
Jesse G. Spector was crunching some numbers. It was late February, and the senior history major had just been informed that our story about his scheme to buy the Montreal Expos would appear in the May/June issue of the Gazette.
“Let’s see,” he muttered. “By May, I may be in jail; I may own a baseball team; or this may have reached some sort of merciful conclusion. I’ll have graduated, hopefully, assuming this hasn’t taken over my entire life—which it pretty much has.”
Things have calmed down a little since the news first broke about Spector and a small band of baseball-loving renegades at The Daily Pennsylvanian, who devised the quixotic plan to raise enough money to buy the floundering major-league franchise. But given that they’ve raised close to $3 million in pledges from nearly 14,000 fans around the world—from Locust Walk to the Northwest Territories to the Federated States of Micronesia—and have been interviewed by more than two dozen news organizations around the U.S. and Canada, it has certainly changed their lives.
Like most popular movements, this one was born of discontent. Spector and many other baseball fans have been increasingly disturbed by the recent antics of Major League Baseball (MLB) and its commissioner, Bud Selig—who, shortly after last year’s dramatic World Series, proposed “contracting” (eliminating) two franchises. One was the Minnesota Twins, a small-market team that has enjoyed some success over the years (and whose contraction saga is a story unto itself). The other was the Expos, a once-healthy franchise that has lost its fan base and was recently purchased by MLB from its previous owners for $120 million. (Said previous owners now own the Florida Marlins, whose previous owners now own the Boston Red Sox.) The other possible fate in store for the Expos is to be relocated to another city.
Spector, a native of Brooklyn, New York, is not even an Expos fan, though he’s always liked some of its individual players. But the prospect of contraction appalled him.
“I think it stinks,” he says. “Baseball is coming off one of the best seasons it’s ever had, and the immediate response is to get rid of two teams.”
Spector has a natural poker face and a voice to match, and while one can detect a bit of disgust in his voice, righteous indignation is not really his style. “This didn’t start out as a massive, ‘Let’s take a stand against contraction,’” he says. “It was just some fun that we were having around the DP office.”
And so, on the night of February 5, he and a couple of other staffers—Sebastian Stockman C’00 and College junior Jonathan Shazar—wondered aloud how much they’d be willing to pledge to buy the team. “Fifteen dollars seemed right,” Spector recalls. “So we went around the office that night and collected $456 from 17 people.”
They went home, set up a Web site and put it on the SAS server. After they got 40,000 hits in five days, they took it off the SAS server. (The site is now buytheexpos.poptopix.com/.) Within three weeks, they had raised $1.3 million from some 6,000 people.
What raised the plan from “goof” to “great idea,” he points out, was a February 22 article on ESPN.com written by sportswriter Alan Schwarz C’90.
“The instant it hit ESPN, it was no longer a goof,” says Spector. “It became something for every fan to be able to say, ‘This contraction plan stinks and nobody wants it.’” A month later, the story had been covered by everyone from the Chronicle of Higher Education to CNN American Morning to Sports Illustrated—which suggested that these students were “too sophisticated to swallow goldfish.” (“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” wondered Spector on the Web site.)
There are, of course, many pitfalls in trying to raise enough two- and three-figure pledges to buy a baseball team, even one that now attracts fewer fans than some minor-league franchises. For one thing, it’s not legal to sell shares of something you don’t own. Trying to do so could arouse the ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission, not to mention Major League Baseball.
“We never were selling anything, and haven’t accepted anybody’s money,” explains Spector, adding that they won’t accept any “until we have the go-ahead to save the team.” As the Web site puts it, with an admirable disdain for legalese: “Pledges recorded on this Web site represent expressions of interest and are not legally enforceable obligations. (Blah, blah, blah … You get the idea: we don’t want to be hauled off to jail for running some sort of pyramid scheme. We’re just trying to see if we can apply the Jaws of Life to the Montreal Expos franchise.)”
“The biggest thing in our favor is, who would want to come after us for doing any of this?” says Spector. But, he admitted, “it wouldn’t surprise us at this point if Bud Selig came walking through the doors of the DP office, grumbling and muttering the whole way that he can’t believe he has to do this.
“It’s a long way to any sort of resolution other than a cease-and-desist order,” he adds. Asked if he would cease and desist if ordered to do so, he responds: “Absolutely.”
At this point, he says, “we’re just kind of along for the ride. It took off without us. We’re not promoting it, not taking out any ads. It’s what’s coming to us right now. If we wind up with the Expos, it’ll be half the campus that owns them.”