Carl Pohlad purchased majority ownership of the Minnesota Twins from Calvin Griffith on June 22, 1984, and assumed control of the team September 7, 1984. He purchased the team with a sense of community responsibility and a feeling that major league sports, particularly baseball, are vital to the standard of living any community must strive to achieve. Not only did Pohlad keep the Twins in Minnesota, but he has been committed to playing a quality, winning team on the field ...

-- 2001 Minnesota Twins Record and Information Book

Contraction.

Such a benign word, usually associated with the wonders of childbirth. But when Bud Selig uses the word, he's not talking about creating something; he's talking about destroying something. Two baseball franchises, to be precise. And we're not talking about destroying a couple of Johnny-come-latelies here. The Expos have been in Montreal longer than Bud's Brewers have been in Milwaukee. The Twins have been in Minnesota since Kennedy was in the White House, and they've existed as a franchise since Day 1 of the American League.

As I'm sure you've seen or heard, no major league hasn't contracted since 1900, when the 12-team National League became the eight-team National League, dumping Baltimore, Louisville, Washington, and Cleveland. Louisville probably was not a "major league" city, but it's probably worth noting that Baltimore, Washington and Cleveland all boasted franchises in the American League, one year later. Things didn't work out in Baltimore -- the Orioles moved to New York in 1903 -- but the Washington club survived until 1961 when it moved to Minnesota, and of course the Cleveland club survives still, a century later.

It's unlikely that a new "major league" will set up camp in the Twin Cities, but if the St. Paul Saints drew 6,423 fans per game last season -- a sellout every night -- can you imagine what they'll do if the Twins aren't playing just across the Mississippi River next season? So if there's one man who's probably ecstatic about what might happen to the Twins, it's Saints owner Marvin Goldklang, who is about to reap a huge financial windfall, as his team may well outdraw a couple of major-league clubs next summer (if they can add some seats to Midway Stadium).

Unfortunately, Goldklang (and his co-owners, Mike Veeck and Bill Murray) is one of the few people likely to benefit from Selig's risky scheme. I suppose that Angels fans will be happy, because if John Henry really is allowed to buy the Angels and bring some of his Marlins along, the Angels could be a lot better next season. On the other hand, are there really any Angels fans? I'm being facetious ... sort of. I know there must be Angels fans, but the truth is that I've never met one. I do remember that one e-mailed me once.

From the e-mail I've been getting, a lot of readers have a lot of questions about contraction, but I'm not going to deal with all of those questions. Here at ESPN.com, Sean McAdam and Jim Caple have written eloquently and accurately about contraction, as have Joe Sheehan and Gary Huckabay over at Baseball Prospectus, as has The Washington Post's Tom Boswell; if you've not already read them all, you should, because knowledge is power.

Suffice to say, though, contraction won't really solve any of baseball's problems, and might instead be viewed as a callous ploy by the Lords of Baseball to improve their leverage against the players, a disgusting effort by Bud Selig to increase the value of the franchise of which he remains a part owner (35 percent), or both.

Yesterday, Selig said, "Contraction, we believe, deals with this problem because ... they are teams that we judge to be not capable, now or in the future, of generating enough revenue to be a productive franchise. And by shifting teams, oftentimes all you do is shift problems."

Let's take the second of those first ... Shifting teams shifts problems? Well, let's look at the teams that have "shifted" in the last 35 years.

In 1970, the Seattle Pilots shifted to Milwaukee and became the Brewers. Bud Selig's Brewers. Is Selig saying the Brewers were a problem?

In 1972, the Washington Senators shifted to Texas and became the Rangers.

That's it. Two teams. Granted, neither of those franchises has ever won a World Series, but both currently play in shiny new ballparks, and it's safe to say neither will be contracted out of existence any time soon. More to the point, can two events that happened roughly 30 years ago really tell us a lot about what might happen if, say, the Expos moved to North Carolina or Washington, D.C.?

As for Selig's first assertion, that MLB will eliminate teams that are "not capable, now or in the future, of generating enough revenue to be a productive franchise" ... well, one can only surmise either that Bud has an active imagination, or that he isn't telling us the truth.

Look, I'll grant you that things look very bleak in Montreal. That market has its defenders -- the Expos did draw well in the early 1980s -- but the truth is that if you were going to sit down and pick the single team with the poorest long-term prospects, it probably would be the Expos (and yes, I know that the situation around Tampa Bay is bad).

But Minneapolis-St. Paul? That's a sick joke.

Look, I know this argument has been made before, but if you were looking for teams to eliminate, say, 15 years ago, where would you have started?

Minnesota? Hardly. In 1985 the Twins outdrew 10 major league clubs (the Expos were right behind them).

How about the Pirates? Four years running, 1984 through 1987, they finished last in the National League in attendance, failing to draw even 800,000 fans in two of those seasons. The 2001 Twins drew as many customers as the Pirates did in '84 and '85 ... combined.

How about the Indians? From 1983 through 1985, the Indians drew a combined total of 2.2 million fans. Attendance boomed in 1987 ... yet the Indians barely drew a million fans, and again ranked last in the major leagues.

My point isn't that the Pirates or the Indians should have been eliminated back in the mid-1980s. My point is that conditions change. Someday, if the Twins remain where they are, either a smart politician will figure out how to hold up the citizenry or a smart businessman will figure out how to build a ballpark without holding up the citizenry. But I promise you that if the Twins do remain, in five or 10 or 20 years, people are going to look back and say, "Why on earth did they want to get rid of that team?"

