Stretch Drive

Peter Magowan has spoken his mind. The managing general partner of the San Francisco Giants has often expressed dismay with the spending patterns of the new Dodger and Arizona Diamondback owners, saying they deceived their established brethren with pre-approval assurances they would be respectable partners and recognized their responsibility to hold the financial line.

Now? Well, with the second year Diamondbacks about to win the National League West and the showdown spotlight on other divisions and races over the final two weeks of the 1999 season, Magowan and others seem to realize that continued criticism of the team some call the Diamondbucks would carry the taste of sour whine.

Asked if it was embarrassing and/or disturbing to have a second-year expansion team win the division, Magowan said it was neither. Of course, the Diamondbacks have made so many moves and spent so much money that it is difficult to classify them as an expansion team.

“We all knew at the start of the season that they’d have a competitive club, and you have to give them credit for buying and trading for the right players,” Magowan said. “They have a high payroll that annoyed some people in baseball, including myself, but my hat is off to them. At least they performed. You look at Los Angeles and Baltimore. Those organizations spent a lot of money and didn’t perform.”

All that is left for the Dodgers is a chance to take out the Giants in a four-game series opening at Dodger Stadium tonight.

Arizona holds an eight-game lead on the Giants, who would like to believe that a three-game series with the Diamondbacks in San Francisco this weekend will still have meaning.

Barring a Dusty Baker miracle, the real races are elsewhere as ’99 approaches the wire:

* The Atlanta Braves and New York Mets, in an NL East dogfight, play a three-game series beginning Tuesday in Atlanta and another in New York next week, with the loser of that division likely to find solace as the wild card. The Houston Astros or Cincinnati Reds, however, are battling for the Central crown and could also wind up with the wild card in what is a tangled web.

The Reds, clinging to the fringe of the division and wild-card races, begin a three-game series in San Diego tonight and can’t afford to lose if they hope to be alive when they play a two-game series in Houston next week. Five National League teams--the Reds, Astros, Braves, Mets, and Diamondbacks--still have a shot at the league’s best record and the home-field advantage through the first two rounds of the playoffs, a race within the races.

* Similarly, four American League teams--the New York Yankees, Cleveland Indians, Texas Rangers and Boston Red Sox--are scrambling for the league’s best record, an element of intrigue in a league in which the Indians have already won the Central Division title, the Rangers are about to win the West and the wild card-leading Red Sox have pretty much ended the Oakland Athletics’ Cinderella hopes. The Red Sox are only three games behind the semi-struggling Yankees in the East, but they do not get another shot at New York, which has it soft, playing seven more games with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, three with the Chicago White Sox and three with the Orioles.

The standings, of course, are where it’s at over the final two weeks, but there is also Cal Ripken Jr.’s pursuit of 3,000 hits, the home run race between Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire, the MVP duels between Jeff Bagwell, Matt Williams and Chipper Jones in the National League and Nomar Garciaparra, Ivan Rodriguez and Rafael Palmeiro in the American League, and the last, haunting hours for three old ballparks: Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, the Houston Astrodome and San Francisco’s 3Com Park.

None of it, however, may be more noteworthy--or illustrative of an era in which economics rule--than Arizona’s domination of the West in only its second year, an expansion record.

San Diego Padre General Manager Kevin Towers said it would be more of an embarrassment “if they were doing it with players they acquired in the expansion draft. But look at their lineup and pitching staff. Very few of their players came in the draft. They basically [bypassed] the developmental process. They bought and traded for their team. I give them credit for doing it well, but they may have created some cyclical problems in the process. They’re reaping the benefits now, but they back-loaded so many contracts [with deferred salary] that in three or four years, when those guys are older, harder to move and still owed a lot of money, they could be in a difficult situation [with limited payroll and roster flexibility].”

The Diamondbacks spent $119 million signing Randy Johnson, Todd Stottlemyre, Steve Finley and three other free agents in an off-season binge that lifted their payroll to $66 million, baseball’s seventh highest. Among playoff-eligible players, only five remain from the expansion draft: Damian Miller, Kelly Stinnett, Hanley Frias, Omar Daal and Brian Anderson. It has been the contention of Jerry Colangelo, Arizona’s managing general partner, that given the high costs of their initial investment in the team, the investment and risk involved in the new stadium, and the expectations of their vast and growing market, the Diamondbacks were justified in attempting to build an immediate winner--and those without sin among his fellow owners should cast the first stones.

For Colangelo and partners, however, the high cost of their endeavor amid the industry’s difficult environment continues to grow. Twenty-four of 29 investors recently agreed to put in another $24 million--raising the group’s total investment to $350 million--to handle a cash-flow problem stemming primarily from the loss of 9,000 season-ticket holders after a significant price increase during the off-season. The Diamondbacks averaged 44,450 last year while drawing baseball’s third-best total of 3.6 million, but they are now averaging 37,276 and will barely reach 3 million--although playoff attendance will definitely affect the liquidity.

Said Padre owner John Moores, reflecting on the Diamondbacks’ division title: “The trick is to sustain it. The only way to get there is by a commitment to competitive balance [and a system that creates it]. I worry generally about mortgaging the future for one or two years [of success]. It bothers me in the long-term to sign players to contracts that call for them to continue to be paid after they are probably not capable of playing, but there is terrific pressure on all of us to win and win now, particularly for an expansion team given the initial outlay. Jerry Colangelo is a big boy. He’s been in sports a long time now. It’s a philosophical decision, and our philosophy may not be the same. We’re trying generally to build for the long-term.”

The Padres had won two of the last three division titles but will finish about 20 games behind the Diamondbacks. Towers calls it a disparity that will be difficult to make up in one year, but the current approach is to retrench, rebuild and be ready with a younger team when the new park opens in 2002.

The Giants move into their new park next year with a record season ticket base of 27,000 and a debt service obligation of about $20 million a year for the next 20 years, an immediate hit on the improved revenue stream. How that impacts a payroll already committed to go from about $45 million to $52 million isn’t certain.

“I’d like to have another $20 million to compete at the [payroll] level Jerry decided to compete at,” Magowan said of the Diamondbacks. “It makes it much easier. This year, we didn’t have the depth when we had all the injuries.”

Barry Bonds, Jeff Kent, Ellis Burks and Bill Mueller all went down for extended periods. The Giants will still finish in the 90-win neighborhood for the third year in a row, and Magowan called that “good momentum” for the new park and reason to regard 1999 as a success even though it also looms as a “disappointment because we thought we had a team good enough to win.”

The second-year Diamondbacks appear to have won the West and appear determined to compete at a high level in the future, an ominous note for division rivals--unless Commissioner Bud Selig is successful in moving Arizona to the American League West as the key piece in a major realignment.

The Diamondbacks and Devil Rays, as part of their initial agreement with baseball, were guaranteed two years in their current divisions, but baseball now has a three-year window in which they can be moved. Colangelo, adamantly against moving to the American League, met with Selig in Milwaukee last week to express his view again.

The Giants, Dodgers, Padres and Colorado Rockies would undoubtedly like him to know that they would help him pack.

DODGERS 5, COLORADO 2

Kevin Brown earned his 17th win in a 5-2, rain-shortened victory over the Rockies at Coors Field. Page 3

BALTIMORE 5, ANGLES 4

Orioles win 11th game in row when Derrick May homers off Troy Percival in eighth inning. Page 5