Locked out baseball faces largest existential crisis yet - but who cares?

Twenty-four hours before the entire nation ground to a halt to watch the Super Bowl, Major League Baseball presented its players' union with a set of proposals designed to end a lockout that began more than two months ago. The meeting didn't go well, news filtering out that pre-season training would most likely not start on time and the regular campaign might be in jeopardy too. And America momentarily glanced up from the NFL, the true national obsession, shrugged its shoulders, rolled its eyes, and muttered, "So what."

“If a recent poll from Seton Hall University is to be believed, a large chunk of sports fans looks at the lack of lockout progress not with anger or impatience, but with indifference,” wrote Jason Foster in The Sporting News. “The survey of 1,570 adults last month found that 44 percent of respondents who identify as avid sports fans would be less interested in big league baseball when the 2022 season begins…But even if the Powers That Be wave that away, there’s another troubling revelation from the poll: 54 percent of the general public responded that it had no interest in MLB anyway.”

Even allowing for the unreliability of polls, that those numbers formed the centrepiece of an article in The Sporting News, the bible of baseball in the pre-internet days, is significant. Here is a magazine with a vested interest that realizes an unseemly dispute, pitting billionaires (owners) against multi-millionaires (players), could have genuinely dire long-term consequences. A game with an ageing fanbase (the average devotee is 57 years old) and per game attendance numbers that have declined steadily for five consecutive seasons can ill afford a work stoppage that will further alienate supporters.

The issues at hand are straightforward enough. Players want owners to be forced to spend more on salaries, not just to line their own pockets but to ensure greater competitive balance. Right now, revenue-sharing overcompensates clubs with losing records and rewards miserly owners handsomely for penny-pinching. The union also wants to close loopholes around service time manipulation, the practice of teams keeping blue chip prospects in minor leagues for part of a season so as to stretch out the number of years they can pay them at lower rates.

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Two years into a pandemic that continues to cause economic hardship, the general public has little appetite for a squabble between parties arguing over sums many multiples of the average industrial wage. Long before inflation started to rise, the price of a night at a baseball game, once one of the great summer rituals, was gone beyond the reach of many families. The league and the union already angered their fans back in 2020 when they took forever to agree terms for a lockdown shortened season. All of this is why some believe the implications for not starting the new campaign on time may be even more existential than before.

Speculation about the imminent demise of baseball has been such a constant for the past century that Sports Illustrated once ran a piece in which a reporter trawled the archives, sampling all the different times the sky was apparently falling in. What may be different now is the challenges it faces are more varied on every single level, from demographics (the die-hards are, literally, dying) to diversity (the game doesn’t exist in many African-American communities) to degree of difficulty (kids evince diminishing appetites for learning a game where hitting the ball is bloody difficult).

While all sports are struggling to attract and retain youngsters with rapidly shrinking attention spans, baseball has suffered more because its games, crippled by overuse of analytics, are now longer than at any point in its history. And large parts of these three-hour plus snooze fests are given over to pitchers and hitters spending inordinate amounts of times fixing their gloves and adjusting their helmets. By one estimate, the ball is now in play once every four minutes.

Hardly the stuff to capture the imagination of a 21st century child, especially when powerful voices in the sport still frown upon a player celebrating a home run by, shock, horror, flipping a bat in the air. The kind of exuberance that impressionable young minds actually enjoy about any sporting spectacle. Little wonder that in two decades driving around this country, I’ve seen kids on streets and in parks playing unsupervised games of basketball, soccer, football and hockey, but never, not once, baseball.

In 1994, the last lockout caused the cancellation of the World Series and ate into the following season too, causing lingering bitterness that ensured many fans took their time returning. They were eventually lured back by stars belting home runs with a frequency and power scarcely seen before. Wondrous feats made possible by widespread steroid use and authorities conveniently turning a blind-eye saved the sport then. As it happens, nobody is drug testing during this stoppage either so maybe teams are planning on something similarly chemically-enhanced to light up the box office once the dispute is resolved.

“This is the decision baseball and its players face: They can negotiate themselves right into obscurity, or they can start making real compromises,” wrote Evan Grant in the Dallas News last week. “The former is already at risk of happening. If baseball can’t address the latter, the question that’s going to start getting asked should be absolutely scary to all involved: Who cares?”

Less people than you’d think.