During my second stint living in Buffalo, some of my very few moments of peace and serenity were spent at Genesee Country Village and Museum. My folks and I loved talking with the fully dressed “villagers” all decked out in their 1800s regalia, visiting the various old-time houses, and sitting in Silver Base Ball Park (base and ball being two words there is not a typo) to watch the baseball games being played with old pasteural rules and mannerisms. Now, those baseball games were REAL baseball games – full nine innings, full-sized diamond, and there’s apparently a proper league of people who do it for fun. And that was the amazing thing about those ballgames: They were fast, exciting, and competitive, even though the players were doing it for no other reason than the pure joy of baseball. They played hard and had fun no matter how many people were gathered in the park to see the game. As for the sport itself, it was the very same as it is today, yet very different. As the players frequently explained to the spectators, rules were tweaked more than they were changed. The old time leaguers weren’t allowed to slide. Nobody wore gloves, and the pitcher’s job was to get the ball into a position so the batter could hit it and get it into play.
This past Monday, the Seattle Mariners played against the Oakland Athletics in a doubleheader. Seeing as how the air in Seattle isn’t fit to be breathed by anyone – let alone a professional athlete who does a lot of heavy breathing – those two games shouldn’t have been allowed to take place at all. But MLB having turned into what it is these days, all they did was add another notch to a sad, terrible, and unwatchable season. The fact that MLB is letting teams play while breathing what amounts to little more than modified carbon monoxide digs at a truth about “America’s Pastime” that was unthinkable just a decade ago: Baseball is in deep shit. Not that you’ll hear the old boys ever admit such a thing. Most of the people who still write about it for a living are writing off baseball’s current identity crisis as just another in a long line of echos about how baseball is dead. Hell, just 10 years ago, I was writing it off myself. But a lot can change in sports in a decade. Bob Selig retired as commissioner and was replaced by Rob Manfred. I’ve fallen from a diehard to a casual fan. And I’m starting to come around to the idea that baseball is, at the very least, on life support.
It’s customary at this point for boomers and Xers who grew up watching and loving the sport to make their regular arguments: “Baseball is making more money than ever! Baseball games have the largest crowds on average!” First of all, I’m getting sick of hearing those. They’re not arguments anymore; they’re excuses. Those arguments are the “The economy is doing great!” of sports arguments: They don’t matter to anyone except the head brass that’s making the money and the devout. But I DO have something to clarify: When I talk about the death of baseball, I’m NOT talking about the end of the sport on any level. Baseball has been too relevant to the American cultural landscape to ever die such a full death. What I mean – what most people in general really mean – about baseball dying is the sport’s death as a coffee pot cultural entity. Yes, people go to games. Yes, they tune in. But the question here is, to what degree? Are the fans who are tuning it doing it to enjoy the thrill of a pitcher and batter engaging in psychological warfare? Do they appreciate the whip-fast, reflexive athleticism of infielders leaping three feet to catch line drives? Or are they tuning in by force of habit for background noise and going to games for picnics? Those are the things money and viewership don’t tell you.
When I was a little kid back in the 80s, baseball was as ubiquitous as football. By contrast, basketball was still creating a name for itself and hockey was still strictly a phenomenon for Canadians and Northeasterners. Baseball had star power – Ozzie Smith, Darryl Strawberry, Don Mattingly, Roger Clemens, and Ken Griffey Jr. were bona fide A-list superstars. EVERYBODY knew who they were. Hell, right through the 90s, we had Alex Rodriguez, Frank Thomas, Barry Bonds, and Derek Jeter. In the millennium, Ichiro Suzuki and, briefly, Jason Giambi were the guys. I think the last of those stars to retire was A-Rod, and baseball hasn’t had such a star since. Fans in the know can tell you the best player in MLB right now is Mike Trout of the Angels. Trout’s stardom, though, is not transcendent. It lives and dies during baseball season in Los Angeles. If you took a walk on the street and asked any non-fan who the most famous baseball player is, I’m not sure anyone would be able to answer with a current player. You might get Barry Bonds, who was forced out of the sport in 2007 when the Giants decided they were sick of him. You might get Jeter, who retired in 2014. You might get A-Rod, who was forced out on some sort of “tentative suspension” in 2017 and never returned. The odd celebrity follower might know Justin Verlander, but only by virtue of his marriage to Kate Upton. Maybe you could argue that Bryce Harper fits the bill here, but he’s currently getting dragged for a $400 million contract albatross he accepted from the Phillies only to learn – in the exact season he switched teams – that his old team, the Washington Nationals, was quite capable of winning a World Series without him.
It also doesn’t help that the current commissioner seems to hate baseball. Now, if you were a reader of Lit Bases, the baseball book blog I once wrote, you already know I’m hardly a fan of the baseball-is-perfect line of thought. To his credit, Rob Manfred has addressed an issue which caused me to fall off – the length of the games. But his solutions have been hit or miss. The timer? Well, that worked for about a month. An intentional walk being granted with a single signal rather than make the pitcher draw it out? It will save a little bit of wear on the pitcher’s arm, but only about 30 seconds for something that may not actually happen in the game at all. Every pitcher has to face at least three batters before a change? Okay, now THAT is a rule! It adds both speed and strategic dimension. But on the other hand, Manfred managed to alienate the minor leagues, which are home to some of the most fun and wallet-friendly teams there are. He also seems hell-bent on ruining the playoffs. The Wild Card Game is a nice thought, but baseball being the marathon that it is, it would only work as a proper series because it sucks to fight to get so far only to have a game that could be unlucky; not even BAD, just unlucky. If Manfred wanted to extend the playoffs, at this point he would have to cut the regular season, and god forbid teams should be robbed of 10 games of regular season dollars.
