Baseball negotiators aren’t talking, they’re giving up Hot Stove League
Updated Monday, December 13, 2021
Baseball, which truly was the national pastime for almost a century, has been in decline since the mid-1960s, when football overtook it as America’s most popular sport for playing and viewing. In this century, pro basketball also has surpassed Major League Baseball, with 50% higher TV ratings than the latter.
While the owners and players of the National Basketball Association work together to market their game and make it more appealing, baseball players dawdle in the batter’s box and on the mound, not caring about fans losing patience and interest. This is the age of attention deficit, where movies must be limited to two hours, which is how long baseball games usually lasted before the sport began its decline.
The die-hard fans are dying, and privately, MLB executives wonder if their sport is dying. The average age of baseball fans is 57. Polling shows that only 7% of the fans are younger than 18. There are so many other things they’d rather do for entertainment: cellphones to engage, Fortnite battles to win, even real guns to shoot in backyards and schoolgrounds.
It would be nice if Major League Baseball would consider the role it once had and still could have in shaping our youth for the better. This sport is so much safer and more peaceful than football, so much more accessible than basketball. And kids do love to play it, when they have fields to play on.
You don’t have to be tall or even very athletic to be a baseball star. Jim Deshaies, the Cubs broadcaster, once struck out 8 big-leaguers in a row and later asked, “Can you imagine me guarding Michael Jordan?”
This is truly the game for Everyman. But as MLB ventured into the lockout zone two weeks ago, you didn’t find many people extolling its virtues. ESPN’s Tony Kornheiser, arguably America’s most eminent sports journalist, did not exaggerate much when he said, “This is the highway to hell, and baseball turned onto it.”
There’s no sense of urgency about negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. No meetings so far between Commissioner Rob Manfred and Tony Clark (pictured above), the director of the Players Association.
One long-time executive with the Astros lamented, ”We’re losing the Hot Stove League, and that’s important for keeping our fan base.”
Indeed, the NFL and NBA make sure their off-seasons are crowded with newsworthy activity: trades, free-agent signings, contract extensions. MLB has put all that on hold. The amateur drafts are huge events in football and basketball, but of little interest in baseball, where almost all the draftees require minor-league seasoning.
As senseless as they are, you wonder why these work stoppages keep happening. This is the ninth one. Why more often in baseball than in football, basketball or hockey? When I asked Hank Aaron about this in the late 1990s, he said, “Baseball has had very poor leadership.”
Aaron’s long-time friend, Bud Selig, was duly offended. Selig likes to think he was baseball’s greatest commissioner, and perhaps he was, considering the blatant racism of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was the most significant of the eight men who preceded Selig in baseball’s highest office.
But Selig was in charge and having little impact in the sport’s most catastrophic labor war, when the 1994 World Series was ditched and millions of people swore off baseball, never to return.
I was among the throng of ballwriters who covered futile negotiations in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, Florida and Washington, D.C. It was a boring seven-month journey, though it had a few memorable moments, capped by the emergence of Sonya Sotomayor, future Supreme Court justice. Her ruling in a crowded Manhattan courtroom led to an uneasy peace that would last 26 years after she struck down the owners’ skewed interpretation of labor law.
We had hoped for leadership from George W. Bush, president of the Texas Rangers and son of a U.S. President, but he showed none of the political skills he’d later develop. Mission not accomplished. When the owners finally surrendered, San Diego Padres president Larry Lucchino shrugged and said, “All’s well that ends.”
Who knows how or when this new labor war ends. Manfred said the lockout is preferable to continue operating under an expired CBA. MLB tried that in 1994, and the players went on strike in September, causing the loss of the postseason with its mega revenues. The lockout is a tool to give the owners more leverage. They will continue bemoaning their financial misery, but you notice that every time a ballclub is sold, it’s for exponentially more money than its previous sale.
I’m guessing we’ll get a truce in March, perhaps after the sacrifice of some spring training games. We’re likely to end up with a designated hitter in the National League, more playoffs, a faster road to free agency, perhaps a payroll floor to prevent teams from diving for dollars – collecting shared television revenues but pocketing the cash instead of using it to build their rosters. Baseball is always more devoted to cutting cost than to increasing revenue, which could be the underlying problem.
