BASEBALL GAVE US A COMPELLING ALL-STAR MOMENT — NOW WHAT?
A game that began with a breathtaking backdrop and a classic showdown — Kershaw vs. Ohtani — soon emptied into the harsh reality of an industry overwhelmed with irreparable problems
For an evening, for a sequence of one pitch and one pickoff throw, there was nothing but beauty in the world. Not a cloud was in the sapphire blue sky above Dodger Stadium, a dream machine immune from life’s distress. The pitcher on the hill, Clayton Kershaw, was a national treasure oozing family, charity and majesty. The batter, Shohei Ohtani, was a dynamic symbol of the sport’s global reach and an ongoing reminder to America: Japan has birthed a two-way force superior to our own from a bygone era, Babe Ruth.
“First pitch, first swing. That’s it,” Ohtani said as he was interviewed on TV before entering the batter’s box.
What’s the Japanese word for chutzpah? Was Ohtani calling his shot, so to speak, as Ruth once did in forecasting a home run? Yes, he was.
The first pitch came. Fastball, 91 mph. “I mean, you can’t throw the first pitch of an All-Star Game as a breaking ball,” Kershaw said. “You kind of had to give him a heater, I think, just for everything. Had to.” Ohtani swung and connected on the end of his bat, which broke on impact, and the ball sailed into center field for a base hit.
“I was definitely swinging 100 percent,” he said, admittedly aiming for a homer. “I wish I hit it more square. I wasn’t too happy about that.”
A tough man to please, isn’t he? But that’s why Ohtani is a 21st-century phenomenon headed to the Hall of Fame. Said Kershaw, knowing Ohtani wanted the long ball: “All he has to do is touch it, and it will go a long way. Broke his bat, at least.”
Then he broke Ohtani’s balls. Facing the next batter, Aaron Judge, Kershaw pivoted and threw to first base, where the baserunner wasn’t expecting actual gamesmanship. The hit was erased by a pickoff. Ohtani disappeared into the American League dugout, laughing sheepishly. “I was seeing if there was a chance to run, and he made a great move,” he said through his now-famous interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. “I was not expecting that. Regardless, my name was going to be in the papers good or bad.”
Kershaw escaped his only inning without further damage, then conducted his own interview for the viewing audience and his worshippers in his home ballpark. “It’s so cool, Dodger Stadium, the All-Star Game,” he said, having checked another box in a career bursting with magnitude.
Consider the moment a baseline for Major League Baseball. It showed that a sport still carries a modicum of chops, if only for a few Hollywood moments at the 92nd All-Star Game, and that it’s still capable of luring us for a mano-a-mano showdown that meant nothing in the standings but represented everything baseball still has going for it.
Now, where does MLB go from here?
Can America’s No. 4 sport — the NFL is king, followed by college football and the NBA — avoid sliding into permanent nichedom?
The stands were full, as they often are in Los Angeles, where 18 million people are within a metropolitan drive of a cathedral that lets you absorb tradition and visit Disneyland in a single stop. But the grand happenings in Chavez Ravine, once the norm in the majors, are an anomaly. Twenty-one of the 30 franchises are dealing with continuing attendance declines, per Sportico, a multiple-year trend nearing a crisis point. Eight million fewer people have gone to games than at a similar stage last season, when the coronavirus was strangling American life. And TV ratings? What TV ratings? What’s Rob Manfred’s excuse now? Appears he doesn’t have one.
Never has the disparity been wider between the solid-gold franchises — Dodgers and Yankees at the top, flaunting bi-coastal market dominance — and everyone else, really. Oh, a handful of teams one tier below remain title-competitive and rake in revenues — Mets, Braves, Red Sox, Astros, Cardinals, even a team in San Diego that appears serious about adding Juan Soto to Fernando Tatis Jr. ($340 million) and Manny Machado ($300 million). But baseball has no legitimate, mass-appeal future when two-thirds of the ballclubs either aren’t committed to winning, don’t know how to win or are trying to flee so someone builds them a stadium in Las Vegas or Nashville.
What we have is a caste system, a handful of “haves” competing on the big stage while everyone else whips open the ballpark doors so the locals have something to do on summer days and nights. Every so often, a “have-not” gets lucky, such as the 2015 Kansas City Royals, who haven’t been heard from since. Otherwise, Seattle will have to be content with a random thrill such as a current 14-game win streak, which hardly eases the pain of missing the playoffs 20 straight seasons, still the longest futility streak in North American sports. And, wow, for the first time in eons, the Orioles actually are competitive, which galls Baltimore old-timers who remember routine World Series appearances in the previous century.
In the NFL, the system is devised for all 32 teams to have title shots, with no better examples than the Green Bay Packers and, most recently, the Cincinnati Bengals. Same applies to the NBA, where the Milwaukee Bucks won a championship last year. MLB’s only apparent October story lines, as the nation’s eyeballs shift toward football training camps, are whether: (1) the Yankees overcome the Astros in their cheat grudgefest; and (2) the Dodgers hold off the Mets and Braves. From there, we’d likely get a Subway Series in New York, a Yankees vs. Dodgers megaseries or another cheat grudgefest, Dodgers vs. Astros. Any would make for a fun World Series, but, by then, no one is watching except septuagenarians and fans of the two teams.
