The Decline and Fall of Baseball

[Baseball Guru]

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The national pastime's obsession with economic woes is a coverup. Its real problem is irrelevance.

By Charles P. Pierce, Globe Staff, 6/23/2002


It was 1916, and he should have had more important things on his mind. The British had been slaughtered at Gallipoli. The Germans were being slaughtered off Jutland. And everybody was being slaughtered around Verdun. The Federation of Catholic Societies proclaimed that America was imperiled by easy divorce and dirty theatricals. Yet, writing in Harper's Weekly, a fellow named Louis Graves discovered a deeper and more insidious threat to the bedrock values of the Republic. He discovered baseball.

"Having acquired a national flag and a national anthem," Graves wrote, "these United States of America decided some 40 years ago that they needed a national game. Up to that time, sport of an individual character had sufficed; but now [they] could no longer meet the demands of a society that was rapidly becoming effete and citified and whose tastes were becoming communistic. . . . I have found that a great number of citizens extol [baseball] as a patriotic duty - like rising for `The Star-Spangled Banner.' "

Poor Graves. As author Douglass Wallop correctly points out, even then, even with Woodrow Wilson still both president and ambulatory, Graves already was howling at the moon. Walt Whitman, to name one, had trumped him, yawping away about how baseball embodied the robust new national character that was brawny, complete in its 48 contiguous states, and full-blooded. Even more securely than it attached itself to America, baseball enveloped itself in the mystique of the dawning American century. It caught the exact moment in which the United States of America became a singular descriptive, and it brought everything that had come before into that moment, when bucolic agrarian republic bled into industrial democracy, and the old money danced warily with immigrant labor.

Baseball was drunk on that moment, and look at it now, with the American Century a pile of dead-weight books on the coffee table. This is what baseball now says about itself: that it lost nearly a quarter-billion dollars in 2001; that anywhere from a quarter to a third of its franchises are complete wastes of time; and that it has adapted itself to new technologies as easily as a frog learns to play the clarinet. Look at me, says baseball, sickly and feeble. It wanders around in its pajamas and a three-day-old stubble, superannuated and panhandling quarters. The culture has left it behind, and it stands there, baseball does, befuddled, heedless of traffic swirling around it, unable to cross the road. Its time has passed. It can't keep up. It hates itself as it wanders, lost, bellowing at spectral enemies.

All of baseball's current problems involve a world that has changed three or four times while baseball wasn't looking. Meanwhile, the fan base gets grayer, and the pace of the game seems less and less suited to a joystick world. The average baseball fan is a white male who is 38 years old. Sixty-seven percent of American teenagers count themselves as baseball fans, which may sound respectable but pales next to the 82 percent who identify themselves as fans of professional basketball. One Internet company even has offered to condense a baseball game down to a 20-minute video package, squeezing the sport into the dwindling cultural attention span by draining it of its essential, meandering charm.

Maybe it would have been better off never having been the national pastime. It's a lot of weight to carry, to be the national pastime of a country that produces pastimes the way that New Zealand produces sheep. Without that burden, maybe every tiny battle wouldn't sound so apocalyptic. Maybe its public rhetoric wouldn't veer so easily toward catastrophism. Maybe every incline would look less like a cliff.

After all, things are not all that bad. The Boston Red Sox - obsolescent ballpark and all - were worth $700 million to the people who bought them last winter. Even the basket-case Montreal Expos sold for $219 million in 1999, eight years after someone had paid only $86 million for them. Baseball's national television ratings are down from what they once were, but not disproportionately compared with the other major sports. (In 1998, for example, one survey showed that the ratings for all professional sports nose-dived between 20 percent and 30 percent, except for those of NASCAR.) Since 1970, attendance at baseball games has risen 153 percent, and in 1999, baseball outdrew the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League combined.

In April, Forbes magazine published a series in which it claimed that Major League Baseball had made $75 million last year. Of course, the commissioner of baseball responded to this particular outburst of optimism - with which he had a difference of opinion of a mere $307 million - by dismissing the reporting of the staid old financial publication, comparing it to a "supermarket tabloid."

