In a fit of marketing ineptitude that has plagued it for more than 20 years, Major League Baseball has managed to upstage its signature event. At a time when every sports section should lead with stories about the playoffs, particularly now that the World Series is under way, baseball coverage is now split between the Yankees/Diamondbacks matchup and the spectre of contraction.

The timing of the leakage of baseball's contraction "plans" -- discussed as if they exist in a vacuum where the Congress and the Players Association don't exist -- is in itself moronic. But the plans themselves aren't a whole lot better. Contraction brings no benefits to the fans, the players, or even the other owners, even as it's being pitched to a gullible media as the solution to baseball's economic woes.

There's a certain symmetry here. Baseball's economic woes are largely a fabrication the owners have been feeding to the public for years, so cooking up a fake solution to a fake problem would seem the prudent course of action. Although many teams have cried poverty, and baseball likes to claim that three-fourths of its teams are losing money, numerous outside analyses have shown that baseball is a highly profitable enterprise, a fact that can be obscured only by accounting chicanery.

Let's assume for a moment that baseball really does have some Problems That Need to Be Solved. Contraction isn't going to solve any of them, and it's going to tick off a lot of people in the process.

Some baseball franchises are losing money. That's not a surprise; attendance and merchandise sales will sag in some years, and some baseball franchises have been run for too long as patronage enterprises worthy of Mexico's PRI rather than as the businesses they are. But eliminating two teams will do little to help the remaining 28, because the franchises are not in any sort of direct competition for revenue. Think about it: have you ever heard a Dodgers fan say, "You know, I'm not going to tonight's game, because I just can't believe they let the Expos in the league?"

Baseball teams do compete for on-field talent, but eliminating two teams will have no effect on player salaries. The teams that might be eliminated -- Montreal and Florida are the two most commonly cited candidates -- have not competed in any meaningful way in the market for baseball players. They've signed just two free agents between them in the last two years (Graeme Lloyd and Charles Johnson); neither was a market-setting contract, and Johnson would have received similar money elsewhere had he not chosen to return to Miami. But even eliminating two mid-market teams would have no effect on free-agent prices; the supply and demand curves some of us remember from Economics 101 apply to goods with a variable supply, whereas the supply of Alex Rodriguezes is invariably one.

The remaining major-league teams would see their receipts from the league's national television and radio contracts increase by 7 percent when they divide up the two shares of the dissolved teams … but the sizes of the contracts would probably be smaller than they would have had the league stayed at 30 teams. After all, ESPN and Fox signed their deals with MLB on the expectation that there would be a local team in Miami, ensuring a higher level of local interest in, and media coverage of, the sport as a whole.

Despite Players Association head Don Fehr's statement this week that contraction was something the union would consider during renegotiation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, it's hard to imagine a circumstance in which they would accept contraction of any sort. The owners are supposedly going to propose an expansion of 25-man rosters to 26 or 27 spots. Of course they are: it's a great tradeoff for them.

If you eliminate two NL teams, you eliminate 16 starting hitting positions, 10 starting rotation slots, and two closer jobs. Each of those 28 jobs would earn a veteran with at least three years of experience more than $1 million a year. If you add one slot to each of the remaining 28 teams, you're just creating another spot for Bobby Cox to fill with a fourth catcher or for Tony LaRussa to fill with a fifth left-handed reliever because, hey, you never know when you'll need one. Those jobs pay $200,000 a year (the league minimum). It's a great deal for the owners; now they just have to get Fehr and Gene Orza and all the union reps loaded on absinthe before they negotiate.

Some fans and writers have argued that contraction will solve the "problem" of talent dilution, arguing that there are too many teams today and not enough talented players to fill them. The argument is clearly false on its face, unless you believe that the game was better off before 1946, with 16 major-league teams drawing players only from white Americans, than it is today, with 30 teams drawing from the entire Western Hemisphere, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan. It's also hard to swallow when players who are waived and discarded by various major-league teams end up being productive -- or even stars -- when they finally get their chances. Just ask Cory Lidle. Or Omar Daal. Or playoff hero Craig Counsell. Heck, Erubiel Durazo can't even get a starting job; are they really suggesting that there aren't enough players?

So what is the owners' motive in moving to eliminate two major-league teams? One possible reason is as a first move against the MLBPA. By drawing the first line in the sand in a spot that is highly favorable to them, they may hope to force the players to come to the table with a more moderate position than they typically have. If this is the reason, the owners need to stop smoking their own product, because the Association is not that easily fooled.

Another possible reason is the desire to return to the largely successful blackmail days of the early 1990s, when a team could threaten to relocate and scam its host city into paying for a cushy new stadium. It's hardly a coincidence that the three teams most frequently cited as targets for elimination are in cities that have recently rejected new-stadium proposals: