As major-leaguers convene in Florida and Arizona for their annual spring training rites, all appears well with professional baseball. Players and owners reached a labor agreement last fall with nary a whisper of rancor, a rarity in recent decades. New television deals have set records. Ballparks, many brand-new, are full. Six different teams have won the last six World Series, giving at least the sheen of parity.
So why does G. Edward White think Major League Baseball faces a crisis?
White, a U.Va. law professor, author of the 1996 book Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903-1953, former college baseball player and lifelong fan, sounded the alarm for baseball in October as part of the “More Than the Score” lecture series, held before U.Va. home football games. He identified four major factors threatening the pro game:
- Youth participation is fading. Soccer has become “the reflexive sports activity” of America’s professional-class children, White says. Baseball is expensive, difficult to master, and embarrassingly public when kids drop the ball or strike out. Plus, there’s just not enough action to hold the attention of a video-game-paced generation.
- Large-market teams dominate the marketplace. Though it has been seven years since the well-heeled New York Yankees won a World Series, they remain perennial contenders. Less-wealthy teams can gear up for sporadic playoff runs, but few can afford to retain their star players for many years. Smaller-market teams like Pittsburgh and Kansas City are forced to scrape together rosters of lower-priced talent, leading to competitive imbalance.
- Steroids threaten the sport’s historical link to the past. Baseball’s leadership looked the other way when steroids entered the game, White says, happy to reap the short-term rewards of attention-grabbing home-run-record chases. Now, baseball must wrestle with how those records will be viewed in the light of widespread perceptions that the modern players were artificially aided in their pursuit. “The steroid problem is embarrassing for baseball, and it’s just insoluble,” White says.
- The racial and ethnic makeup of the game is changing. Despite outreach efforts, baseball has lost ground to football and basketball among African-American athletes since the 1970s, he said, with roster spots being claimed by Latino and now Asian players. “If African Americans end up being a tiny minority on major-league rosters by the middle of the century, the sport is not as representative of American culture as it once was,” White says.
So, if the former Amherst player—White played baseball there his freshman year—were to be named baseball czar, what would he prescribe?
His first edict would be to decree NFL-style revenue sharing, paired with a salary cap, to foster economic and competitive balance. Under the current system, “How in the world could you have a franchise like the Green Bay Packers in baseball?” he asks. Likewise, he would seek to lessen the disparity in local TV contracts.
Not that White is totally against having designated villains. “The Yankees are what every purist loves to hate, and I think that’s good,” he says. “But I don’t like the fact that some teams can almost never have a chance.”
Comments
NFL revenue sharing will never come to MLB simply because the game of baseball (and the structure of MLB) does not lend itself to garnering a national network television contract. The NFL is built for televison. Because of its predominantly weekend afternoon schedule, every game in every market can be televised by the networks. The NFL provides compelling content to the networks in time periods where advertising revenues could only support old movies and sitcom re-runs. In many markets, football ad rates are the highest rates paid by local and national advertisers. Combine that with the fact that the NFL pulls prime time ratings and you have a very valuable commodity for which the networks pay dearly (totalling in the tens of billions) allowing the owners to split the loot with everyone including the popcorn vendor and still make millions. Baseball could never attract a television deal like the NFL. Most games are played during the week smack dab in the middle of the network prime time lineup, games are prone to hideous delays and frequent postponements, the ratings are a fraction of ratings for NFL games and, most importantly, only the hardest core degenerate gambler, gambles on baseball. Some estimate that over 75% of the adult population has gambled on the outcome of a professional or college football game. And one thing television executives know (and they know very little) is that gamblers will watch. Essentially, baseball has no future unless it engages in immediate franchise contraction, imposes a realistic salary cap on player salaries (utility infielders should not be making $2 - 4MM/year) and teams share all revenues. It is a shame because I love baseball and it kills me that a small group of stupid, greedy owners and players are going to ruin the game.
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