Baseball, then, reflexively takes upon itself the gloomy mien of those dreary end-of-history types who sucked all the fun out of the end of the Cold War. It can't simply be all about money and spin and labor and management. It's deeper than that - a fundamental insecurity about where baseball is now in the culture, played out in public by the people who are supposed to love the game the most, and not dissimilar to the insecurity that popped up in some American politicians when the Wall finally fell and bluejeans turned out to matter more to the communists than Marx did. Baseball's self-image has been knocked awry. Its definition of itself is garbled and incoherent. ``More problematic than the self-image problem,'' says Rob Ruck, a social historian at the University of Pittsburgh, ``is the collectively self-destructive behavior.'' Baseball is a national pastime that, by degrees and inexorably, lost its nation.

[Baseball Guru]

Baseball is never prepared. That's the one ineluctable fact of its history. Its status, nurtured in a simpler age before mass communications and labor unions, insulated it from the changes in the culture around it. Baseball, smug and oblivious, never saw anything coming, no matter how large and noisy it was. The huge evolutionary changes in the country and its culture left baseball behind, and it often seemed as though the ballpark was the last place anyone noticed.

Of course, baseball did not develop this exalted sense of its own importance by itself. It wasn't even developed completely by the heavily filigreed bunkum of its various chroniclers. (Wallop captures a particularly garish specimen when he quotes one newspaperman's febrile 1909 account of a line-drive out to the third baseman. It takes three paragraphs.) In 1922, the Supreme Court exempted professional baseball from the nation's antitrust laws on the grounds that baseball was a sport, not a trade. Writing for the court was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once played amateur baseball and who had had better days on the Supreme Court, truth be told.

The antitrust exemption gave explicit sanction to the way baseball conducted its business. It created within baseball a penumbral exceptionalism that enfolded everything that baseball did, and within which, baseball grew fat and smug.

Moreover, it gave implicit sanction to baseball's position as the national sport, inculcating a sense of entitlement that blinded the sport to the necessity - and, thus, the inevitability - of any kind of change. It created within baseball a perilous tendency toward short-term thinking. Whatever its merits as law and as economics, and it has been upheld twice since it was handed down, the ruling worked within the game's history as a dangerous opiate. It has caused baseball to veer wildly between lordly entitlement and sudden existential panic.

For decades, there were people who told baseball that its deliberate racial segregation was both morally repugnant and competitively stupid. Baseball ignored them and found itself after the arrival of Jackie Robinson having alienated four generations of African-Americans, most of whom had noticed that professional football and basketball desegregated themselves much more quickly. Baseball never really caught up. In the 1940s, there were people who told baseball that the reserve system - by which a player was bound in perpetuity to one team through the abuse of a revolving one-year ``reserve clause'' in the standard player contract - was bound to end in chaos. Smug in the exceptionalism provided by the Supreme Court decision, baseball ignored them, too. In 1974, then, after vainly suggesting that baseball negotiate a modification of the reserve system with its players, an arbitrator named Peter Seitz ruled that the one-year reserve clause indeed meant only one year, thereby blowing up the system so precipitously that baseball is still dodging the fallout.

Technology perennially caught it flat-footed. As late as 1932, all three New York baseball teams banned local radio coverage of their games, fearing that the broadcasts would cut into the live gate. By 1960, 87 percent of American households owned a television set. Baseball approached television as leisurely as it did anything else, its sense of entitlement preceding it, and a man named Pete Rozelle stole the country away simply because he could look farther into the future than baseball ever did.

Rozelle saw how perfectly television suited his National Football League, and he conjured up limitless vistas of profit if he could fit the economics of his game to the medium as well as the game itself did. As football commissioner, he knew he had to sell his sport in an increasingly competitive entertainment culture. He took nothing for granted. So Rozelle knuckled his owners into sharing almost all of their television revenues with one another, perhaps the most successful socialist enterprise in history. In devising this policy, Rozelle anticipated not only the rise in broadcast revenues but also the appearance of new revenue streams, most of which also would be shared.

