Clark and Manfred give us hope that this labor war won’t be 1994
Baseball, which truly was the national pastime for almost a century, has been in decline since the mid-1960s, when football overtook it as America’s most popular sport for playing and viewing. In this century, pro basketball has surpassed Major League Baseball, with 50% higher TV ratings than the latter.
While the owners and players of the National Basketball Association work together to market their game and make it more appealing, baseball players dawdle in the batter’s box and on the mound, not caring about fans losing patience and interest. This is the age of attention deficit, where movies must be limited to two hours, which is how long baseball games usually lasted before the sport began its decline.
The die-hard fans are dying. The average age of baseball fans is 57. Polling shows that only 7% of the fans are younger than 18. There are so many other things they’d rather do for entertainment: cellphones to engage, Fortnite battles to win, even real guns to shoot in backyards and schoolgrounds.
It would be nice if Major League Baseball would consider the role it once had and still could have in shaping our youth for the better. This sport is so much safer and more peaceful than football, so much more accessible than basketball. Yes I admit I’m an unabashed seam-head.
You don’t have to be tall in baseball. Jose Altuve is 5-6 and has led the big leagues in hitting. He hits the ball out of the park and also hits home runs in the park. How much better can entertainment be?
You don’t have to be very athletic to be a baseball star. Lance Lynn? Kyle Schwarber? Jim Deshaies, the Cubs broadcaster, once struck out 8 big-leaguers in a row and later asked, “Can you imagine me guarding Michael Jordan?”
This is truly the game for Everyman. But as MLB ventured into the lockout zone last Thursday, you didn’t find many people extolling its virtues. ESPN’s Tony Kornheiser, arguably America’s most eminent sports journalist, did not exaggerate much when he said, “This is the highway to hell, and baseball turned onto it.”
You wonder why this keeps happening – the ninth time there’s been a work stoppage. Why more often in baseball than in football, basketball or hockey? When I asked Hank Aaron about this in the late 1990s, he said, “Baseball has had very poor leadership.”
His long-time friend, Bud Selig, was duly offended. Selig likes to think he was baseball’s greatest commissioner, and perhaps he was, considering the blatant racism of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was the most significant of the eight men who preceded Selig in baseball’s highest office.
But Selig was in charge and having little impact in the sport’s most catastrophic labor war, when the 1994 World Series was ditched and millions of people swore off baseball, never to return.
I was among the throng of ballwriters who covered futile negotiations in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas and Florida. It was a boring seven-month process, though it had a few memorable moments, capped by the emergence of Sonya Sotomayor, future Supreme Court justice. Her ruling in a crowded Manhattan courtroom brought peace that would last 25 years, as she struck down the owners’ skewed interpretation of labor law.
Prior to that, I saw Donald Trump for the first time, standing near a podium that he’d set up in the lobby of his Manhattan hotel which hosted one day of negotiations. Of all the hotel owners on the labor trail, he was the only one to make himself known to the press. He was affable, not only to reporters but to his workers in that sprawling lobby. He did know how to make an impression.
If only the negotiators had been more affable with each other. Selig had little to say. He was nicknamed Bud Light, regarded, perhaps unfairly, as a puppet of hard-liner Jerry Reinsdorf. Union chief Donald Fehr was always scowling, looking like he hated to be there. His lieutenant, Gene Orza, committed the shocking gaffe of calling federal mediator William Usery “a senile old man.”
We hoped for leadership from George W. Bush, president of the Texas Rangers and son of a U.S. President, but he showed none of the political skills he’d later develop. Mission not accomplished.
When the owners finally surrendered, San Diego Padres president Larry Lucchino shrugged and said, “All’s well that ends.”
Who knows how or when this new collective bargaining squabble ends. I’m guessing by early March we’ll have a designated hitter in the National League, more playoffs, a faster road to free agency, perhaps a payroll floor to prevent teams from diving for dollars – collecting shared television revenues but pocketing the cash instead of using it to build their rosters. Baseball is always more devoted to cutting cost than to raising revenue.
There are lots of points of contention, but I can’t see the differences being worthy of scrapping part of a baseball season. I’m encouraged that Tony Clark (pictured above) is far more pleasant in tone than Fehr, who’s now director of the National Hockey League’s union and under fire for ignoring a player, Kyle Beach, when he complained of a Chicago Blackhawks assistant coach sexually assaulting him.
As for Rob Manfred, groomed by Selig to be his successor, he was acknowledged by both sides as the owners’ most competent labor lawyer in 1994-95. He knows how to do this. History, which is baseball’s best friend, tells us that in the three previous lockouts, no games were sacrificed. So there’s reason for hope, though it should not have come down to this sort of brinkmanship. There’s too much at stake.
