Out-of-touch owners only expediting Baseball’s downfall
The mental checklist for baseball fans during the COVID-19 pandemic makes for ominous reading.
The NHL? Cue the packed-SUV videos of players trekking back to home markets.
The NBA? Hotels for Disney World are booked. MLS? Ditto.
College sports? The dorms are being readied as we speak.
The NFL? C’mon, does anyone really doubt the perpetual money-making machine will be thwarted?
Peruse your favorite app and you can fill your sports-starved day watching soccer from Germany, rugby from New Zealand, baseball from Korea and football of its eponymous rules in Australia.
But where is Major League Baseball in all of this? Running up the lawyer and publicist bills.
Baseball’s return is the opposite of imminent. All the sport can offer to fans for the moment is an object lesson of a sport dying on the vine.
The latest salvo came Saturday night, with the MLB Players Association stating, “it unfortunately appears that further dialogue with the league would be futile,” and asking the owners to set a schedule to which it can either report or file formal grievances to trigger arbitration.
The sides have sought a middle ground on the number of games, which started with the owners cynically low-balling at 50, and salary concessions, with the owners trying to get even prorated salaries on the cheap. The owners’ later counter in the back and forth came Saturday, accompanied by a bonus salvo of,”We are disappointed that the MLBPA has chosen not to negotiate in good faith over resumption of play.”
It’s like a schoolyard scene where two kids are tussling over some petty slight and have been at it so for long they don’t realize the crowd that gathered has dispersed, leaving them to huff and puff for no gain.
Baseball is under no obligation to return. It’s a business, beholden to do what’s best for its bottom line. You could argue that the multi-million-dollar subsidies these billionaires swindled from municipalities to build their pleasure palaces come with strings attached, and you’d be right. But that’s another column.
Actually, it might be time for the owners to read the room and take a short-term loss — or, more accurately, stop thinking of themselves as immune to the losses everyone else in the economy is feeling — instead of torpedoing long-term goodwill. In holding their ground on 28 percent of a prorated 89-game contract or whatever such fraction, the owners risk losing the public. And unlike other times in baseball’s history, when it was central to America’s cultural identity, their stocks of equity are critically low.
Baseball as a pro spectator sport is dying. That’s not an opinion. That’s a demographic fact. The average baseball fan is old and white in a nation that is becoming younger and more global. One of the main draws for younger fans, being at the ballpark, is off the table for the foreseeable future. So that leaves the appeal, to a casual baseball fan, of what – watching weeks of acrimonious public haranguing to get the chance for a dozen Orioles-Marlins games that drag on for 4½ hours each?
The current battle is emblematic of MLB’s disregard for how anyone outside its sheltered bubble views the sport. If you were to ask MLB owners why fans should come back, the best answer any of them could fathom is simply that “it’s baseball.”
America’s pastime, peanuts, cracker jack, Willie Mays, Babe Ruth. People will watch baseball because it’s baseball, because it’s always been baseball, because people have always watched.
You can see that laissez faire attitude in the Phillies’ virtual disappearance during the pandemic. The Flyers set up Zoom sessions or conference calls with the head coach, several players, one former player and even (early on) the general manager. The Union went dark for weeks but have been back to regularly scheduled availabilities now that MLS is close to returning. The 76ers have allowed sporadic glimpses into the quarantine life of coaches if not players. And the Eagles … well, they’re the Eagles, the gold-standard franchise that elevated the idea of keeping themselves regularly on the airwaves and in the papers 13 months a year into an art form.
As for the Phillies ... who are they?
Short of Bryce Harper’s social media and the occasional Andrew McCutchen tweet, they’ve all but stopped existing online. Outside of the brief resurfacing for last week’s MLB Draft ... allowing the new scouting director and their No. 1 pick to be available to the media, and that’s all, folks ... their social media has been little more than Phanavision skits.
Oh, and Matt Klentak holding up a Black Lives Matter sign with an energy that can only be described as “hostage proof of life photo.”
All of those choices are within their purview to decide (and come with the admirable decision by the franchise not to furlough employees). But it comes from the same place as
MLB’s greater passivity: We’re the Phillies.
Why would we need to do more?
Owners have shown this blatant disregard time and again, as though prevailing societal currents somehow don’t apply to them. It happened with desegregation in the 1940s (and for some clubs, sadly, into the 1960s). It happened with the obstinate stand over the reserve clause (and the resulting pettiness of the Hall of Fame not to induct labor leader Marvin Miller until after his death). It happened with collusion around the 1994 strike and allowing players to take the brunt of punishment over performance-enhancing drugs while owners almost certainly knew and most certainly profited.
Now they face a rude awakening. Baseball is usually the only game in town from June through August. So long operating as an unchallenged monopoly (to say nothing of its antitrust privileges) has made baseball grow bloated and complacent, like prey that has forgotten the existence of predators.
This summer, it will face competition. “Because it’s baseball” won’t suffice when the Stanley Cup playoffs and the NBA playoffs and MLS return triumphantly. It won’t hold up as fans that have discovered new sports that returned more quickly to the sports vacuum keep their attention there.
When – if? – baseball returns, who will still be waiting?