Beyond economics, however, the primary venue for spectator sports was moving from the stadium grandstands to the living-room sofa, and Rozelle followed it there, adapting and tailoring his game to the demands of television, letting it be shaped as the nation changed. Football on the Lord's Day? Of course. Football on Monday night, in prime time? Why not? Over the next 40 years, the NFL replaced baseball as the national pastime, and it did so primarily on television, which changed the nation itself. The NFL allowed itself to become a television series.

Meanwhile, baseball clung to its past the way a dowager clings to the family furs, refusing to acknowledge that it needed to compete as an entertainment entity in the modern era. It wasted time in a series of bloody and protracted labor disputes aimed at regaining the control over its labor pool. Most damaging was the ill-conceived strategy of collusion on which baseball embarked in the mid-1980s. Teams simply refused to bid on free-agent players, undermining a collective bargaining agreement that they had signed and lying about it publicly. It was a sham, and everybody knew it, and an arbitrator eventually fined baseball management $280 million. Baseball now had a management side exposed as (at best) duplicitous and a labor side with no earthly reason ever to trust it again.

And that's pretty much where things are today, with the All-Star Game coming up on July 9 and the Players Association talking about a strike date in August. The two sides are going to the mat over increased revenue sharing and a salary cap, beating each other bloody over a system that the NFL adopted more than four decades ago, but from which baseball failed to learn, instead wasting three decades trying to revive the old reserve system de facto where it once existed de jure. Once again, baseball's failure to plan for the long term - rooted in a traditional sense of its own exceptionalism - left it unprepared to profit from new revenue sources flowing from new technology. A battle over 21st-century finance breaks out on a rhetorical battlefield left over from about 1959. Nothing's left for the management side except to try to bust a union that's had every reason to build up an impenetrable carapace of mistrust.

``They've gotten themselves in a kind of perpetual situation of surviving the next day,'' says Andrew Zimbalist, an author, Smith College economist, and a longtime student of the business of baseball. ``In terms of economics, they have anomalies. In terms of history and politics, baseball has a deeper problem. It's a crisis of governance, not a crisis of cash flow.''

It's also a crisis of perspective. So all the rhetoric is apocalyptic again, as if baseball's economic anomalies threaten the very existence of the sport, and as if the existence of the sport is somehow tied into the survival of the nation, and asif shouting from the housetops about its problems is the only way that baseball can recapture the eminence to which it long felt itself entitled.

``Baseball,'' former owner Bill Veeck warned nearly 40 years ago, ``has sold itself as a civic monument for so long that it has come to believe its own propaganda.''

[Baseball Guru]

The decline (and fall) of baseball | Continued


I am a person who believes in the fallacy of humans.
— George W. Bush, former owner, Texas Rangers

In the beginning, Allan ``Bud'' Selig was just a jovial car salesman who'd bought a baseball team. He would wander through the press box in old County Stadium in Milwaukee, chaffing the local columnists about their unseemly devotion to the Green Bay Packers. And the Brewers owner brought himself all the way to the office of baseball commissioner and to a moment last December, when Selig appeared before the Judiciary Committee of the US House. Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, asked him a question that nobody likes to hear in any formal proceeding, and she asked it three times: ``Are you aware, sir, that you're under oath?''

Selig was testifying about his stated plan to eliminate two Major League teams in response to what he maintains is a looming fiscal catastrophe, while the committee wanted to talk about the antitrust exemption. The commissioner claimed, once again, that the 30 baseball owners lost a combined $232 million last year. Asked for specifics, Selig hedged. The committee members looked at him as if he were a space alien. ``He completely stupefied people,'' recalls one committee staffer.

