To: The Lords of Baseball
Re: Your latest lunacy
Gentlemen–I use the term loosely–you are in serious trouble.
My brother has been a baseball fan since Sandy Amoros robbed Yogi in Game 7 of the 1955 World Series. He can recite at will the starting lineup of the 1957 New York Yankees. He can tell you more about Mickey Mantle’s numbers than could the late Mick himself. Since moving to L.A. in the ’70s, he’d been a regular at Dodger Stadium.
And: Since the strike of 1994, he has not been to a single game. Not one. On principle. I learned this to my great amazement when I took him to Camden Yards last week. He mulled, then decided it was all right to go, but only because I was paying. He refuses to give you guys a penny ever again.
Gentlemen, my brother is your lost fan. He is the reason that baseball attendance is off 10 percent since 1993; the reason this year’s All-Star Game got the lowest TV ratings ever; the reason the June 21 Fox game-of-the-week drew a smaller audience than the Women’s NBA. As we’d have said when the Mick was in his prime: You lost to girls!
Your problem, moguls, is very simple. Baseball is a boring game to watch, excruciatingly so on TV. It will not be watched by the casual fan, the way spectacles like football and basketball are. It will be watched only by people who care about the game.
The reason the 1994 strike was so devastating is that it showed that the players and owners care less about having a World Series than the fans do. That made the fans feel not just betrayed but stupid.
Hence the fan revolt. And what are you doing to win them back? The latest idea of genius circulating in your ranks is to reshuffle the very structure of baseball. One proposal backed by acting Commissioner Bud Selig and gaining momentum among the owners is to abolish the American and National leagues altogether and set up entirely new divisions with the teams grouped regionally.
It is the worst idea in the history of baseball, and baseball has had some very bad ideas (like playing the most pastoral of games on carpet).
Baseball will never become a more interesting TV spectacle. Yes, you could speed it up a bit, plant mikes on the umps and cameras on the catcher’s helmet. It will not avail you much. Baseball is a trying game. The pauses are long and the ball is small. On the late-night highlight reel, the winning homer consists of the swing of a bat and fans looking skyward for a dot.
So what do you have? You have one thing that no other sport–and few endeavors of any kind–in America has: an extraordinarily rich history. It is that history that gives drama to the otherwise mundane. When the San Diego Padres’ Tony Gwynn goes to bat in September, he will, as always, be waiting for the pitcher to scratch himself, kick the rubber and play with the rosin bag. But millions–still–will tune in. Why? Because it will mean something. Gwynn is close to hitting .400, and no one has hit .400 since 1941.
Pro basketball cannot even talk about 1941. Pro football was a joke in 1941. The one thing baseball has over its competitors is a history that infuses every workaday act with significance. And a crucial element of that history is the American and National leagues, with their different styles of play, their separate sets of records, their rival rosters of heroes.
Or to put it in terms more familiar to amnesic fat cats: the National and American leagues are priceless brand names built up over a hundred years. Even the biggest corporate dummkopf knows that brand names with as much recognition as McDonald’s and as much history as Coca-Cola are irreplaceable. And you want to junk yours for no reason at all.
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There is nothing wrong with the way the teams are aligned in the major leagues. They were aligned the old-fashioned way–American and National leagues with two divisions of seven clubs each–in 1993, the year of record crowds.
What baseball needs is serious revenue sharing to keep small-market teams like Kansas City and Minnesota that every year deal away their best players (because they cannot keep up with the salaries) from becoming the permanent underclass of baseball, Triple-A clubs in major-league drag.
Of course, asking the barons of baseball to do something so sensible is asking too much. One can, however, ask something more modest: Don’t commit suicide. After all, it may be a boring game, but some of us still love it.