There has been much talk about baseball tradition in recent years, since the plan for realignment and expanded playoffs became public. The Traditionalists have it that allowing also-rans into the post-season violates the grand tradition of winner-take-all baseball, the three-division alignment bears a disturbing resemblance to the NFL, and expanded play-offs after a 162-game regular season threaten to extend the season to November, an awkward time for the boys of summer to play. The Modernists hold that such traditions are antiquated, that baseball must move with the times and the times dictate more play-off games, more post-season TV revenue, more exciting races for even watered-down pennants.
The first position, opposed to realignment and expanded play-offs, is better called the Nostalgist or Sentimentalist. It invokes the glorious past to bolster an emotional argument, and the past it invokes consists entirely of visible appurtenances without consideration of meaning or motive. The purity of the game they refer to never really existed, nor did the focused pursuit of competitive excellence.
Those of the second position, supporting realignment, more play-offs, more TV money, and all the rest of it -- those are the true Traditionalists. There is nothing more traditional in major league baseball than the single-minded pursuit of profit. That was the goal long before 60'6", before four balls made a walk, before overhand pitching. Ever since major league baseball was established as a cooperative venture among owners rather than players (in 1876), money has been the prime mover. Every change in the organization of the major leagues, and almost every change in the rules of the game itself, has been aimed at maximizing profit or minimizing loss. Winning percentage has never been as important as profit percentage; competition between teams has always taken a back seat to competition between owners and leagues. After throwing, hitting, and catching the ball, this is the most enduring fact of major league baseball.
This is not necessarily the way it has to be, or ought to be, but simply the way it has always been. Any discussion of the future of major league baseball must start here. The Sentimentalist position has a lot to be said for it. It is highly attractive, mostly because it is sentimental. It is how we would like to think of baseball; it calls upon the central core of beliefs that make us baseball fans in the first place. But it takes little cognizance of the fact that the important decisions in major league baseball are made in corporate boardrooms, not on the field.
The major change in professional baseball in the last 50 years is the source of the money that all the fuss is about. In the old days, most baseball revenue came from the turnstile. You had to put the fannies in the seats to make money. And it didn't take a whole lot of fannies; attendance of a million was a great year, and most teams could get by with half that (throughout the 1920's, for example, an average of 9.6 million people a year attended major league games, about 600,000 per team -- with the Yankees accounting for a quarter of the American League). So the owners did what they had to do to get people to the park. Mostly, that meant a competitive local team playing an exciting brand of baseball. Or, in the American League, squeaking by until the Yankees came to town.
Then came radio and television and everything changed, though the owners didn't realize it for a while. By the early 1950's radio reached every corner of the land and television was blossoming. Baseball owners saw these media as direct competitors for the entertainment dollar, and resisted "giving away" their product with the same tenacity they displayed in suppressing the labor movement. It is interesting to note that pay-per-view TV was a burning issue back when Casey Stengel talked to Congress. The owners, needless to say, clung to the concept of attendance, and wanted to collect it even when the fan sat at home.
It took football to demonstrate the power of the tube. The owners of the NFL and AFL saw television not as competition, but as a vehicle, carrying their product the length and breadth of the land. And more, they saw television as a consumer, willing to pay millions of dollars a pop for the product. This changed professional football from a sideshow to a major attraction, producing a billion-dollar industry. (TV made the NFL what it is today -- the sporadic collision of faceless automatons on a small flat screen. It can do the same for baseball.) As a result, the NFL freed itself from the shackles of attendance. Every NFL team will make a profit, no matter how few people actually go to the games. Individual people are no longer the primary consumers, network TV is. This is a situation to warm the heart of any monopoly capitalist, and major league owners are no exceptions.
The price of guaranteed profit is lost autonomy. NFL owners have long subordinated individual greed to the greed of the trust as a whole. Baseball owners, though they supposedly have anti-trust exemptions, have so far been unwilling to do the same. Still, revenue sharing is inevitable when the bulk of the revenue comes from a single source.
And that single source also restricts the autonomy of the owners. A producer dependent on a single consumer, that is, a producer in a monopsony, must accede to the dictates of that consumer concerning the product. Witness the Pentagon system, the most extensive monopsony in the history of the world. Every defense contractor, to keep the money flowing, must adhere to quite precise, sometimes inexplicable specifications. The network TV system is no different. NFL owners have surrendered scheduling authority to television, and embraced the made-for-TV wild card play-off system and the continually expanding season. MLB has followed -- thank you, Mr. Selig -- with no end in sight.
While of the Sentimentalist position, I am enough of a pragmatist to know that it doesn't matter. The Lords of Baseball will do what they damn well please with "their" game, even if it means an adulterated product and ersatz competition. And we fans will take it. We may think we have a right to baseball, but we'll accept any shoddy substitute they offer in lieu of the real thing. They're a monopoly. They can do that. And once they transform baseball into a monpsony as well, they won't have to deal with us at all. Dealing with fans, with real live humans, will be the problem of the players and the networks.
Back to Infinite Monkeys Ballpark Back to Main Waiting Room Back to The Infinite Monkeys House
Go to Text Services Go to Textile Services