Posted on 06/17/2020 8:04:52 AM PDT by Kaslin
Short-sighted negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and players are sabotaging the chance for a renaissance that the game desperately needs.
Each passing day without Major League Baseball stands as a stain on America’s national pastime and represents a sad failure to capitalize on a golden opportunity for the game and the country. Today, we should be distracted from our work, glued to our televisions, computers, or smartphones watching otherwise meaningless spring training games with greater interest than ever before, in anticipation of the return to normalcy of the daily drama of baseball.
At a minimum, our ailing nation could use the entertainment of skills competitions, or a reprised “home run derby” series. Baseball in any form, that most cherished spring-fall companion, would provide a needed respite from the mundane of the everyday grind that has only been accentuated by the effects of the Chinese coronavirus.
Instead, MLB’s folly is coming into clear view as June comes and goes. Players, owners, and the league remain unable to come to terms on an agreement to play ball while engaging in an ugly, short-sighted, and ultimately damaging public confrontation.
Historically, if you are a fan of virtually any team save for the New York Yankees or St. Louis Cardinals — and especially like me if you stay true to the New York Mets orange and blue — June marks the transition of a once-promising season to a long, hot summer of pain, suffering, and humiliation.
For this Mets fan, my mid-month birthday stands as a milestone of franchise futility — a reminder that it has been more than three decades since a summer in which a world championship club graced the meadows of Flushing, the remarkable exploits of which I never got to witness. Yet even if you are as jaded and tormented a fan as I am, I suspect you, like me, would give anything right now to once again have your hopes dashed, and heartbroken.
This year, even the most spoiled of fans, blessed with allegiances to the winningest of franchises, face agony. Through natural disasters, civil strife, economic calamity, and world wars, baseball has always marched on as a joyous diversion. No matter what was happening in your life or the world, you could always count on an unscripted three hours each night that would guarantee you something you had never seen before — one installment of 162, comprising the glorious narrative arc that is a Major League Baseball season.
Today, baseball stands still. It’s worse than no joy in Mudville. There’s no Mudville at all.
With each passing week, the prospects of anything resembling a season fades. At this point, even the best we could hope for is a rump schedule. The American pastime is blowing a golden opportunity to stand as the only game in town, in the process bringing a semblance of normalcy back to the nation, and positioning itself for a renaissance.
For years, even as revenues have risen, many have feared, with good reason, that baseball was dying. “The game is too long,” they say, and people’s attention spans “too short.” Some argue advanced analytics have not only generated infinite pitching changes — which, in turn, lead to drawn-out games — but replaced the humanity of the sport with something more automated and artificial. This is to say nothing of the scandals, including the one poised to loom over this season.
But for all of the game’s problems, some real and some perceived, at a time the country craves sports, that baseball could have led the nationwide restart should have been too enticing a chance to pass up. Baseball has a unique opportunity to reward loyal fans and create scores of new ones; to showcase its richness, history, and electrifying talent; to unite our beleaguered states over something that transcends our differences. We should have been preparing to celebrate July 4 with Opening Day.
Instead, what we are seeing in the acrimonious back-and-forth between the players, the owners, and MLB in the early stages of a long-term labor dispute. Make no mistake, the current baseball standstill persists because it represents the opening round of negotiations concerning the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that governs the game, slated to expire after the 2021 season.
The gist of the dispute comes down to this: Given a truncated schedule, played in front of fewer fans than ever before, and thus where revenues and profits are going to absolutely crater, how should players and owners split the pot of substantially reduced money? There is more to it than this, of course, as there were many areas of disagreement between players and owners that had been bubbling to the surface in recent years. The current standstill represents a crescendo to the conflict that’s been a long time coming.
All sides should realize the potential benefits gained for everyone involved by coming to some form of ceasefire far outweigh the costs of butchering this season. Instead, the billionaire owners, super agents, high-flying lawyers, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicists who run the game are imprudently throwing away — among other things — untold future billions of dollars by forestalling or even postponing this season.
Baseball could be growing goodwill that would accrue to the benefit of everyone involved in it by playing today. Millions of people could be being introduced to the elation of walk-off home runs, the curiosities of lineup construction and bullpen management, and the high drama of pennant races. There has long been talk of the fact that the game has not done enough to promote its stars, yet there is infinite young, exceptional talent sitting idle, all of whom could be getting unprecedented national attention.
Although purists like myself would abjure any of the numerous tweaks to the game that have been bandied about, we would have been content to see them tried, only to crash and burn in a shortened season.
