiser didn’t say “go drink Miller,” we’ll find new customers. They still offer the same products. Sports teams are inherent to the state/city they reside and only are really relevant to those fans at its basic nature. So, why can an owner or commissioner say “well you’ll still have Wisconsin teams, they are close?”

A lot of markets that had a franchise leave, for whatever reason, has seen the same sport return. Cleveland, Baltimore, Minnesota Hoc-key, etc… We’ll probably see basketball return to Seattle at some point. We may even see another football team in LA; heck, it may even be ours. But why then do these franchises have to leave? Obviously there is the case of cities that don’t support the team. Florida Marlins, Montreal, etc… fans just don’t show up. I get that. (I don’t get why people in Florida don’t want to go watch baseball everyday…) All that ends up happening is now the city/state has to find another owner willing to bring another franchise in, wasting lots of years and lots and lots of money.

Are we really so vain as to think that we can say “go ahead try to move the team, we don’t care.” I think we would lose a lot of our identity as a state if one of the major teams leave. Sure they underachieve now and then and can be insanely frustrating, but they are our teams and our frustrations. It brings us together to talk about how stupid the head coach is and how we can’t trust the bullpen. And if that went away, all we could do is read about who TO is yelling at and how large Kellen Winslow’s … things are.

So Randballers, is there a way that we can fix this or stop this kind of action? Short of a city buying a team, which would just be silly. Or do people just not care anymore and have to see championships or it’s good riddance?

(I am speaking in terms of the general sports fan not just a Minnesota fan.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.