An Outside View: Is baseball sports’ Titanic?

There are some who will argue with great conviction and passion that baseball, our once proud national pastime, is alive and well. Then again, there were those on the Titanic who argued that the luxury ocean liner wasn’t sinking. Oh, I’m not suggesting that baseball is a sinking ship but it is riding pretty low in the water these days and it may be time to invest in a water pump. Denying that baseball’s popularity is spiraling downward is like denying that the stock market has plummeted in the last two years. Sure, some stocks have bucked the odds and have performed well in a sluggish economy but all in all it hasn’t been a good ride for financial investors. The same is true for baseball. Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire created national excitement with their pursuit of new homerun records and who will ever forget the Rally Monkey. However, these individual achievements were not enough to pull baseball from its deep doldrums. The facts speak for themselves. There are fewer youth playing baseball today; fewer Americans identifying themselves as baseball fans; attendance on the Major League level is in the midst of a steady decline; and television ratings have hit rock bottom. This is evidence that even the L.A.P.D. couldn’t overlook. Johnny Cochren would have never gotten O.J. off in the face of such compelling evidence. Something needs to be done to reverse these trends or baseball will go the way of the dinosaurs. But what? Baseball purists, and I count myself among that elite club, generally fall into two distinct categories on this issue. On one front you have the romantics who deny the obvious and argue with emotion rather than facts. They talk with heart-felt emotion about a game that they love so much. They reminisce about their sandlot days and speak of the beauty of spending a leisurely summer evening at the ballpark eating hot dogs and rooting for the home team. They tell stories of their baseball heroes of yesteryear. These are the people who would have continued to dine and dance after the Titanic hit the iceberg on that fateful night because they knew the ship was unsinkable. These are fans who have a genuine love affair with the game but unfortunately most love affairs end unhappily. On the other hand, you have those who recognize that baseball is in trouble and they spend their time and energies trying to pinpoint where Major League Baseball went wrong and what needs to be done to fix it. As true traditionalists, they bemoan the designated hitter rule, inter-league play, the wild card system, free agency, overpaid players, strikes, and stories of drug abuse. These are the folks that would have been rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. They recognize that there is a major problem but they’re spinning their wheels because baseball’s difficulties are much bigger than the majors. There’s a natural tendency to link baseball’s decline to the many problems facing Major League Baseball today. But if we turned back the clock 50 years and fixed everything that is wrong with Major League Baseball today, baseball’s overall health would still require intensive care. After all, the NFL, NBA, and NASCAR have many of the same problems that Major League Baseball has and they are still flourishing. How are they able to do it? The difference is that they have a product better suited for the new millennium. Baseball’s problems can be traced to the game itself to which most Americans can no longer relate. There are two fundamental problems facing the game today. First and please pardon my bluntness but baseball is a boring game. It is a thinking man’s game and who wants to be bothered with having to think? In this video game paced society we live in today, kids and adults alike demand action and baseball simply does not supply it the way other major sports do. Kids today have the attention span of a flea and quickly tire of the baseball’s slow pace. And if you examine baseball and its competition, you can certainly understand. In baseball, you basically have two or three players involved in the game, the pitcher and batter. Everyone else sits around and watches. They’re in uniform but essentially are nothing more than spectators. Contrast that to football where there are 22 players involved on every play and in basketball there are 10. Baseball is fun if you are hitting or pitching but becomes a spectator sport for everyone else. Baseball also has a serious image problem. In its glory days, baseball was a working class sport. It had a definite blue-collar feel to it. It was played in the pastures of the countryside and on the sandlots in the small communities. Fans worked hard on the farms or in factories in Small Town USA. But as the size of the working class has dwindled in our service-oriented economy, baseball is today perceived as a game for wealthy whites living in the suburbs. Kids, 8 and 9 years old, carry literally hundreds of dollars worth of equipment over their shoulders, making the game too expensive for many would-be participants. African Americans have all but turned their backs on this game in favor of basketball and football and baseball has done very little to reach out to this potential fan base. I once heard it said that when archeologists study our great society one of the most significant contributions at which they will marvel will be the game of baseball. That is no doubt true. They will study how baseball was the fiber that held our country together in times of war and economic depression. They will study how baseball gave hometowns a sense of community pride. They will learn how we elevated players to hero status. Then they will try to understand the demise of what was once such a great game. Like those on the expedition to find the Titanic, teams of experts will set out to discover how a national pastime could become so irrelevant. And it was such a magnificent game. But then again, the Titanic was a magnificent ship.