Instead, baseball is tottering when it has every chance to thrive and squandering a rare chance to reinvigorate the game. It’s a shame for the sport, and more importantly for the country. And for those long-suffering fans awaiting a championship, like the Brooklyn Dodgers faithful of yesteryear would say, this may well be the cruelest “Wait ‘til next year!”
The good news is that baseball can come and go, but God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
We had a great run.
I am not a conspiracy theorist BUT I would play on on TV if offered the role...<: <:
I also ‘gave up’ on pro sports after the strike(s) etc but got interested in baseball when Washington got a team back.
Interesting to note that in the strike shortened season Montreal Expos were on the way to winning the brass ring when a strike/lockout ended the season.
Last year Washington Nationals won the World Series for Washington, the first time in 95 years for Washington and the first for the franchise.
Montreal became Washington and both of the championships resulted or the result of screwed up management/player relationships
Conspiracy or just WTF????
Nice going MLB. All of the other sports have become woke. Baseball hasn’t started up yet and had the opportunity to the only sport that was free of politics. Imagine the money they could have made.
Long term, they are disappointing young boy fans who will not come back. They are pissing away their future.
Rollerball.
MLB is dead.
Without having somebody at the top in charge, as the example of not being able to hand out player discipline to prevent a wealthy player with unlimited resources from employing spotters and wearIng wires results in anarchy to where the most corrupt win. People would eventually not want to watch , and not because they are not allowed to go to the stadiums or be infected with a virus gas, or because games are too long for tic tock attention spans, but because nobody wants to watch rigged games.
Baseball itself has always been a refection of American life, rigging the system, greed and corruption of prideful people resulting in the loss of law and order could easily describe why our nation has shut down and not just baseball.
Anyone that doesn't show up gets replaced by minor league players if necessary.
Start the minor league season immediately so you have a pool of replacements available. Sell 600 tickets or whatever the local community deems safe. I say 600 is a minimum because that was the average size crowd gathering at our local Wal-Mart during the peak of the pandemic.
“then it forever carries a black mark in the eyes of fans because none of the statistical achievements really mean anything in a historical context.”
Roger Maris breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record in a 162 game versus 154 game season.
They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.
“Of course, we won’t mind if you look around,” you’ll say. “It’s only twenty dollars per person.” They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it. For it is money they have and peace they lack.
And they’ll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as if they’d dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.
People will come, Ray.
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.
America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.
This field, this game — it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.
Ohhhhhhhh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come...”
Last time I took a break from baseball over strikes and steroids it was for many years. This might be forever.
Rob Manfred is just another elitist East Coast ahole lawyer.
To all those who used to bitch about Bud, his time as MLB Commissioner is looking better and better every day.
The Golden Goose commits suicide...
Self-inflicted fatal wounds, a little bit like this country we are living in.
“As an old friend told me, professional sports is like professional sex. There is no love involved, and it is all about the money.”
Wow, that’s good. I’ll remember that one!
While reasonable and logical, your proscription would result in a grievance filed by the players association that would be ruled on by an arbitrator and could result in the arbitrator enforcing the player contracts in full. That would cost the owners $Billions for nothing. They are better off not risking that and just use the limitations on gatherings above a certain size enacted by blue state governors to just cancel the season. That reduces their losses and more importantly reduces the potential of massive losses from an arbitration ruling going against them.
‘...a reminder that it has been more than three decades since a summer in which a world championship club graced the meadows of Flushing, the remarkable exploits of which I never got to witness.’
cry me a river; I remember the 1962 Metslike they played just yesterday...as a north Jersey Yankee hater, I lived and breathed for the Amazin’s, as they called them, and celebrations were far and few between...
the names, they’re are like ghosts from some netherworld; Charlie Neal, Felix Mantilla, Joe Christopher, Choo Choo Coleman, a pair of pitchers named Bob Miller...
The media and the politicians wouldn’t have countenanced the playing of baseball. It would have detracted from their focus of scaring the cr@p out of everybody with their daily droning afternoon news conferences.
That monologue was running through my mind as I read the article. I’m thinking that it wasn’t so long ago that “Field of Dreams” and “Bull Durham” were romanticizing baseball — not just MLB. Now I couldn’t give a d@mn. Baseball will survive our indifference and be re-discovered by our descendants. But for the immediate future I expect MLB will have to live on a much reduced allowance.
Orioles owner Pete Angelo’s taught me my lesson and cured me of my fanship.
Bring minor league baseball back...screw the Majors...too bad there isn’t a farm system for the NFL and NBA...
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