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Owner Carl Pohlad (left) allegedly has a hankering for a reported $250M buyout of his Twins, who are valued at just $99M.(AP)

After weeks of gnashing their teeth and gumming the issue of contraction to death, after weeks of rumors and innuendo, Major League Baseball owners finally convened in Chicago on Tuesday and "overwhelmingly" voted to contract!

Exactly which two teams will be contracted, though, remains a secret.

In fact, which two teams will be told to get out of the pool before the 2002 season is such a secret commissioner Bud Selig claims the owners don't even know which two teams will be nuked.

Yet, theoretically, by the time spring training begins 14 weeks from now, baseball:

• Will have two fewer teams.
• Players from the contracted teams will have been distributed throughout the league in a dispersal draft.
• Minor-leaguers with those clubs will have been placed.
• Some type of realignment will have been drawn up (such as shifting Arizona to the American League).
• A new labor agreement with the players' union will have been negotiated.

"It is not a negotiating ploy," Selig said. "I've read that for six months. It is absolutely not a negotiating ploy."

But let's just ask this: If folks in Minnesota, or even Montreal -- the top two teams on baseball's hit list -- suddenly up and decided over the next few weeks to build themselves a new stadium, do you think baseball wouldn't grant them a stay of execution? Especially to Minnesota, whose attendance actually increased during the Twins' best season in years in 2001?

Selig was asked at his news conference whether there "definitely" will be only 28 teams next season.

"That's the intent of this resolution," Selig said.

Notice the built-in wiggle room. He stayed away from absolutes. He used the word "intent" a lot.

Which reminds me. It also is my intent to contract the family dog out of my life by next week.

Exactly how I'm going to go about this, though, is secret. I told my wife I'll let her know the details as soon as the dogcatcher and I negotiate them.

If it wasn't so sublimely ludicrous, it would be ridiculous.

The good news is, Selig said he is not instituting a lockout, nor is he instituting a signing freeze.

So when the basic agreement expires by Wednesday, and then the open period begins on free agents in two weeks, everything remains free game while the owners and players' union continues to negotiate a deal in time for the 2002 season.

Otherwise, after baseball's public pronouncement it will kill off two franchises over the next several weeks in the major leagues' very own version of Survivor -- "Hey, let's vote Jeffrey Loria off the island because we saw him chomping on an unauthorized rat the other day in his empty stadium!" -- Selig proclaimed all 30 teams are supposed to continue selling season tickets and marketing themselves for 2002.

"Absolutely," Selig said. "They have to do it anyway."

Suggested marketing slogan for Minnesota: "Step right up and buy your season tickets -- you never know, you might get a refund by next spring, and then you can go buy that new high-definition television you've always wanted!"

Some of those who wore leisure suits to discos try to pretend the 1970s never existed, some of those who spent Friday nights watching Miami Vice attempt to wipe the 1980s out of our memories.

Baseball essentially is doing the same with the 1990s. The majors added Florida and Colorado in 1993 and Tampa Bay and Arizona in 1998. Owners then were so greedy to collect hundreds of millions of dollars for expansion fees, they awarded franchises as readily as some people hand out candy at Halloween.

Many of us thought it was out of control at the time.

Now, less than 10 years later, with their money flow slowing and with some franchises bleeding red ink, many owners finally are coming to the same conclusion.

"We believe that because there are a significant number of teams that can't make it, that can't generate enough revenue in their markets, that's where contraction comes to be an attractive option," Selig said.

Montreal obviously is a problem. Florida and Tampa Bay, two neophytes from the '90s expansion boom, look a lot like abandoned towns from the Gold Rush days.

Where we especially see contraction as an immoral, reprehensible and despicable act on the owners' part, however, is Minnesota.

The reason the Twins don't have a new stadium, and the reason they have had such a difficult time since 1993, is strictly because of bad ownership.

Carl Pohlad is a multibillionaire who, even at 86, wouldn't think twice about chop-blocking a nun to pick up a nickel on an empty sidewalk. He got his start in the banking business foreclosing on people's homes during the depression -- quality human being there, huh? -- and has been hoarding money ever since.

He has run the Twins into the ground, allowing them to wither on the vine since the early 1990s, and now he sees a chance to exchange his team -- valued by Forbes magazine in April at $99 million -- for the $250 million contraction price. And his eyes are lighting up like slot machines.

He no longer has pupils, he has matching cherries.

The only reason Minnesota is a bad baseball market is because of Pohlad. We're talking about a franchise that became the American League club to top the three-million attendance mark. The Twins did it in 1988, and between 1987 and 1992, they outdrew the New York Yankees, for crying out loud.

Now, because baseball has a willing accomplice in Pohlad, it's going to remove Minnesota from its landscape?

"The fact of the matter is, we haven't picked the final two teams," Selig insisted. "There's a lot of negotiating left to be done."

In Minnesota, read "a lot of negotiating left to be done" as baseball's last-ditch effort to extort a stadium. That's what this always has been about with the Twins, and if they expire, that's what will kill them.

Other cities have built stadiums, the Twin Cities haven't -- largely because of the behavior of Pohlad.

As for the rest of this plan to contract two teams before the 2002 season, good luck. It takes these owners six weeks and 12 meetings to decide whether to tie their shoes. Put something significant in front of them and baseball moves slower than a horse and buggy.

"We're going to have to play this day by day, week by week," Selig said. "We'd like to do it as soon as possible.

"There are so many moving parts to this puzzle. We're plowing historical ground. This is a first in modern American sport."

Thanks to the New York Yankees and Arizona, people throughout the country have been mesmerized once again by the wonder of baseball. Game 7 was baseball's highest-rated telecast in 10 years.

Not even 48 hours afterward, a cold winter already is setting in.

It is simply amazing how these guys continually manage to move backward at every opportunity to go forward.