Columnist Ron Kantowski: LV should tell Dodgers to hit road

Thursday, July 20, 2000 | 10:27 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's column appears Thursday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or 259-4088.

When I was kid, one of the staples of satire-laced Mad magazine was a series of panels called "Things We'd Like To See."

For all I know (in that kids still hide Mad from their mothers) the feature still exists, along with the movie and song parodies, Spy vs. Spy and those inside back covers that could be folded in half vertically to make yet another statement that would be called politically incorrect today.

On the local front, if I were Donnie Logan, I'd be making a few politically incorrect statements of my own. The Las Vegas Stars' president, the point man for negotiations to bring the LA Dodgers' spring training headquarters to town, must have been mad (or at least slightly deluded) to believe he could convince the Dodgers and five of their Major League brethren to begin doing jumping jacks here in 2002.

So the thing I would like to see Monday -- on the day Vero Beach, Fla., officials may sign a new agreement to keep the Dodgers' spring digs in Florida for at least the next 20 years -- is Logan wagging one of those oversized foam rubber middle fingers Vince McMahon sells at pro wrestling matches in the general direction of Dodgertown.

In fact, I'd like to see Logan take it a step further. Having apparently been played by the Dodgers and others like an organ during the seventh-inning stretch, Las Vegas could serve the baseball big shots right by rescinding its offer, just as the Dodgers may be getting ready to leverage Vero Beach one last time.

But like the 1994 World Series, that will never happen.

For starters, Logan is a baseball man. Baseball men do not upset other baseball men. It's one of the game's unwritten rules, like stealing second base with a 9-1 lead or digging in against Roger Clemens.

Then there's the matter of the Stars' contract with the San Diego Padres expiring this year. The Stars have cried wolf about changing affiliations so many times that Little Red Riding Hood now makes her summer home in the Cashman Field clubhouse. But with the Albuquerque Dukes, the Dodgers' triple-A affiliate since ... well, the beginning of time, having been sold to some rich guys in Portland, the Dodgers also are in the market for a new Pacific Coast League partner.

Given the Claude Osteen Fan Club still meets here twice a year and that it's only about 275 miles from Dodger Stadium to Cashman Field as a batting practice home run flies, Logan is not going to jeopardize those negotiations. An affiliation with the Dodgers actually may impact Stars attendance more than a free refrigerator magnet.

But the biggest reason Logan isn't piling kindling under the Dodgers' bridge is that I truly believe he thought they were sincere about moving here. He let being a baseball fan get in the way of being a baseball executive.

It's hard to fault him for that. But when the Dodgers sign on Vero Beach's bottom line it will mark the third time in the past year that a major league sports franchise has used Las Vegas to get a better deal somewhere else.

If this keeps up, we're going to look more foolish than Alfred E. Neumann.