It has not been a good year for the commissioner. Selig bombed in front of Congress. His contraction plan is in the hands of an arbitrator. Talks with the Players Association on a new Basic Agreement have stalled. Outside observers from Bruce Lindsey, the head of the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council, to populist rabble-rouser Jim Hightower, to the capitalist tools at Forbes have called Selig out as a purveyor of barefaced non-facts. Last November, his performance veered into comic opera. Asked about a possible conflict of interest he might have with Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad over their adjacent television markets, Selig told Don Walker of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: ``St. Louis is closer to Minneapolis than Milwaukee is,'' a preposterous assertion easily debunked by any 8-year-old with a map. In general, his public credibility is right about where Maxine Waters left it last winter.

However, the articles of Selig's professed faith in baseball are the articles of baseball's professed faith in itself. He believes that baseball's problems are all economic and that they are all dire, but that once those are solved, the health of baseball itself is boundless. ``I don't think we're knocking the product,'' he maintains. ``We have so much going for us that, once we get these things solved, there should be no end time to our renaissance.'' The problem, of course, is that Selig casts the economics of the game in such catastrophic terms that it's fair to wonder how much faith he really has in baseball's ultimate ability to reestablish itself in the culture.

Let us assume, for the moment, that baseball's labor history is in any way normal. Usually, management calls labor a bunch of featherbedding layabouts and labor calls management a pack of bloodsucking plutocrats. However, both sides usually go out of their way to reassure the rest of us that the cars still run and the widgets still work. Even in the immediate aftermath of the bloody Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania, one anonymous steelworker, writing in 1894, still was able to return to the mills and marvel at what went on therein. ``Proofs of skill and inventive genius are displayed on every hand,'' he wrote.

Consider, by contrast, Selig's testimony before Congress on November 21, 2001: ``An increasing number of our clubs have become unable to compete for their respective division championships - thereby making post-season appearances, let alone post-season success, impossible.'' In other words, the commissioner of baseball stated under oath not only that a good portion of his product was essentially worthless, but also that a good percentage of his paying customers were, well, saps. If every renaissance were defined this way, then Michelangelo might have had a career working in a Florentine fish market.

``Look,'' says Selig, ``do I like the negativism? No, but you can't fool people. We have problems that we have to solve. Other than that, the game is very popular. But we can't avoid what's obvious.''


The purported crisis is now ``competitive imbalance.'' Largely because of a disparity in local broadcast revenues, team payrolls ran from $28 million to $116 million last year. Of course, this was the situation that Pete Rozelle and the NFL avoided while baseball was too busy hanging on to its doomed reserve system to notice. Consequently, the issue of revenue sharing - the percentage of their local broadcast revenue that the owners will share with one another - is so inextricably bound up with nearly 40 years of retrograde fiscal strategy that the negotiation of a simple percentage figure seems beyond the capabilities of everyone involved. It's always been easier to cry economic havoc than to face the problem that the nation may simply have outgrown your sport.

In addition, the competitive-balance case is always argued in terms of success in the post-season, which is more of a concession than Selig seems to realize. Baseball historically defined itself as timeless. It's the only major team sport played without a clock. It's an unfolding drama over 162 games, valuable unto itself. And, in fact, the regular season is still fairly competitive; in 2000, for the first time in history, no baseball team won more than 60 percent or fewer than 40 percent of its games. Now, though, baseball is telling its primary audiences that its dreams are hopeless, that a good June is meaningless without a successful October. The playoffs are what matter now, even if Bud Selig gets everything on his management wish list.

By making post-season success the sine qua non of his bargaining position, Selig implicitly acknowledges that baseball's primary aesthetic charm is obsolete. It's an admission that the short-term scrambles of the NBA and NHL playoffs, and the national holiday that is Super Bowl Sunday, speak more directly to the culture than does the long and languorous baseball season, no matter who makes what money and for how long. He demonstrates a gnawing unease that the problem is not that baseball necessarily is economically unsound, but that it's culturally anachronistic. More easily than anyone would have expected, he gives away the summertime.

