The State of Baseball

To be honest, major league baseball these days has more fans than it deserves – especially fans from my generation.

Think about the major grievances for this era: free agency, skyrocketing costs spread around (all the way down to $5.50 Old Styles), a strike, a cancelled world series, prima donna players, steroids, prima donna players on steroids, and worst of all complete disparity between competitive and uncompetitive teams. Just when we start to like a young player, he leaves for a better contract with a new team that can afford him. On the receiving side of a new player, we find out he’s probably been cheating with chemicals. Worse yet, just when we start to like a team, either we realize they can’t afford to have a chance to win, or we feel guilty because most of their opponents can’t afford to have a chance to win.

If I was just trying to get into baseball at age 24, I can reasonably expect baseball to burn me by the time I’m 27. Either the team will burn me by cutting a financial corner, or a player will burn me to leave for a rival. Or the whole game will burn me through complicity regarding cheating. Or they will work out a television contract that blacks out some of the games I’d love to watch. In the end, they will all make me to feel like a consumer, not an engaging fan with something at stake. They won’t do this all the time, but they don’t have to do it all the time to burn us. Thank goodness I didn’t move to Kansas City – or worse yet, grow up there – because I’m pretty sure being a Royals fan when they’re winning in the fifth inning has to be like rooting for the Riddler in the 1960s Batman episodes.

It’s all pretty screwed up. The whole system is screwed up. So why are we surprised or dismayed when a fan nearly gets into it with Gary Sheffield? Isn’t this the logical conclusion to many of the developments in the last twenty years of major league baseball? Shouldn’t we have seen this coming?

Here’s what I mean: in order to generate revenue, major league baseball has lowered the barrier to entry for fans, and a certain underside of fans is the byproduct. They’ve lowered the barrier to entry by emphasizing the parts of the game that attract casual fans. That’s how they market the game. That’s also the thing about market capitalism: to succeed, you can’t discriminate from whom you take money. At best, you can only try to sell a product in an honorable way, avoiding exploitation.

Major league baseball doesn’t always do this. They exploit us, and we take it because the game – played at its highest level – is a thing of beauty, and we want to be a part of it the way some of us want to be part of anything beautiful. We want it to uplift us, and it can, and it does. But it does this despite itself.

I’m not a purist, someone who thinks that any change to the game is bad. Some are good (television), some are bad (designated hitter), some just change things laterally (night games). Still, overall, I think the league has some serious flaws, and I’m skeptical about whether it’s in their interest to fix them because of the money involved.

Baseball has definitely lowered the barrier to entry for fans, creating a hierarchy of what it even means to be a ‘fan.’ It used to be that you learned the game by playing little league, and coaches made sure even the kids with two left hands and Kleenex wads in their pocket got to play a little bit. Or you learned the game from your father, soaking it in to be with him. Or you learned it from the voices on the radio or television, explaining and analyzing plays for you with a cadence that you couldn’t help paying attention to, because of the exciting play that you anticipate just a second away.

Baseball is not a simple game. It doesn’t have an easy objective like basketball: in basketball, you score by putting the ball in the hoop. It doesn’t have the raw physicality of football, where you hit and are hit, hard, in a blend of toil and grace. Baseball is more cerebral, and engaging it as a certain type of fan requires concentration because there are dozens more levels of nuance than with any other sport. In every other sport, physical talent can defeat mental strategies; in baseball, mental strategies have a lot better chance against physical talent.

Given that nature of the game, it’s no wonder that baseball doesn’t market that side of itself, because people don’t pay for opportunities to expel their own effort – people pay someone else to expel effort. Instead, the league tries to cater to a different sort of fan – a less cerebral type of fan. A fan that gets bored during pitching changes. A fan that’s willing to reach onto the field to get a prize, a foul ball. A fan that gets drunk and likes homeruns and boos and wears visors when they’re in style and throws his empties onto the field if he’s pissed off.

Listen, I like to get drunk. I boo on extremely rare occasions, but I don’t care if you do. I like homeruns, though I prefer pitchers duels. (A great homerun takes five seconds; a great pitcher’s duel takes two and a half hours.) More than all of that, I like the game, I like the strategy and tactics involved, and I usually only get bored during double-digit blowouts. It’s just that I’m afraid that I’m in the minority. I don’t even care if someone else is a fair weather fan or a drunken thrill-seeker. That’s their prerogative. I also realize that there’s plenty of shades of grey in all of the different types of fans there are. I just wish sometimes that baseball didn’t make it easier on the casual fans, compounded by the fact that we all feel entitled to something when we’re paying so much to help other people get extremely wealthy.

So here’s the question: If somebody realizes that there’s a lot more potential fans that like celebrity players and thrills than fans that like the game at its most boring, and moreover that their money is as good as mine, why not try to shape the game to attract them? Why not look the other way when players discover chemicals that help them stretch fly-outs into homeruns? Why not try to shorten the time between innings, to keep attention from wandering? I wish I had a better answer.

In Chicago, on the north side, we can see the result in the neighborhood. Wrigley Field became a place to party, and it was marketed as a place to party, and with that the neighborhood changed. It went from a blue-collar workingman’s neighborhood to a stopover for twenty-something fraternity and sorority graduates. It used to be degenerates pissing in the alleys; now it’s young guys with business degrees pissing in alleys. In the last 10 years, it changed from an area with extremely affordable housing to a high rent area, with Wrigley Field anchoring it as a casual attraction. In many ways, the neighborhood feels touristy. It feels marketed.

On a league-wide scale, everyone is complicit in this: the league, the owners, and the players, everyone who stands to make money from the game. I just wish there was a way that they could demonstrate that they care whose money they take. (Or maybe I don’t wish that, in case it’s not mine.)

Regardless, it’s still a brilliant game. Really, I’m not cynical. Despite all the machinations, I can forget them and get caught in the moment time after time, game after game, pitch after pitch. Cathedrals still feel holy and filled with some sort of good spirit even if the church is corrupt, and baseball stadiums do too. We just shouldn’t be surprised when something happens like the Sheffield incident. That’s just a byproduct of the game as its marketed these days. They want everyone’s money, and everyone includes, well, everyone. That’s not cynicism, that’s just common sense. We’re lucky that sometimes they still try to balance the business side with the baseball side. We’re lucky that sometimes they still want to win baseball games.

We’re lucky that sometimes baseball is worth it.