Pitch to lure Expos almost ready

Friday, April 30, 2004 | 9:57 a.m.

Financiers who are trying to bring the Montreal Expos to Las Vegas have a May 14 deadline to submit their final proposal to Major League Baseball's headquarters on Park Avenue in New York.

"At that point," Centerfield Management Group consultant Mike Shapiro told the Sun on Thursday, "there will be nothing else to add."

Shapiro, a former executive for the San Francisco Giants, was hired by Teamscape and the Las Vegas Stadium Co. to negotiate with MLB officials, most notably relocation envoy -- and ex-San Francisco Giants executive -- Corey Busch.

Shapiro also said he is not planning to attend an important MLB owners meeting May 19-20 in New York, where a list of seven cities who are in the hunt for the Expos will likely be whittled to two or three candidates.

Neither Teamscape chairman Lou Weisbach nor Las Vegas Stadium president Robert Blumenfeld plan to attend the pivotal sessions, either.

"I just don't think there's any value in talking about these things," Weisbach said from his Chicago-area office Thursday. "Everyone here is hopeful that we'll get a good shot at it, and everyone is working toward that end."

Weisbach joined Chicago Cubs broadcaster and former pitcher Steve Stone to form Teamscape. Blumenfeld is the chairman of the Blumenfeld Hueser Group, an investment firm with coast-to-coast influence.

When contacted Thursday at his Manhattan headquarters, Blumenfeld, by many accounts the lead financial figure in the Expos-to-Las Vegas project, hesitated when asked about the approaching deadlines or details about the proposal.

"Unfortunately, I can't say anything," he said. "I will be happy to do that at the appropriate and proper time. Until then, I have no comment."

Robert Scanlan, of the Portland, Ore.-based investment firm Scanlan, Kemper & Bard and one of Blumenfeld's major partners in Las Vegas Stadium, has declined interview requests.

MLB's nine-member relocation committee, chaired by Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, will recommend the final list in New York in three weeks. Those meetings have been incorrectly reported as occurring May 15.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig has set a firm mid-July deadline, during the game's All-Star break, to announce the Expos' new home. Selig and his staff want the team permanently in its new environs for the 2007 season, at the latest.

Groups representing Washington, D.C.; Northern Virginia; Norfolk, Va.; Portland, Ore.; Monterrey, Mexico; San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Las Vegas have been trying to sway the relocation committee for months, if not years.

Teamscape and Las Vegas Stadium have the joint goal, according to their principals, to buy the Expos, a franchise that Forbes magazine recently valued at $145 million, and build a 40,000-seat, retractable-roof stadium.

Industry experts estimate the construction timetable of such a stadium at three years, at a minimum cost of $450 million. Caesars Entertainment Inc. will provide the land, behind its Paris Las Vegas and Bally's properties, and will act only as a landlord.

Selig has called the Las Vegas groups' efforts "aggressive."

The Sun first reported Wednesday, though, that the leaders of those groups have had difficulty in trying to meet MLB's request to use some public financing, via a likely new tourist-related tax, to build the stadium.

Multiple figures declined to reveal those hurdles or the resistance, and by whom, they've met.

Three weeks ago, Washington mayor Anthony Williams announced a proposal in which the District of Columbia would completely fund the building of a new baseball-specific $340 million ballpark, on RFK Stadium grounds, with public money.

However, Teamscape and Las Vegas Stadium officials also dismissed recent reports that called their efforts fruitless and charged that they have been used as leverage by the relocation committee.

"Totally inaccurate," said one source. "Totally. That could not be more wrong."

Various insiders also laughed at accounts that do not link the Las Vegas tourism and convention industries, which are expected to lure 36 million visitors to Las Vegas in 2004, with the city's population of about 1.6 million as a potential fan base.

"That's about 100,000 visitors to Las Vegas on any given day, throughout the year," he said.

"That's why we've been so private in not discussing any parts of this process in the press; the press never gets the story right."