It’s that time of the year when the best two major league baseball teams battle it out for the World Championship.
Big whoop.
I don’t really care anymore who is in the World Series, who the teams’ best players are, and who’s winning at this point. And, I don’t think that I’m alone with this attitude. Supposedly, about 12 million viewers watched Game 1 on Fox, which is a paltry amount considering there are 120 million households in the United States.
When I was a kid, and was an avid baseball fan, at least half of the TV sets in America were tuned to the World Series each year no matter which teams were playing. Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the attractions were the grandeur of the Fall Classic, the history, and the exploits of the players yearning for immortality. Player salaries in those days were such that many good ballplayers had to work in non-baseball jobs in the off season to help make ends meet. The players seemed like regular guys who just happened to have some special skills.
Nowadays, the money that players make, particularly the very good ones, borders on the obscene. The Major League average is above $4 million and there are 14 players who make over $30 million per season. Most of the MLB news that one hears on TV nowadays pertains to player contracts, potential trades, and off-field scandals by young men with high testosterone and big wallets.
Like many people, I am tired of hearing about some super-rich MLB player who throws around $100 bills at a strip joint and has twelve children by six women, none of which he bothered to marry. I can’t relate, nor do I want to.
Competitiveness in MLB has become a joke. The disparity of annual payrolls between teams is outlandish (L.A. Dodgers = $265 million versus Baltimore Orioles = $44 million). One team’s pitcher (Max Scherzer of the New York Mets makes the same amount in 2022 as the total of all players on the Orioles. This vast discrepancy in team player quality manifests itself in team victories: the same high payroll teams do well each year and the lowest paying teams are barely competitive. This year’s World Series competitors (the Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros) have the 4th and 8th highest payrolls among MLB’s 30 teams.
Back in the day, virtually all MLB players were Caucasian. That changed in 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the “color barrier”. By 1990, one in five players was African American. Currently, almost 30 percent of players are Hispanic or Latino compared to about 7 percent who are Black. There are a few Asian players now, including Shohei Ohtani, who was the American League Most Valuable Player last year. Paradoxically, MLB is getting less “white” and “black” at the same time.
I think the ethnic makeup of MLB turns off some fans, particularly those who are prejudiced against Latinos.
There are so many MLB games! Thirty teams play 162 games in the regular season (that’s almost 5,000 games in eight months) and then a bunch of “playoff” games to get two teams to the World Series. Most of those regular season games are statistically irrelevant, as more than half of the games involve teams which will not make the playoffs. Why do teams like the Orioles and the Oakland A’s even suit up? They are on pace to lose 100 games each year before the first pitch is thrown in the Spring.
And then we have the cheating.
Players and teams do what they must to stay competitive. Teams used to hand out scads of amphetamines to players to keep them alert after long plane flights, back-to-back games, and nighttime games. Thus, most players back in the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s was “juiced” with greenies, even the most famous players who are now in the Hall of Fame. MLB had no problem with this. In the late 1980’s, presumably, players started experimenting with “performance enhancing drugs” (PEDs) to increase muscle mass. This was not a violation of MLB rules at the time.
In August, 1994, the greed of the club owners and the players reached critical mass, resulting in a player strike and stadium lockout that terminated the 1994=95 MLB season. Baseball fans were furious over this; many vowed to never attend or watch another MLB game.
When the strike was over and play resumed in 1995-96, players started hitting a lot of home runs. It seemed that most position players had, seemingly overnight, become sluggers like Babe Ruth. “Banjo hitters” (weak hitters with no power) began hitting baseballs out of stadiums. Brady Anderson of the Orioles, who had never hit more than 21 homers in a season, belted 50 in 1996. He was a leadoff hitter, to boot, whose job was to get on base, not hit balls over the fence. After his surprising season in 1996, he never hit more than 24 homes again in his career.
Lots of players like Anderson became, miraculously, Clark Kent… when MLB really needed help to bring fans back into stadiums. PEDs were running rampant, MLB was the beneficiary, and the Commissioner’s Office was mute, because fans were returning to the stadiums to watch the Home Run Derby. Business was good. However, long-standing records began to fall and baseball purists became outraged. It took MLB about five years to come up with a PED testing program and another 3 years to establish penalties for “cheaters”. Testing for banned amphetamines began in 2004. By that time, virtually all home run records had been shattered and baseball fans were furious.
The blame fell mostly on the players expected of cheating, although the club owners and MLB leadership were definitely criminal co-conspirators. Some great players, who benefitted from PEDs before the prohibitions and testing were established, were made scapegoats despite the fact that they violated no MLB rules when they were “juiced”. Fans of those players became highly annoyed over the two-faced attitude of MLB and some became ex-baseball fans.
The Houston Astros, who won the World Series in 2017, were found to have used technology to steal opposing teams’ signs (from catcher to pitcher), enabling their hitters to know what pitch was being thrown. This is, and always has been, illegal in MLB. After investigation, it was determined that the Astros had been doing this for a couple of years, benefitting both their players and the team.
After the public outrage about this blatant cheating had subsided, MLB punished a few Astros’ coaches, but didn’t punish the players who were involved in the cheating, and the Astros got to keep their 2017 World Series title.
It’s no wonder than so many baseball fans have been turned off by MLB and are not attending or watching games like they used to.
I was an AVID baseball fan until the 1994 strike; nowadays, I don’t pay any attention to the sport. Based upon the dismal World Series TV ratings, I’m not alone.