Linda Cropp -- the District official who, depending on your perspective, either stood up to Major League Baseball or stabbed local fans in the back -- spent yesterday dealing with the fallout. There was a lot of it, and coming from all sides.
The phone in Cropp's office rang with the voices of the outraged and the approving all day long. The e-mails came tumbling in, too. So did a handful of racist and sexist comments and a couple bodily threats. At one point, a police officer was stationed outside Cropp's office door.
District official Linda Cropp, caught in media frenzy, defends her stance.
(Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)
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Sports provokes strong passions. And in more than a dozen years of serving on the D.C. Council (including the last seven as its chairman), Cropp, 57, has never seen the passion as juiced as it was around Tuesday's Council vote on a financing plan for a baseball stadium.
"I've been involved in all kinds of issues -- teachers and education issues, health care, crime issues, things that to me are very serious," she said yesterday evening. "But I've never seen the kind of emotion that I've experienced around this issue."
That might be because Cropp has emerged as the franchise player in the baseball debate, eclipsing Mayor Anthony Williams. Late Tuesday night, she pushed through an amendment requiring that half of the money for building a District baseball stadium come from private sources. It could be a deal killer. Yesterday, Major League Baseball said it would immediately put all Washington Nationals business and promotional activities on hold and, upon request, refund deposits on season tickets. It seems unlikely that the Montreal Expos will become the Washington Nationals in perpetuity without an agreement to pay for a new stadium.
Which, as Cropp makes clear, would be unfortunate, but perhaps necessary. Someone has to be responsible for the District's treasury, she says. Someone has to say no if the deal's a bad one.
Cropp says the reaction she has gotten breaks down along a geographic fault line. The reaction inside the city has been positive; less so in the suburbs.
"There's been a lot of negative comment [today] from people who don't live in the District," she says. "It's hard for people who don't live in the District and have no vested interest in it except to enjoy the game, to feel the same as residents do. It's [District residents'] taxes, their businesses that will be impacted. The people from the suburbs just view it as something joyful and fun."
She adds, "For the most part, I believe I am representing the wishes of the people of the District. I'm getting a very positive response from my actual constituency, and that's extremely good."
Cropp stops there. She doesn't suggest a racial or gender bias in any of the negative reaction, outside of a few hotheads. But the demographics of baseball fans are pretty plain: Older, suburban white men are the sport's dominant fan group. It's not surprising that this group would feel the most irritated by the delays in landing a team.
The most unkind group, she says, has been the sports media, which have heaped scorn on Cropp from the moment she began to raise doubts about the stadium. She won't name names, but describes sports reporters as "vicious."
"It's as if they said, 'My job depends on getting more sports into this city. If anything upsets that goal, I'll trash whoever is standing in the way.' "
Cropp says she wants baseball, but at the right price. "I've done everything I could to encourage baseball to come here. I would love baseball to look at this [the modified proposal] and stay. I'm not trying to run them out. We approved the legislation for a stadium that they wanted; now they have to give us an opportunity to get private financing. There is private financing out there. We can find it."
Unlike the sports crowd, Cropp suggests the issue isn't personal to her -- she isn't a fan -- and she thinks that's a good thing. It means she can look at it dispassionately, weigh the pluses and minuses without being seduced by the romance of baseball, the emerald chessboard on a soft summer night. She grew up in Atlanta, and her family were Braves fans. She saw one game on TV last season while visiting her parents in Philadelphia. Personally, she prefers swimming and basketball.
She finds it especially hard to combat the cynicism that attends any politician's involvement in a high-profile issue. People say Cropp is grandstanding, playing to populist sentiment against wealthy baseball team owners in a bid to set up a run for mayor in 2006. Baseball has made Cropp a franchise player, one with the clout to stop Mayor Williams's biggest -- and potentially career-making -- initiative.
Indeed, it's hard to take at face value her response to the question of whether she's considering a run: "Right now, I don't know what I'll do. . . . I know I'll be thrilled when this issue is ended."
She sounds a little tired. It could be the end of the day. Or it could be all the heat she's been taking.
Cropp laughs. Say what you will about her, she seems pretty tough.
"It's been," she says "a very interesting time."
