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There is a lot of bandwidth taken up with discussions about the byzantine financial nature of the Major League Baseball labor dispute which has, at this writing, put Spring Training on hold, let alone the start of the 2022 regular season.
{Update: A new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) was agreed to on March 10, and The regular season began on April 7.]
The sports media (the same cohort that repeatedly demanded game cancellations during COVID) has primarily blamed ownership.
Let’s stipulate that the billionaire owners are unpleasant, devious people who are working the angles. Making it worse, the cowering commissioner’s office is inept.
All that said, the stubborn players (and their agents who are prodding them) are greedy as hell. They should feel blessed to be professional athletes with all the perks that go with it.
Make It Make Sense
That the multi-millionaire players are fighting for their colleagues or future colleagues who are lower on the income scale is laughable.
What about all the behind-the-scenes workers who are or will be out of a job?
Moreover, all the player shave to do is show up in shape (and they sometimes have difficulties doing even that).
In contrast, the owners have to fund — admittedly along with tax breaks and other gimmickry — the entire vast infrastructure of the business.
Professionals sport owners made a terrible mistake back in the day in agreeing to guaranteed contracts for players, but that’s another matter.
Parenthetically, the whole idea that the players who negotiate individual personal service contracts are in “a union,” i.e., subject to a CBA makes no sense.
The union reportedly has a bank account that is flush with cash to disperse to players if the work stoppage is extensive.
The Love for Baseball Is Not Unconditional
Given its everyday nature, baseball becomes like a friend. Even fans of the game have to admit, however, that unlike the fun of attending a game in person, MLB home-run-or-strikeout games constitute a horrible TV product. Boring. Things can admittedly pick up, say, after the seventh inning or so, however, or during intense playoff games.
Yes, baseball is cool in that, in a sense that it makes time stand still for the fans who have to chance to forget about day-to-day concerns, but MLB must figure out sensible ways to make each game more crisp.
Parenthetically, unaffordable, often jacked-up ticket prices along with outrageous concession markups are other matters that MLB should address to make attendance more fan and family friendly.
That most of the announcers are generic shills make matters worse (although that’s where the mute button comes in handy).
Even so, as a regional sport, MLB apparently garners higher TV ratings than the National Basketball Association. There are various reasons for that, including that the NBA regular season is a voyage to nowhere. MLB unfortunately seems intent on taking the same journey.
Making news even during the off season, the National Football League, of course, long ago supplanted MLB as the national pastime, in part because of gambling.
The commissioner’s office, ownership, and players seem oblivious to how tedious MLB games are when they are viewed on TV or via a device. Maybe they don’t care, as long as the money (like in professional wrestling) keeps flowing in from networks and streaming services.
Those entities are apparently is desperate for inventory.
As one commenter on Barstool Sports put it, “Everyone involved is an idiot. Your sport is dying right before your eyes and you’re hung up on pay raises and a draft lotteries?! When the boomers all die off, no one will be watching and the revenue will dry up.”
Pace of Play Must Be Prioritized
Along with other creative ways to speed up the game, the pitch clock should have been implemented years ago by the timid commissioner. Obsessively gloves-adjusting hitters should be required to stay in the batters box.
Umpires need to keep things moving. And, by the way, what happened to the ban on spitting?
Requiring relievers to pitch to at least three hitters was probably a good step in the right direction.
Putting a man on second to start extra innings was not (even though it may have encouraged people to tune in). That’s because traditional extra inning play is one of the most exciting and unpredictable aspects of MLB. All of a sudden, it seems, the automatic man on second is now called a ghost runner, even though it’s an actual living person.
As the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick perceptively observed:
MLB, overwhelmed by its self-afflicted tedium, abandonment of fundamentals and devotion to computer-delivered scientific applications to the unscientific, has ruled that all extra-inning games must begin with an artificial additive, a gimmick in the form of a designated runner at second.
Don’t fix what’s killing baseball, fix what isn’t!
Wacky things have also happened during the four pitches of intentional walks that no longer is part of the rules, unfortunately.
As alluded to above, expanding the playoffs, which is currently likely, waters down the regular season, during which the pennant race often come down to the last weekend.
Interleague play, at least to extent of the number of games it consumes, has outlived its usefulness, too.
Adding the designated hitter (DH) to the National League, also a current proposal to is headed to implementation, will just make NL games take longer and reduce strategy. But maybe the analytics nerds in the front office, who seem to be charge rather than the field manager, want that.
Eliminating the defensive shift is also dumb. Like workers in other industries, batters should and must adjust to changing market conditions to beat the shift.
“The death of baseball won’t be quick, it’ll be done through many tiny little nails in the coffin like this, slowly bleeding it out until nobody is interested any more. It started with expanding the [Wild Card] to 2 teams, then adding a runner on 2nd in extras, next it’ll be bigger bases, no shifts, multi-ball and the Philly fanatic riding around the outfield in a golf cart taking liners to the face for an automatic win,” a MLB Trade Rumors commenter opined.
Or as Mushnick separately wrote, “So many fans are weary of watching multimillionaires strike out while trying to hit into the shift, 17 pitching changes per game and batters posing doubles and triples into singles…”
MLB seldom takes common-sense scheduling into consideration either, the columnist noted:
“Every year we ask why MLB can’t begin the season with teams playing their first two series in warm-weather cities or under domed stadia as a matter of common sense, including fan comfort and minimizing winter weather postponements.”
Added: (More from Mushnick):
“But MLB is stuck in stupid. Now we await the artificial elimination of the strategic shift as caused by the slavish but unrealistic misapplication of home-run-or-bust analytics that have inspired the removal of fundamental, winning baseball played by multimillionaires.
“MLB already has chosen to artificially put quick ends to extra inning games — once often memorable, even cherished for their tension and unforeseen occurrences — with automatic runners at second.”
