Franke
Baseball Is Back (for Better or Worse)
by Mark Franke
Baseball is back, finally. It seems the winters here in northeast Indiana get longer and longer, or maybe it’s just that I am getting older and older.
I watched several major league baseball (MLB) games on opening weekend and last week attended my first game of the Fort Wayne TinCaps. I should be exhilarated with the start of the new season, but I am beginning to develop a love-hate relationship with my favorite sport. I should explain that my love for the purity of the game is being tempered by my increasing irritation with those who seem determined to bury America’s pastime in a grave of irrelevancy.
First, my list of things and people getting under my skin.
- Rob Manfred — I used to think Bowie Kuhn was the worst commissioner of all time. Recall how he forced Hoosier Charley Finley to divest himself of a winning franchise at a fire sale price. Then he decreed that all post-season games must be played at night, regardless of late fall weather and time zone issues. Manfred’s knee jerk decisions such as moving the All-Star game out of Atlanta are causing me to look back kindly on Kuhn.
- The time needed for games — Games in my youth were two hours or so, with pitchers going the distance as often as possible. Now they average well over three hours, still with only 27 outs per side. How many pitching changes can we tolerate? Apparently an unlimited number, as most clubs started the season with 16 pitchers on their rosters. I am not impressed with Manfred’s handwringing about this problem. The solution is simple: Just tell the pitchers to throw the ball, the batters to stay in the batter’s box and the managers to keep their butts on the bench. To prove my point, the TinCaps completed a game in under two hours last week using a pitch clock.
- Price of tickets and concessions — Can any family take a summer outing to a MLB game? Not without applying for a second mortgage. The last MLB game I attended pre-Covid cost $150 for the seat and $15 for a beer. You won’t see many kid-filled station wagons pulling into major league parking lots at these prices. And I shudder to think what parking costs.
- The loss of all strategy — Unless you consider deciding how to best use eight pitchers per game, there is no strategy. Remember hit-and-run? How about sacrifice bunts? “Get ‘em on, get ‘em over, get ‘em in”? It’s home run or strikeout, thank you. And apparently our current crop of athletes can’t adapt to obvious opportunities, such as bunting to an open third base in the face of an over shift.
- Money — Now I am a free-market classical liberal so normally I would not criticize someone for trying to maximize profits. But please tell me, if you can, how a bunch of billionaires arguing with hundreds of multimillionaires over splitting the revenue earned from closed ballparks is maximizing profits. Ratcheting up ticket prices at the slightest provocation is simply reducing total tickets sold, as attendance data shows. I seem to recall an economic principle about price elasticity of demand. Aesop and his goose that laid the golden eggs come to mind as well. How many corporate sky boxes can they sell to make up for all the Joe Sixpacks who can’t afford even the cheapest bleacher seats?
- Baseball cards — My bete noire Manfred and the union representing the wage slaves who play the game decided to send Topps packing. No more Topps cards to take a kid’s entire weekly allowances? No pink, concrete-like bubble gum? No doubles to put in the spokes of bike wheels? Just one more tradition from my childhood passing into obscurity.
I do feel better now even though nobody cares what I think, at least no one in MLB’s Manhattan corporate offices. And to end this column on a high note, here is my all-too-short list of what good remains in baseball.
- Radio — Baseball is a game made for radio. I realize Vin Scully, Red Barber, Harry Carey and Ernie Harwell are gone. Still, I feel like John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman, announcers for my Yankees, are close friends. I even switch to their broadcast when watching the game on TV.
- Big innings — That is, those innings marked by multiple hits and aggressive base running and not by one home run and three strikeouts.
- Defense — Great glove plays and running outfield catches are all that is left of athleticism in baseball, at least to my jaundiced eye.
- A lifetime of memories — Even Rob Manfred can’t take those away. I will always be that youngster walking into old Comiskey Park for his first major league game. Or going outside to the backyard each spring once the snow finally melted with his lovingly oiled glove in hand.
That may be what saves baseball: Its ethereal capability of unifying generations around a symbol of what America once was and can be again . . . unless they succeed in totally spoiling it for us perpetual kids.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
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