Of course, both states already had actual minor league teams. Now they have more expensive ones.

So, the rest of baseball suffers. The addition of two teams has hurt the quality of play around the league. There are too many players who can't compete effectively on the major league level toiling in the bigs.

And the fans suffer too. After the initial excitement and newness of these teams wears off, people will stop coming. Why should a Denverite pay $10 to watch the Colorado Rockies, essentially a Triple A team?

The baseball owners named Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as commissioner 73 years ago because they wanted an independent authority to restore integrity to The Game in the wake of 1919 World Series, which was intentionally thrown by members of the Chicago White Sox.

Landis, like future commissioners, had authority to act in the best interests of the game. He could have (and as a man with knowledge of the law, would have) suspended Coleman or even banned him from baseball. He, like the commissioners who followed him, had the authority to protect baseball from the people who play The Game and own the teams.

Without a true commissioner, for example, owners regularly violate the public trust. The San Diego Padres owner, Tom Werner, who is a TV producer, has deliberately run the franchise into the ground. Werner began the season with the National League's batting champion (Gary Sheffield) and home run leader (Fred Midriff) on his roster.

Because he felt the salaries they are being paid are too expensive, Werner has traded both away for a pittance. The not-so-secret reason: Werner wants to make the team more attractive to buyers. Damn the fans and ticket holders, who were promised a team with Sheffield and McGriff in literature distributed by the team before the season.

A strong commissioner would have stepped in and not permitted Werner to make these trades. Selig, however, has had nothing but praise for Werner. It figures.

The time has come for those with some authority over The Game to play hardball. If baseball has not restored a commissioner with truly independent authority and absolute power to office by the World Series, the United State Congress ought to move to revoke baseball's antitrust exemption.

The competition would be healthy for the majors. And, I suspect, anyone who had he chutzpah to start a new league would soon see thousand of frustrated fans, including this one, arrive at the ticket window.

Still, some baseball owners persist in the belief that there is nothing he matter with their sport. Some even believe major league baseball is on the rebound. The point to increased attendance in many major league parks during the 1993 season as a prime example of this trend.

But the trend doesn't exist. Baseball fans are as much turned off by the way the sport is mis-run as they are attracted to the game. The number of people attending baseball games as a percentage of the total urban population is not increasing, despite what those who run baseball would have us believe.

The advantage of having a commissioner is to have an advocate for fans and for The Game, Baseball has neither.

Now, we have a national pastime in which Bud Selig looks after the owners, an umpires union looks after the men in blue and a player's union protects criminals such as Vince Coleman.

But no one exists to protect the fans. To those of us who love the game, the combined effect of all these problems and administrative missteps is terrifying. It feels a little bit as if someone had thrown a lighted firecracker in our faces.

Maybe Coleman knew that with baseball's current vacuum of leadership, there was no one running the Grand Old Game to make sure he wouldn't get away with it.