Baseball can’t afford another extended labor dispute

ATLANTA » 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.

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.

“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.

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

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 in the summer of 1998.

We know now that it was nothing more than a chemically enhanced farce. But at the time, the McGwire-Sosa duel was just what baseball needed to lure back even more of its fan base.

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.”

Also, the stars of the 1990s were more prominent figures than today’s players.

In today’s far more complex media landscape, baseball’s biggest names — whether it’s Mike Trout or reigning MVPs Shohei Ohtani and Bryce Harper — simply don’t have the gravitas of those in other sports.

Lewis pointed out that NBA star LeBron James has 103 million followers on Instagram. Trout, Ohtani and Harper have 4.8 million — combined.

There’s another obstacle that baseball faces, even without a labor dispute.

Baseball — unlike every other sport, with the possible exception of the NHL — is not nearly as attractive to watch as it was decades ago.

Not only are the games longer, but front offices driven mainly by analytics have created 30 cloned franchises — teams all playing essentially the same style, with an emphasis on homers and defensive shifts and constant pitching changes.

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.