Scott Servais, Seattle Mariners. (Photo by Dinur via Flickr)
Hollywood doesn’t get this right every time. Can you think of a futuristic, dystopian, or post-apocalyptic movie or show that still has professional sports as they are today? While you’re wrapping your head around that, read this article about the fall of MLB and baseball.
Professional sports continue to alienate fans. Diehards will hold on to their heroes until the final days of the sport, but if things continue, we will see the end of professional sports in our lifetime. It is an ugly truth, and deep down, in places you’d rather not think about, you know it’s a possibility.
Alienating Major League Baseball fans isn’t anything new. The 1981 baseball strike was a precursor to strengthening the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA). That year, MLB lost 713 games due to the MLBPA exerting their will over the owners to force their hand on free agency compensation.
Blame found its way to the owners, who were looking for compensation for losing a player. Ironically, it was the owners who lost $72 million during this strike. It hardly seems worth it, but baseball would rebound.
Then in 1994, the entire postseason was canceled. Arguably, this event finished off the Montreal Expos, who needed the playoff revenue that they were destined to get. It was what the owners had to have in order to stave off their financial ruin.
The owners wanted a salary cap. Obviously, the players didn’t. The MLBPA called for a stoppage which began on August 11. That work stoppage ran through the beginning of 1995. A total of $580 million was lost by the owners, and players missed out on $230 million in salaries.
Both of these strikes caused near irreparable damage to America’s Past-time. Never before in the history of professional sports had a postseason been lost due to a work stoppage. Needless to say, every time there’s a possible work stoppage, Major League Baseball is playing with fire.
The current labor agreement between MLB and the Players Association expires on December 1. At that point, a lock-out seems inevitable. The two sides are far apart on many issues, and there is plenty of animosity between them. It seems Commissioner Rob Manfred and MLBPA President Tony Clark genuinely don’t like each other.
Until we get closer to the 2022 season, there isn’t much motivation for either party to make concessions. That means no free agent frenzy and no trades. The hot stove will be, in effect, turned off. In return, so will fan interest.
Knowing that they needed to find a reason to once again bring fans to the game, the fix was on. From juiced baseballs to juiced arms, steroids ran rampant throughout the league. It worked, too, as fans returned in droves to a game that had just said that fans didn’t matter; money matters. A course correction was required, and finally, Major League Baseball put their foot down and essentially stopped performance-enhancing drugs.
It took until recently for things to seem under control. But the damage was done to a strategic game that was equal parts; the smell of the cut grass, vendors shouting about peanuts, and cracks of bats.
The nostalgia was lost for many, especially the casual ones, who were only there for the three-run bomb and a dramatic bat-flip. Pitching duels became few and far between, and moving runners along the basepaths faded away due to analytics. The eye test gave way to the spreadsheet, the trackman, and WAR.
At some point, the fans will call Major League Baseball’s bluff and not come back. Especially the fans of teams that haven’t been successful recently. The short season of 2020 was a nice test, but if Major League Baseball messes with the rebuild of the Seattle Mariners and they lose this window of opportunity, it could spell doom for the Emerald City’s team.
If Seattle loses this window of development, then their rebuild could face a much more challenging uphill obstacle to face, and that’s a declining fan base that doesn’t return to baseball. The Mariners are an organization that has been plagued with bad luck, poor management, and horrid development. Yet the fans show up to the games. If this season is delayed, then what will the ripple effects be?
It’s not just the Mariners either; it’s the Marlins (don’t let their accidental trip to the postseason fool you), Tigers, Royals, Pirates, Rangers, and Orioles. All of these teams are in jeopardy of folding, here’s why.
They all banked on rebuilding a fan base with the arrival of top prospects and hope. Those teams were willing to sacrifice several lean years to get to the point where the fans come back because they are excited about their team and its future.
What if the team never gets their prospects up to showcase them and sell tickets?
It’s 2030; ten-year-old Dag Willikins picks up a brownish-white ball with red thread around it. He looks up at his dad with a curious look and says, “Dad, what is this?” as he examines the worn-out logo.
Dad looks back at him, nods his head, and with a smirk, he starts, “You see son, once upon a time, there were these great heroes that depended on people to keep them on their financial pedestals, and they kept letting the people down. So the people ripped the pedestals out from underneath them.”
“That sounds violent.” The son replies.
“It was heartbreaking, it was called baseball, but it had morphed into something else completely. No longer a game, but instead a battle of control over something that they couldn’t control anyway.”
Dag looks down at the ball in his hand, realizing that it is junk; he lets it drop behind him. The ball rolls off the side of the gravel walkway and into a ditch as the father and son walk on.
The death of baseball. Let’s hope it never comes to that, but it starts with those who control the game acting like they care about it more than they care about themselves.
Joe Swenson is an Author, Award-Winning Playwright, Director, Producer, Creator of the Quarantine 2038 Series, and lifelong Seattle Sports fan. Visit www.brokenartsentertainment.com to see his film work and libraries of plays.