When team owners commit some craven act of penny-pinching at the expense of better, more interesting baseball and the reaction focuses on how that’s just good business sense, or even if it scoffs at how predictable this all is, that lets owners off the hook from having to do it differently. Cynicism is an abdication of responsibility for ourselves and others. It’s an easy default to seem savvy and world-weary, which is generally justified but does not justify the disaffection that often accompanies it. We can expect the people who have the power to impact these things to care about it too.Ĭynicism is often accurate, but it’s not ambitious. We can decide that it’s not actually mawkishly naive to care or even talk about The Good Of The Game. We - not a royal ‘we’ but a specific subset of the media and the most vocal of fans - can refuse to throw up our hands in resignation and simply say “baseball is a business” by way of explanation without bothering to interrogate it further. That said: we can accept this and plan to navigate it, mitigate it when necessary, without preemptively capitulating to the more damaging effects that capitalism can have on the sport. And every time, it seems like The Good Of The Game will lose out. This isn’t intended to be puritanical civility scolding about the impropriety of public salary conversations (declassify all corporate economic information as far as I’m concerned) but rather an accommodation of the reality that often the bottom line is at odds with The Good Of The Game - by which I mean it’s overall vitality, popularity, aesthetic value, and the consumer experience. But as a transactional matter, sports fandom involves handing over increasingly more money in exchange for the enjoyable, intangible fiction that the people involved are motivated by something other than money - that is, winning - and so, from a purely practical standpoint, the whole thing loses a little of its luster when that is routinely undermined. It’s tempting to dismiss the sort of fans who feel that way (or at least tweet that way), and the ones who use a rhetorical willingness to play for free to bludgeon the earning aspirations of professionals deserve to be dismissed. Doing so makes you a sucker for funding these greedy elites squabbling over the chance to get rich off a game - or at least that’s how it seems sometimes. It’s why anyone does this it’s also why it’s hard to be a baseball fan as adult. The people in charge are motivated by money. This is happening all the time, I have to think, and so it’s not that this particular moment in baseball labor relations is special or even uniquely disenchanting, but maybe people are saying it more than ever, or more people are saying it, or more people are seeing what’s being said - or now just happens to be when I’m allowed to talk about it.īaseball is a business. (This will be a baseball column soon, I promise.)
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