Farewell Forbes Field

Recently it has been my good fortune to spend a total of 14 days in Pittsburgh, a city I had never visited before -- and which turned out to be much greener and interesting than I had imagined it to be.

Here's the most forlorn thing I saw in my exploration -- a piece of what was once the outfield fence at Forbes Field, the former home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Regarded as the first modern ballpark, Forbes Field would have been 100 years old today.

If Forbes Field were still there, it would likely be counted as one of those historic baseball gems -- of which only Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago remain. What seems especially poignant about the absence of Forbes Field is that if it were still there, it would be wedged into a truly remarkable location -- the edges of two university campuses (U. of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon) and a beautiful park (Schenley). Alas, when it took over the stadium site, the U. of Pittsburgh replace Forbes Field with particularly mediocre examples of brutalist 1970s concrete campus buildings.

The Pirates decamped in the early 1970s for Three Rivers Stadium, itself a forgettable brutalist monsterpiece. Recently they moved to PNC Park, among the newer examples of the current rage for cute major league facilities. As a design concept, this idea was fresh and remarkable when it began with Camden Yards in Baltimore. Now it's a bit too tried-and-true -- a bit too calculated, as two recent trips to PNC Park revealed, to dazzle and distract and induce spending on food and frippery, as opposed to savor the national pasttime itself.

Plus, in truth, PNC Park is a bit ugly. From home plate looking outward, PNC offers a lovely prospect of downtown Pittsburgh in the background with the Sixth Street Bridge in the foreground. But from the outfield looking in, there's something cheap and wearying about the place. I think it's the press box, which looms at the top of the stadium and looks as if it was an afterthought dropped atop the structure without any attention to its visual effect.

One of these days -- if the penchant of major league baseball for short-term gain at the expense of longterm success doesn't catch up with it -- some team will try something truly bold. Can you imagine a team playing in a stadium that looks anything like the Olympic Stadium in Beijing, which the swiss architecture firm of Herzog and deMeuron designed to resemble a giant bird's nest? (Hello Orioles? Blue Jays? Cardinals?)

Baseball teams like to use public money to build tiny stadiums so they can make big bucks charging obscene ticket prices -- which generates nice cash flow but seems calculated to turn today's youngsters into something other than baseball fans. I personally would love to introduce my two little kids to Fenway Park, but the cost of such an outing puts that out of the question.

The razzle-dazzle of today's new ballparks is calculated to make a family jaunt to such places an enticing prospect despite the expense, on the theory that the best leisure time is that which most closely resembles a trip to the also absurdly expensive Disney World. But baseball, in order to be savored properly, requires study -- of things like the elaborate strategy and the subtleties of the fierce battle of wits and skill between the pitcher and the batter. Thus it seems particularly fitting to put a ballpark in the shadow of two great universities. If only it were still there.

Mister Piggly Wiggly Gets Sued

It's a long and winding road that started in 1916 on Jefferson Street in Memphis, where a certain go-getter named Clarence Saunders opened a store with the purposefully mysterious name "Piggly Wiggly."

Saunders got rich the old-fashioned way -- by thinking up something his competitors in the retail grocery business hadn't -- the idea that grocery customers did not have to be waited on but could pick items off shelves, put them in carts and pay for them at the front of the store. Thus the supermarket was born and the Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain was launched -- not through cheating but through innovation.

Of course Saunders eventually got poor the old fashioned way as well, by losing his fortune, and control of Piggly Wiggly, in the stock market depredations that ultimately led to the big crash in 1929. Today Piggly Wiggly is a franchise operation that is part of C&S Wholesale Grocers, based in Keene, New Hampshire.

One wonders what Saunders would think of the complaint filed against C&S on June 19 in New Hampshire's federal district court. It is a class action lawsuit, alleging violation of federal antitrust law, against both C&S and another wholesaler, Supervalu. The plaintiff is a Boston-based retailer of fancy grocery items, DeLuca's.

The 16-page complaint tells a straightforward story.

C&S is the dominant grocery wholesaler in New England. Supervalu is likewise the big player in the midwest -- Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. According to the complaint, the two wholesalers invaded each other's territory -- Supervalu by acquiring a company in 1994 with warehouses in Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island (Sweet Life Foods) and C&S by purchasing the assets in 2003 of a bankrupt midwestern wholesaler (Fleming).

That, of course, is good old-fashioned market capitalism. But what allegedly happened next is not. According to paragraph 37 of the complaint, just after Supervalu bought the Fleming assets "Supervalu and C&S entered into an Agreement to refrain from competing against each other by allocating markets and customers. They agreed that Supervalu would exit New England in return for C&S's agreement not to enter the Midwest."

Here's paragraph 39 of the complaint in its entirety: "Supervalu and C&S concealed the nature of their Agreement by publicly referring to it as an 'asset swap.' However, rather than swapping assets to facilitate competition, C&S immediately closed the three Midwest distribution facilities that C&S had purchased from Fleming and terminated 1,000 employees. In addition, shortly after the Agreement was consummated, C&S closed the three New England distribution facilities owned previously by Supervalu and terminated over 1,000 employees."

Astute consumers of grocery items in New England will note that Supervalu isn't just a wholesaler with a looming presence elsewhere -- in 2007, it became the owner of the Shaw's and Star Markets retail grocery chains. According to the complaint, C&S nevertheless continues to be the primary wholesale distributor for Shaw's and Star Markets.

There are two important points to be made here.

First, there is a difference between alleging things in a complaint and proving them. Presumably, C&S and its co-defendant Supervalu will mount a vigorous fight and deny every allegation in the complaint. Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act makes it illegal to engage in a combination or conspiracy in restraint of trade -- but you gotta prove it happened.

Second, regardless of whether the allegations in the complaint are ultimately proven, the lawsuit is an eloquent argument in favor of using cooperatives to supply people with the food they need to live. The co-op on whose board I serve, the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society, doesn't get its groceries from C&S -- it buys from a wholesaler called Associated Grocers of New England. Associated Grocers is itself a cooperative, owned by the food co-ops and mom/pop grocery stores that use it. For Associated Grocers, conduct such as that alleged in the complaint against C&S and Supervalu is simply out of the question.

It's all well and good that an investor-owned food retailer like DeLuca's has stepped forward to pursue this antitrust claim. But if C&S is as dominant as the complaint alleges, it's quite possible that most retailers are simply passing the cost of any antitrust violations along to their retail customers. To an investor-owned business, that's just the way it is. To a cooperative, owned by its customers, that would be unconscionable.