The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Disgusted fans find other summer fun
Rob Manfred plans to use dictatorial power as Major League Baseball commissioner to set season.
So now Rob Manfred plans to use his dictatorial power as Major League Baseball commissioner to implement a 60game season to start in late July.
It is baseball’s version of a shotgun wedding.
If my Fanometer is accurate, the negotiations to start the baseball season dragged on so long with no agreement reached after 100 days of bickering, the owners and players union each in their own way came across as so selfish and out of touch with the real world, a large portion of the paying public feels completely abandoned by the teams it follows.
“Talk to me when it’s football season,” said Mike, a 61-year-old auto mechanic in Eastlake. “I won’t watch baseball. I’m going to get on my bike and ride.”
Full disclosure, a Fanometer is not a scientific device. It isn’t even a tangible thing with numbers, gauges, meters or anything like that.
But it does measure the attitude of people who consider themselves sports fans, and Mike’s response June 23 when asked “What do you think of this baseball mess?” was not unique.
I posed the same question to three other people over the last couple days — a woman in the checkout line of a grocery store wearing an Indians T-shirt, a guy wearing a faded Tigers cap I came upon during a backup on the fourth tee at a golf course in Lake County and a man named Jim I met at the same auto shop Mike the mechanic owns.
It turned out the 60-year-old construction engineer is a rabid baseball fan. But today he is a disgusted one.
“What do you think of this baseball mess?” is a good way to start a conversation. How long it lasts depends on how many items the person two people ahead in the checkout line is placing on the conveyor belt. It depends on how long the guy in the red muscle shirt (who shouldn’t be wearing one) causing the backup searches for his golf ball in the calf-high weeds to the right of the fairway.
“We bought a Tribe six-pack for each month this season,” the lady at the grocery store, a dental hygienist, said June 20. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if we should get our money back or bank them for next year. The Indians can’t tell us, because they don’t know what will happen this season.
“Our 10-year-old son just started following the Indians last year. He understands they didn’t start on time because of COVID-19 because his school closed because of it, but he hears the NBA is going to start playing again next month and wants to know why baseball teams can’t start playing. If we can’t watch games, we’ll have fun camping.”
The golfer in the Tigers cap, who appeared to be in his 30s, was more pragmatic.
“We were going to stink again this year, anyway,” he said. “They won’t allow fans in the stands (because of the novel coronavirus). After all this backand-forth (baloney), I’d have to be pretty bored to watch the Tigers on TV.”
Fans’ disgust is genuine. But they always come back, and team owners are banking on that happening again in 2021. As of now, fans won’t be allowed in ballparks in 2020 because of the pandemic. Teams are counting on the fans’ love of baseball winning out next spring over the anger they feel now.
“Why play 60 games?” Jim, the construction engineer, said. “I talk to people on my street and they say the same thing — just wait until next year. Teams start blossoming at the end. The Indians did it a few years ago. The hitting and pitching comes together, and they make a run over the last 40 or 50 games.
“I don’t even want to watch games on TV if there aren’t any fans in the stands.”
On top of all this, teams are temporarily closing their training facilities in Florida and Arizona because of COVID-19 concerns, including the Indians’ complex in Goodyear, Ariz., which had been open for limited use. Five players and three staff members from the Phillies tested positive at the team’s spring training facility in Clearwater, Fla.
The coronavirus threat should be a priority and of equal concern to both sides. It is completely separate from the owners and players haggling over money.
The players are unhappy. The owners are unhappy.
Meanwhile a dental hygienist and her family are camping instead of following the Indians. A mechanic is riding his motorcycle. A disgruntled Detroit fan is working on lowering his golf handicap instead of following his beloved Tigers, and a devout Indians fan is writing off this season before it even starts.
And all four seem to be doing just fine without following baseball this summer.