[Baseball Guru]

It's a tough old bird, though, tougher than a lot of folks who profess to love it are willing to admit. There are signs of optimism, if you know where to look, signs that baseball can compete and survive in a hyperaccelerated mouse-click age. In May, bone chips taken from the arm of Seattle Mariners pitcher Jeff Nelson were put up for auction on eBay. The bidding went into five figures before the site, in a spasm of good taste, took the chips off the market. Surely, there has to be reason for some optimism if baseball players can be sold off at tidy sums piecemeal.

Or you can go to Fenway Park, even on a drizzly night, even with the hopeless Baltimore Orioles in town, and even with Lansdowne Street smelling like the Drunk Undergraduates Graveyard. The grandstands are a riot of red and yellow rain gear, and there's a snap to the place, even on a soggy evening. It seems a great distance from baseball's pose as a nagging mom at the dinner table - ``Eat up, because teams just like you are starving in Kansas City'' - but Larry Lucchino is with the program, even here, with his team in first place going into the Memorial Day Weekend.

``People can love an institution and still see the need - sometimes the crying need - for reform,'' says Lucchino, the new president and CEO of the Red Sox. ``I love the dailyness of baseball, the historical context of baseball, the charm and the pace of the game, but I can and do believe that the game is out of whack.''

Within minutes, then, Lucchino is explaining, again, the problem of competitive imbalance in the playoffs. He goes into a lengthy disquisition on the ``gigantic increases'' in player salaries and the effect of those increases on the price of tickets and ballpark frankfurters. When he's asked if lowering those salaries would lower those prices, Lucchino starts talking about ``moderating the rate of growth,'' which is tap-dancing straight out of Singin' in the Rain.

Baseball is groping for a place in the modern world consistent with the one it lost, and, recognizing the futility of that quest, it's fallen into a kind of self-loathing of which the most outward sign is the compulsive catastrophism of its public pronouncements over what are essentially economic anomalies. It has spent so much time concocting problems that baseball is (again) unprepared when confronted with a real one. Earlier this month, after a former MVP named Ken Caminiti admitted to having used steroids while playing, baseball was convulsed over the issue. However, it didn't take long at all for this authentic crisis to be wedged into the comparatively illusory economic one. Selig called for mandatory random drug testing, which the Players Association has opposed for almost 20 years, and the whole thing disintegrated into an argument in which the terms ``anabolic steroids'' and ``revenue sharing'' seemed grotesquely synonymous.

Maybe it's easier to talk about money and percentages, though. Maybe it's easier to play mathematical volleyball. After all, if baseball solved its labor strife tomorrow and forever, there would still be football and basketball and stock-car racing. There would be MTV and the Disney Channel, Microsoft and Nintendo, Spider-Man and Britney Spears, and baseball would still be looking for a nation for which it could be a pastime again.

Maybe it feels safer to have San Diego owner John Moores write (in the May 15 Wall Street Journal) that his Padres lost $43 million between 1998 and 2000 and that, because of baseball's competitive imbalance, the team is unlikely to compete in a World Series anytime soon, and not even mention that his net worth is somewhere between $500 million and $700 million. So maybe it feels safer to stare over a fiscal cliff than it does to peek into the abyss of cultural irrelevance. The Padres won the World Series? Splendid, and what did you say was on Animal Planet tonight?

After all, back when it was a national pastime, baseball had owners who talked about going broke and had the good grace actually to do it. For example, there was Chris von der Ahe, the manic German saloonkeeper who ran the St. Louis Browns at the end of the 19th century. (One of his stars was a gifted outfielder named Tip O'Neill, who became the idol of a certain corner boy in Cambridge.) Von der Ahe failed so spectacularly that his stadium was burned to the ground and his creditors kidnapped him, spiriting him away to a hoosegow in Pennsylvania.

Through it all, though, through actual fiscal disaster, von der Ahe never doubted the place of his team in the world. When the Browns came into a city, he would hire a brass band and lead it through the streets. He took out ads in the local newspapers, announcing: ``THE BROWNS ARE HERE! THE COMING CHAMPIONS.'' Maybe that's what baseball really is searching for. Not an accountant or a human relations specialist. But someone, anyone - even a bankrupt, lunatic someone - who thinks baseball is still worth a parade.