This is why Manfred, whose media deals are dwarfed by the monstrous fortunes thrown at the NFL and college football and, eventually, the NBA, has resorted to desperate financial measures. The commissioner already is a hypocritical disgrace for abandoning competitive integrity — remember Pete Rose’s lifetime ban? — and cutting sponsorship deals with gambling companies. With the handle for baseball betting on a $10 billion pace, as sportsbooks open at Nationals Park in Washington and (gasp!) within the hallowed confines of Wrigley Field, the MLB Players Association is aghast. Union chief Tony Clark knew Manfred and the owners would cash in when the Supreme Court legalized sports betting, overturning the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act four years ago. He didn’t realize they’d sell out their rectitude beyond recognition.
“We’re entering a very delicate and, dare I say, dangerous world here,” Clark told a gathering of baseball writers in L.A. “We hope that it is truly beneficial for our game moving forward and that everyone involved benefits from it in one fashion or another. But when you have players suggest that no sooner was PASPA repealed, that they started to have (sportsbooks) following them on social media, that gets you a little twitchy pretty quick. We’ll continue to pound the pavement … to ensure that our players and their families are protected as a result of the language that’s on the books — despite the fact this train has left the station.”
As Clark was sounding warnings, Manfred was announcing an additional revenue stream: advertising patches on uniforms. It’s not new to sports, as Premier League fans know, and the NBA and NHL also have sold out. But baseball, as the former national pastime, was supposed to be above the compromised fray. No longer. “I think that advertisements on jerseys are a reality of life in professional sports,” Manfred said. “It’s a revenue source that is significant enough that it is really impossible for the sport to ignore over the long haul. I think that’s the truth.”
ACME BAIL BONDS, here we come.
Meanwhile, the commissioner continues to advocate a pitch clock for next season. Pardon me if you’ve heard it before, five or six times. This time, an 11-person competition committee — seemingly tilted MLB’s way with six management representatives and only four players, with one umpire — is empowered by the latest collective bargaining agreement to implement the clock. Can you imagine a 14-second limit with the bases empty, 19 seconds with any runners on base, as tested this year in the minor leagues? Those time restraints are carving off an average of about a half-hour per game, which would reduce major-league contests to about two hours and 30 minutes, giving MLB a chance to maintain our attention span after years of napping and phone-reading.
But it’s not that simple, sadly enough. The players’ union remains potent, even in the aftermath of a 99-day lockout, and diehards won’t accept significant change without a fight. The players still loathe the owners. They are very capable of blowing off an installed clock, pitchers and batters alike, and challenging the system when some are accustomed to taking 40 or 50 seconds between pitches.
“I’m not opposed to a pitch clock, but I think it needs to be a reasonable amount of time to not feel rushed,” said Justin Verlander, the two-time Cy Young Award winner. “Fourteen is quick. I was kind of like on the fence about it, maybe pro-pitch-clock, but then talking to a couple of the Triple-A guys we’ve had, they feel in certain situations that they don’t even have enough time to shake off pitches.”
Said Yankees ace and union man Gerrit Cole, providing hope for a clock: “I think (baseball) needs it, obviously. And I think it’s coming regardless of opposition of the players. It’s kind of our fault. We’ve known it’s been an issue and its importance and we don’t seem to clean it up.”
The owners can try to shorten games, stop defensive shifts — whatever measures they choose — but there’s still a sense the sport is a lost cause. Why have they waited so long, allowing fans to grow apathetic? Before the game, actor Denzel Washington took the house microphone to pay tribute to pioneer Jackie Robinson. There can’t be an All-Star Game in Los Angeles without an ode to Robinson, who began to blaze trails while growing up in Pasadena.
“Beyond the field, Jackie Robinson challenged us to be better versions of ourselves,” said Washington, as the number “42” was superimposed in the outfield.
But the ceremony came only minutes after Dodgers star Mookie Betts took batting practice without his National League jersey, wearing a t-shirt with an inscription: “We need more Black people at the stadium.” On the field, of course, only 7.2 percent of major-league rosters are comprised of Blacks this season. In the stands, at many ballparks, the percentage is smaller. Jackie would be heartbroken.
The game proceeded as baseball is accustomed: not much action, except for back-to-back homers by MVP Giancarlo Stanton and Byron Buxton, in a 3-2 victory that stretched the AL’s winning streak to nine. The season’s second half begins Thursday.
America is much more interested in how long Deshaun Watson, the NFL quarterback accused of sexual assault by more than 20 women, will be suspended by the league. And whether an NBA team trades for Kevin Durant or forces him, with his head between his legs, back to Brooklyn. And how college football is allowing conference realignment to create a caste system similar to, well, MLB’s.
As they say at the ballpark, wait till next year.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.