Baseball has changed for the worse
I hate to quibble with a famous poem by the poet Tennyson (“Locksley Hall”), but in the Spring a young man’s fancy does not lightly turn to thoughts of love, as he wrote. Once upon a time long ago in Philly where I grew up, my mind turned to baseball come Spring.
Baseball once symbolized new hope after a dreary and cold winter, a chance to renew life in the midst of other woes and worries. I recall getting out my baseball mitt and a tennis ball and bouncing it off a nearby wall, all the time pretending I was Robin Roberts or Curt Simmons striking out the opposing side in the ninth inning.
But although I was born a few minutes past April first, you can’t fool me any longer. Baseball, like most other professional sports games these days, is controlled by money interests, owners and players. It’s a sad commentary on the sordid times in which we live that money seems to control not only politicians but also sports.
Where once I collected baseball player cards and kept score of games, now I check how much players and teams make, ye olde bottom of a capitalistic culture. Here are a few examples of how money rules the game: the average 2021 salary of a major league player, according to the Associated Press, was $4.7 million. The average weekly income of a full-time U.S. worker was $1,010, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The owners are hardly poor. Forbes says the Phillies owner’s net worth was $3.4 billion.
Once upon a time, sports figures were role models. I marveled at Phillies players like Richie Ashburn who couldn’t hit a ball over the wall but could splatter singles through the infield. These days infielders shift positions depending on the hitter, Ashburn would be lucky to play every day. And the pitchers I saw as role models like Curt Simmons would be yanked after four innings. And need I mention another Simmons (Ben) who chases money before shooting free throws?
Once America’s game, baseball has become what other sports teams have — a battle of the budgets with spoiled and often greedy owners and players putting the dollar before anything else. Like so many others in our country, I have grown disillusioned and indifferent.
My brother, another Philadelphian, and a far better sports enthusiast than I, recently shared a rewrite of the 1908 poem that expresses how many of us feel these days:
Although some academics and other intellectual snobs once mocked my love of sports as “lower class” and a diversion from reality, I stood my ground and spilled forth my own academic diatribe reminding them that Sigmund Freud, certainly no intellectual slouch, thought sports were a great outlet for societal violence that otherwise might spill into the streets.
Sadly, these days I agree with the criticism that most professional sports are more about how much a team owner or players make. Some player salaries today are higher than some annual organizational budgets. They have become symbols of the very cultural issues that inflict us today, where making money becomes more important than saving lives or standing up for something more important than your bank accounts.
No wonder so many mistrust so many institutions these days. Once the American symbol of playing fair and hard, baseball like all the other major sports, has become a symbol of nothing higher than figures who have big salaries, houses, and cars. The same disillusionments are shared of some politicians who put money before service or even a few religious figures who put their mansions and book sales above everything.
I suppose the best way to protest what’s happening is simply to stop going to games. In this culture, it may be the only way to express one’s displeasure is to hit the pocketbooks of the purveyors of greed. Or, perhaps go to a minor league game where admission fees are not high and players seldom millionaires (yet).
Freud was right but drew the wrong conclusion. Sports today does not reduce the violence we might otherwise use on others, but simply mirrors the sad state of our culture where money is king and we serve its demands upon our lives.
“Take me out of the ball game, Take me out of the crowd. I don’t care if I never get back. For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out, At the old ball game.”