Another black mark
Baseball can’t handle going down this road once again
Baseball’s last labor dispute was devastating, but the comeback had two big things working in its favor.
Cal Ripken Jr. and steroids.
The sport won’t be so fortuitous if this lockout lingers into the spring.
For the national pastime to maintain some semblance of its former glory, we better be talking about WAR and slash lines instead of the CBA and luxury tax rates by the time the Super Bowl is over.
The brouhaha that came to a head this week with the owners locking out the players is a mere sideshow at the moment, overshadowed by the NFL playoff races and the biggest games of the college football season.
With basketball and hockey also ramping up, there’s plenty to keep sports fans distracted for the next couple of months while the two sides haggle over the details that most of us couldn’t care less about.
“This is peak college football season, and the NFL has all sorts of cool narratives,” said Mike Lewis, a marketing professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “This is a good time from a strictly negotiation point of view for the owners to play a little hard ball.”
All that changes if an agreement hasn’t been reached by mid-February, when the dawn of spring training still serves as a symbolic end to the long, dark winter.
The situation is even more tenuous with baseball still trying to bounce back from the COVID-shortened 2020 season, which was played largely in empty stadiums.
“Losing two out of three opening days would be brutal,” Lewis said.
Some will argue the sport never fully recovered from its last labor dispute, which wiped out the 1994 World Series and dragged on for nearly eight months.
They’re probably right, but baseball caught a huge break when two compelling storylines lured many leery fans back to the ballparks.
First, there was Ripken’s pursuit of one of the most hallowed records in all of sports.
In September of 1995, just five months after the strike petered out, Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s mark by playing in his 2,131st consecutive game. It was a moment that mesmerized the nation, and undoubtedly healed some of the game’s self-inflicted wounds.
Coming off the strike, baseball conveniently looked the other way while its hitters transformed themselves into Incredible Hulks.
The ball started flying over the fence at a stupefying rate, culminating in the home-run derby between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa that captivated the nation through the summer of 1998. It’s hard to envision a similar scenario this time around.
For one, the game’s popularity is even more diluted than it was a quarter-century ago. Many young people have turned away from baseball, viewing it as staid and old-fashioned in an increasingly fast-paced world filled with shinier entertainment options. Anyone who has sat through a four-hour-plus game — filled largely with players going through meaningless gyrations instead of any real action — would find it hard to counter that viewpoint.
Lewis recently conducted a survey that looked at the evolving state of sports fandom in America.
Every sport has taken a hit, he said, but baseball “has essentially crashed” among Generation Z, those born since the last labor stoppage.
“It’s really a mismatch on multiple levels,” he said. “That generation wants to look at content on their phone. They want to get their highlights on Instagram and TikTok. Baseball is built on local markets and people sitting in a stadium for three or four hours. The technology, the marketing of the game — whatever it is — has really created a disconnect with young people, and particularly young males, in baseball.”
Baseball does have some advantages over other sports, Lewis said.
“Sure, baseball has some challenges with an older fan base,” he said. “But baseball also has more kids going to major league parks than any other professional league. There’s more of a family connection in baseball. It’s a game that almost has more of a wholesomeness to it than other sports. That’s got some power.”
If baseball wants to maintain that connection, it needs to settle this labor dispute before anyone really notices.
A deadline to keep in mind is Feb. 14.
The day after the Super Bowl.