CAN WE JUST LET BASEBALL DIE AND MOVE ON WITH OUR LIVES?
The owners have allowed a labor impasse to spill into wartime, continuing to misread a disgusted public that no longer cares about the sport and has no reason to pay attention during a bleak future
Do they realize how ignorant, ridiculous and inappropriate they look? An autarch has invaded Ukraine — in a mad world where gas is $6 a gallon and disruption is a perpetual possibility — and here we have tiny groups of petty men, huddling hundreds of feet apart, passing offers like notes in junior high school before, ultimately, firing angry salvos inside a ballpark in a wealthy town called Jupiter that might as well be Planet Jupiter.
Wait, I have a splendid idea. While they’re still encamped at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium — such a fittingly wee-sounding cemetery for a sport slip-sliding into a dark, bleak cubbyhole in a nation where it once was The Pastime — why don’t the players and owners just fire purpose pitches at each other? That’s how rancor traditionally is settled in Major League Baseball, a game for little boys in uniform and much smaller minds in the executive suites, and, this time, please do try to bean each other and make it hurt.
The fans would appreciate it. Because the owners and players don’t appreciate the people who support the industry with their money, energy and time, nor do they care about a game that was thriving long before they were born and doomed to fight over a $10.7-billion annual jackpot. Do they know how myopic they look, so insulated from reality with their sport only hours from crashing and burning, when Max Scherzer stands beside a locked fence — the same Max Scherzer who would make $43 million this season, the highest average per-year salary in MLB history, because New York Mets owner Steve Cohen wanted him to have $130 million over three years — and complains to glum, gathered fans as he prepares to lose $232,975 a day while getting into his Porsche.
“Not good. They don’t like what we have to say,’’ said Scherzer, signing what might be his last round of autographs for weeks … or months.
The billionaire owners are the most disgraceful villains, as always. It is their responsibility, as baseball’s custodians, to recognize the existential crisis that could kill the goose as paying customers seek post-pandemic normalcy. This is no time to fight a labor war when revenues are at an all-time high, when the small-market Kansas City Royals sell for $1 billion not long after they were purchased for $96 million, when the Atlanta Braves cry poor and claim they can’t resign franchise icon Freddie Freeman after generating a record $586 million in revenues during their World Series championship run.
They must save baseball from self-sabotage. The owners must realize that young people have tuned out, that too many well-endowed teams are tanking seasons, that games are too long and boring. Rather than fight the MLB Players Association, the old men should be thankful to have any audience at all when America is hooked on the NFL, suitably enthused about the NBA, more interested than ever in global soccer and far more willing to watch college football and basketball than anything with a bat, ball and defensive shifts. Baseball is dying. It is one missed Opening Day from imminent death.
But the owners are more interested in beating the union, which still might be the most potent in the entire American workplace, than they are in saving the sport and preserving what their forerunners built. They really are a bunch of crusty moguls, many self-made and overly proud, who have nothing better to do than play their own Putin-esque games against the players. They aren’t living in our universe. They live to gain even the slightest ground on the MLBPA, as they did in recent labor deals, and it’s safe to say they get more jollies from those gains than winning pennants. Which explains why baseball suffers from competitive shrinkage — too many ballclubs prefer to lose in the long term than win in the short term, a disease that defeats the purpose of every inspirational talk ever delivered to a young athlete.
So, if the owners aren’t interested in providing a life preserver, it’s best that their representatives leave Jupiter without a new collective bargaining agreement, head to Uranus and Pluto and never return. Because they’ll have failed in recognizing the needs of the players — many of whom do receive extraordinary compensation, but only after serving a required quota of service-time years and, in too many cases, while wasting prime seasons in stop-trying towns that take turns in white-flag surrender — when it wouldn’t take much giveback to appease them. Nothing the union wants is an insurmountable issue.
Unless you happen to be a swinging dick such as Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who continues to call behind-the-scenes shots as a hawk at age 86 — as he did aggressively in 1994, when the World Series was canceled and MLB died its first death — while letting commissioner Rob Manfred take hits as the owners’ public piñata. The media who still cover baseball — why would you want to, when eyeballs are on the other sports? — make the mistake of assigning the entirety of ownership blame to Manfred. It’s because they fear angering the actual power-and-money people, knowing the Reinsdorfs of the world might come for their jobs, as I experienced and overcame during my 17 years as a Chicago columnist.
In a bold moment, Los Angeles Dodgers ace Walker Buehler spoke for many when he tweeted, “This isn’t millionaires vs. billionaires. This is workers vs. owners. The value is subjective. We are EXTREMELY lucky to do what we do but the numbers don’t line up. I appreciate the fans getting where we are coming from. Truly."
Then he deleted the tweet. He knew, probably prompted by his agent, that the owners will blacklist him for such a sin. This is how the owners operate, as a mob, like the mafia.
The parties will settle, eventually, because too much money will be lost on both sides if too many regular-season games are lost. But this time, you SHOULD NOT GO BACK. EVER AGAIN. I realize there’s still nothing like a day at the ballpark, as I partake myself, whether it’s a throwback joyride like Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, a mid-century marvel such as Dodger Stadium or a newer sensation like Petco Park. Find something else to do with your life. It’s a large world. Stop embracing a cancer.
As a daily sporting passion, baseball faded in the mid-1990s. The labor impasse allowed the NFL to seize a front-and-center position alongside the Michael Jordan extravaganza. There was just enough juice — figuratively and literally — for Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to revitalize the sport with their phony home-run derby. But between steroids and a relentless run of scandals, including tanking and electronic sign-stealing by the Houston Astros and other teams (that Manfred didn’t choose to similarly punish), baseball assumed a lowly, indifferent place in American culture. Even if the games resume in April or May or later, why would anyone care when apathy is so widespread?
Television ratings never have been worse. Regional networks are a pox. While the NFL dominates talk shows and the NBA controls social media, baseball has only minimal percentages of the analytic-nerd demographic and over-65 crowd. Would anyone even notice if there was a season? The owners don’t get this — and could learn lessons from players in their 20s and 30s — but demands and expectations from the American people shift quickly in the 21st century. They want to be entertained, especially when paying. Consider how the movie business has cratered. In 2010, the Oscars telecast attracted 42 million viewers; by last year, the total was 10.4 million.
And yet, the baseball owners sit in their caves and enjoy the twisted denial of their empty power trips. Sunday, a deputy commissioner named Dan Halem walked four times from offices inside Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium to talk with Scherzer and a group of players in a building behind the right-field wall, where the St. Louis Cardinals normally dress for spring-training workouts and games. Halem’s final visit was at 6:30 p.m.
Given what is so monumentally at stake — the life span of a non-responsive patient about to fall into a coma — they should be meeting around the clock, in the nation’s capital, where Congress should be overseeing them, if not the FBI. But Planet Earth is in wartime, too busy to care about Planet Jupiter. The owners have had years to mend wounds, but they chose to dawdle, in a labor version of a four-hour game, and wait until an anxious time in the world when people crave normalcy and no one is in the mood for follies and b.s.
It’s time for a beanball war. Ready, aim, fire, terminate.
Disengage.
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Jay Mariotti, called “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.