Oh, one more thing about Selig's brilliant pronouncement ... how, exactly, will contraction deal with the "problem" of revenue disparity? There is one, and only one, solution for that problem, and it's called -- everyone together now, class -- REVENUE SHARING. Not that namby-pamby system that we've already seen, but something meaningful. As Bill James writes in his new book, there is an unbelievably simple solution here: half of the local TV revenues should be put into a pool, which is then shared equally by all of the teams. The Yankees and the Dodgers would still have a great advantage, it just wouldn't be overwhelming as it is now.

Everyone knows that this, or something like this, is the only way to address the problem. And Commissioner Bud's been talking about the problem for, what, 10 years now? And the amount of progress that's been made toward solving the problem?

It's not zero ... but it's close. Awfully close.

If the Twins and the Expos are excised from the major leagues, all of us should spare a few minutes for the real losers here: their fans. There may not be many Expos fans, but don't we all know at least one of them? And there certainly isn't any shortage of Twins fans out there. Not only do many thousands of baseball fans live in Minnesota and Iowa and North Dakota, but kids across the country became Twins rooters in the late 1980s, just because Kirby Puckett was so darned cute and cuddly.

If it happens, let us all take a moment or three, and consider how we'd feel if it were our favorite team that Commissioner Bud killed. Not a pleasant thought, is it? Scott? My heart goes out to you, buddy. John? You're a peaceful man, but I wouldn't blame you for wishing a pox upon Bud Selig's house.

Frankly, though, such sympathy can only last so long. After all, bad things happen to good people every day, and if we spend all of our time thinking about the poor unfortunates in the world, we won't have time to watch many baseball games, will we? So those of us in New York and Los Angeles and Seattle and Chicago will get over it.

But friends, this contraction business might affect you, too. Peter Gammons, among others, is reporting that the players might go along with contraction if (among other things) the active rosters are expanded from 25 players to 27.

That's a horrible idea, one of the worst ideas anyone at MLB has floated in a long time.

Here's why.

First of all, larger rosters will lead to greater specialization, and specialization is generally a bad thing. Look at any sport, and what you find is that as roster sizes increase, you see more athletes who are good at only one thing. And athletes who do only one thing are boring; or rather, they lead to boring sports, because outcomes are more predictable. Just as an example, let's say that the 27-man roster makes it easy for teams to carry a player who can't hit or field, but is a brilliant baserunner, so fast that even a pitch-out won't stop him from stealing second base. So now it's the bottom of the ninth, the game is tied, and your sluggardly slugger just walked.

Well, there's little mystery about what happens next. The world-class sprinter replaces the sluggard, and then he steals second base. See, while it's true that you increase a manager's options when you enlarge his roster, it's also true that you make his job easier ... and consequently less interesting for the discriminating fan.

And speaking of less interesting, what is baseball's biggest "problem" right now? Aside from Commissioner Bud and the owners' inability to fix the revenue disparities, it's the time it takes to play a game. There are three obvious ways to speed up the games:

1. Call more strikes.
2. Prohibit the batter from calling time between pitches.
3. Cut the commercial time between innings.

Sandy Alderson is working on No. 1. There hasn't been any movement on No. 2, but it could certainly happen one of these years. And No. 3 isn't worth discussing because everyone involved is too short-sighted to understand that taking less advertising revenue today might result in more advertising revenue tomorrow.

But if you want to shorten the games, there's one thing you cannot do, and that's expand the rosters. Because if there's one thing that larger rosters will most certainly bring about, it's more pitching changes. And that means longer games. I guarantee that if the rosters are bigger, all the progress toward cutting the game times will be wiped out -- poof -- just like that, as pretty as you please.

This whole stupid thing reminds me of the way Bob Brenly ran his pitching staff during the World Series: it doesn't make any sense now and it will lead to more problems later.

After all this gloom and doom, I've got some good news. Despite what you've heard on TV, contraction is not a done deal. Remember, these are baseball owners. Just because they voted to eliminate two teams doesn't mean that two teams will be eliminated. The owners can do whatever they want. If they realize tomorrow, or next week or next month, that $400 million is a lot to spend on something incredibly short-sighted and divisive, who's to stop them from dropping the whole thing? Absolutely nothing has actually happened yet. No checks have been cut, no negotiations with the players have begun, no lawsuits have been filed.

So don't give up hope, fans. There are a lot of people who don't want to see this happen; if you're one of us, let somebody know. Here's another guarantee, though: If Selig's scheme does go through, he'll forever be remembered as little more than The Man Who Killed the Twins.

Before we leave this subject (for now), a few words on the man who led off this column: Twins owner Carl Pohlad. Perhaps Forbes.com puts it best: "Baseball's wealthiest owner, Carl Pohlad, refuses to put his own money into the team; instead, he turns a profit on the team as a result of a $20 million+ revenue sharing cut."

That's right, folks. Carl Pohlad, who's worth about $2 billion, is making money off the Twins. True, that hasn't always been the case. But the fact remains that, for his original $44 million investment, Pohlad will realize a tidy profit if this contraction scheme really happens. Which is good, because at 86, Pohlad certainly needs to pad his accounts as much as he can. Because as we all know, the more money you've got when you die, the better your chances of getting a luxury suite in the afterlife.