Whenever a big event in baseball does seem to hit the news outside of the sport, it always seems to be something stupid. Here’s my fuck-respect-for-the-game gene kicking in again. But my GOD, the players who raise fusses over this phantom idea of respect are the snowflakest of the snowflakes. They also make up all this bullshit as they go along. There was another one of these “disrespect” incidents last month. I can’t remember who the teams or players were. But during an at-bat with the bases loaded and his team up by a comfortable margin, a certain batter had worked his way to a full count. The pitcher’s next move was to just casually toss a nice, meaty fastball right up the gut. The batter, of course, took a nice power swing and hit a grand slam. Someone on the pitcher’s team issued, moaned, and whined about “respect” after the game. Apparently, in a sport in which players receive truckloads of money for putting up individual statistics and jobs are ALWAYS on the line, the proper procedure was for the batter to take the fucking strike and sit his ass back down! If you don’t think that sounds like the dumbest shit of an “unwritten rule” there is, you might be a baseball fan. 15 years I’ve devoutly followed the sport, reading about it every chance I could get, and that’s the first time I heard that batters are supposed to allow themselves to be struck out in blowouts to spare the pitcher’s feelings. Did that come along before or after the rule where pitchers get to lob baseballs at batters’ heads if they “celebrate” after hitting a home run? And the rule against flipping bats?
The biggest issue here, for everything else, may be basic visibility. Back when I started getting into baseball around 2000 or so, I lived in Buffalo, which doesn’t have an MLB team. But tuning into games was no problem because a pair of local affiliates picked up games every Saturday, like clockwork. WB (what’s now The CW) snapped up the rights to the Cleveland Indians and New York Mets. Fox would usually show a game that it thought would have regional appeal in Buffalo, which meant we saw the Yankees 80 percent of the time. Every playoff game was aired on broadcast television, and I have some memories of watching playoff baseball games back to back. As for not seeing the playoffs? That was unthinkable. THEN the playoffs moved strictly to ESPN. Afterward, the World Series itself went with it. The playoffs before the World Series basically disappeared. When the Cubs were on the warpath in 2016, I was stuck tuning into most of the entire trip on my shortwave radio.
MLB stands to be stripped of more of some of its airtime by the emerging presence of a new league: Major League Soccer. Yes, it may be too early to call MLS a major league, but in terms of cultural relevance – at least in certain parts of the country – it managed to reach just about the same spot on the way up that baseball is in. No, MLS doesn’t yet have an A-list superstar or a national championship which creates coffee pot narratives, but, well, neither does baseball these days. MLS is at the level where champion teams get parades and celebrations that interrupt the workday, though. Witness the last two Women’s World Cup Champions getting ticker taped in New York City’s Canyon of Heroes. Or Sporting Kansas City, the Portland Timbers, or Seattle Sounders FC. MLS teams are also playing in major stadiums or stadiums of their own to sellout crowds. More people are discovering America’s oddball, homegrown soccer league and embracing it. Now, even when MLS breaks the glass ceiling of summer sports, it’s a stretch to say it will cut into MLB’s audience. MLS doesn’t play nearly as many games. But if you’re a casual fan who can only go to one or the other, and you’re looking to see a fast, exciting sport being played by athletes playing at their very peak level, you’re going to the MLS game. Baseball has a 162-game regular season that even the players themselves get bored of. So the breakthrough of MLS into the cultural zeitgeist is only a matter of time.
In any case, there seems to be one constant common in a lot of the things I said: Baseball seems to be stuck in its past and its reputation. The way the sport is changing for the worse comes from the romanticisation of it, by both the fans and the people directly involved. The fans continue to believe there aren’t any adjustments necessary to baseball, while the unwritten rules and mores players and managers are enamored with seem to prevent positive changes. In the process, baseball has become stagnant and static, and casual sports fans of every age, race, gender, political leaning, and everything else have taken notice. The idea of trying to grandfather children into baseball fandom seems to be the thing baseball is leaning on now, but it’s reasonable to question how long MLB can keep relying on nostalgia to create new fans. The average age of baseball fans is over 50, and both the sport and its fans are starting to look like the pre-Jackie Robinson era. Baseball doesn’t seem hell-bent on reaching out and trying to welcome curious onlookers into the fold.
Once upon a time, I could name most of the batting orders for three different teams. I follow the White Sox and the Mariners now, but I can name only a handful of people on the White Sox. As for the Mariners, even though I’ve been living in Seattle for nearly five years now, I couldn’t even tell you who their manager is. Baseball has to come to terms with the fact that it seems to be undergoing an identity crisis, because otherwise there is every reason to expect that it will one day join horse racing and boxing as a second tier niche sport.
The Windy Nickel 