Feeling good about beautiful Target Field, the Twins' season, sports, life in general? Ardent sports fan and professional killjoy Dave Zirin will bring you back down to earth.

In "Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love," his fifth book, Zirin explores the missing Joe DiMaggio syndrome, the sense that sports today doesn't reciprocate our love for it, and his subtitle puts the blame squarely on franchise owners. "Bad Sports" is a diatribe against the arrogant, the venal, and the block-headed owners who "in the 21st century are destroying what took more than a hundred years to build."

It's a one-sided love affair: We as fans fall prey to the seductions of the team. We visit the park, enjoy the games, squirt the mustard on the dog. Yet once we are won over, the owner threatens to walk away unless the public is willing to foot the bill for a new facility. Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell has called his NFL peers "32 Republicans that vote socialist." In chapter after chapter, Zirin shows us how owners "hold cities hostage for an endless flow of municipal funds."

Zirin explains how in the 1970s, the New Orleans Superdome siphoned away money intended for levees. Ironically, after Katrina, the first major renovation was a $185 million overhaul of the Superdome. Jerry Jones built the new Cowboys Stadium with the City of Arlington providing almost a billion dollars' worth of bonds as funding. Closer to home, we learn how Target Field came to be built with public funds even though 69 percent of our state's voters opposed it in a referendum.

I should admit at this point that I enjoyed every page of Zirin's splashy rant. He is witty, knowledgeable and nasty. Once upon a time the New York Knicks, a marquee team, played shutdown defense and attracted crowds to basketball's most famous venue. But, as Zirin points out, current owner James Dolan's fondness for fat centers and selfish point guards has made the team irrelevant for the past 15 years. "Commissioner David Stern, who would sooner shave his head with a cheese grater than criticize a resident of the owner's box, actually said of the Knicks, 'they're not a model of intelligent management.'"

At the same time, Zirin is willing to excuse the players of anything -- except bad play. Steroid use? The owners were aware of it as far back as 1988 and baseball commissioner Bud Selig's 2005 claim -- "I [had] never heard about it" -- is "dumbfounding." Enormous salary demands? Zirin is outraged by any "formal limitations on what players can earn," all the while he rues the expense of a day at the stadium. I'm sorry, but it's hard to see Manny Ramirez and Roger Clemens as characters in a Clifford Odets play.

Star Tribune
"Bad Sports," a book by Dave Zirin

Zirin's solution to the woes of professional sports comes in his final chapter and its name is "municipalization." The heroes here are the Green Bay Packers: 112,015 stockholders, 50,000 people on the waiting list for tickets, the Pack is "financially solvent, competitive, and deeply connected to the community." Zirin also explains how, sadly, the Green Bay ownership model will never happen again.

Tom Zelman teaches English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth.