Dear Baseball Fan,
If you are paying attention right now, you are most assuredly angry. And rightfully so.
Spring Training ought to have begun by now and the reasons it hasn’t often feel so absurd and complicated that it is tempting to throw up your hands, place a pox on both their houses, and perhaps even swear off the game altogether.
The owners of MLB will have no one to blame but themselves for every single lost fan.
It is similarly tempting to focus solely on whether or not we can get a full season in, or something close to it, and forget that this isn’t just about getting baseball back. It’s about making baseball better.
On some level, we’ve all known for a long time that something is wrong with the current state of the game.
Parity exists only in theory and if you are willing to go to extreme lengths to underpay every member of your roster the way the A’s and Rays have. Or, maybe you can achieve the kind of success the Cubs and Astros did in the last 10 years. All you have to do is be purposefully terrible for half the decade.
The same five teams who have the five best records in MLB history – Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, Cubs and Cardinals – end up in the postseason every year while teams like the Mariners, Royals, Orioles, Reds, and Rockies have to plan everything perfectly around tiny windows of potential contention.
Beyond that issue though, MLB has been beaten and bruised by a litany of embarrassing scandals during the tenure of commissioner Rob Manfred.
Juiced baseballs, rampant sexism, and even a still-employed umpire who threatened violence on Twitter can sometimes be forgotten in favor of the Astros sign-stealing practices and the general handling of the pandemic-shortened season.
To quote Zack Galifianakis’ character from The Campaign: “It’s a mess.”
You may find yourself asking why the players don’t just agree to the new CBA plans laid out by the owners and take their salaries that are unfair but still more than most of us will ever make. The answer, in short, is that doing so would provide no solutions to the mess we are in.
The league cannot continue to limp on as it is, or instead of losing a huge wave of fans at once due to lost games, they will slowly bleed fans for the next 10-15 years until the league becomes irrelevant.
Fans are sick and tired of being taken for granted. Ticket prices in most places are outrageous, not to mention the overpriced merchandise, food, and drink. And a 162-game commitment is a lot to ask of anybody, especially considering your own team may be blacked out in your area, meaning you can’t watch unless you pay absurd prices for a dying cable industry.
So the question remains. Do you just want baseball to come back? Or do you want it to be better?
If your answer is the second one, then it is absolutely imperative that we, the fans of baseball, throw our support behind the players who are insisting that the game grow rather than stay stagnant.
Parsing all of the exact details of the possible changes to a new CBA can be left for another time but the fact is that what the players have publicly offered takes the game forward into a better place for fans, players, and the quality of the product on the field.
The amount of money “lost” by the owners under these proposals would leave them as some of the wealthiest people in the world.
Telling the players that they need to back down from their position just so that we can get baseball back, a stagnant version of baseball that has been stuck in the mud for decades, feels wrong and selfish.
If you care about baseball, you have to care about baseball players. It’s tempting to think of them as overpaid Primadonnas who are just complaining that they are making $4 million instead of $6 million.
But the fact is that all they are asking for is a fair piece of the pie we have all created.
It would be nice, but it isn’t the case that if the players don’t get that money, it somehow transfers to schoolteachers and firefighters. No. Either the players get it, or the owners do.
And how many times have you gone to the ballpark hyped in anticipation to get a glimpse of the owner of the team?
If we want the game to not only exist, but to thrive, we have to take the difficult step of standing firm on that principle. It may mean losing games. And that will mean losing fans.
The short-term health of the game is absolutely in peril. But the long-term health of the game can be preserved if we all have the courage to fight for it.
