A Rebuttal

My State of the Game Address

Since I’m not writing about a specific player or team this week, I thought I’d use a pic I took earlier this season at Kauffman Stadium. This was from a Fireworks Friday win over the A’s I attended with my dad and my sons.

I’ll try to keep this short and sweet for once, and I’ll probably fail.

As we near the All-Star break, this is as good a time to reflect as any. The other day, I heard someone pose the question, is baseball dying? As fellow baseball fans, I’m sure you’ve heard this question many times before. It’s a question people have been asking for over a century, in fact. That we’re still watching and talking about the game seems to be answer enough, but I’m all for overkill, so I thought I’d take a crack at answering the question myself.

Is baseball dying? No, and it’s a dumb question. (Hang on, there’s more.) I don’t need to point to the billions of dollars flowing through the sport or record overall attendance numbers to prove it either. Although, speaking of attendance numbers, nobody look at Oakland. But that brings me to a better question.

Is baseball thriving? That one’s a little trickier to answer. Diehards will point to the previous paragraph as proof that it is, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Sure, combined attendance is great, but the distribution is unequal. Even taking Oakland out of the equation, something’s off. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching the Phillies play in front of a packed house, especially in October, but anybody who watched the 2023 Royals (I know why I watched, but why did you?) knows that wasn’t the story everywhere.

Kansas City has a great fanbase, but we’ve been treated to some of the worst baseball imaginable for the last six years. Thankfully, this season has been a welcome reprieve, but it’s hard to dig out of the hole they’ve dug in a single competitive half-season. I think Kauffman Stadium is one of the greatest places on Earth, but you can’t fault people for not coming out to the park, especially when it’s not exactly cheap, if you’re going to regularly offer an inferior product.

The lone oasis of good baseball in recent Kansas City history, 2013-17, proves fans will come out in record numbers if the team is competitive. Some folks will label them fair weather fans, but no team is entitled to your time and interest. Realistic fans don’t demand championships every season, but they aren’t wrong to expect regular relevance. Despite their best start in years, it’s taking time for Royals fans to come back to the K, and as the team has slumped in recent weeks, the resiliency of those fans is being tested.

To make matters worse, the Royals have spent much of the last couple of years alienating a substantial portion of the fanbase over a new stadium. I’m not going to get into the weeds on whether cities and counties should be obligated to finance stadiums for billionaires (they shouldn’t), but Kansas City isn’t the only place where this kind of battle is taking place.

Oakland’s stadium drama is well-publicized, Tampa’s stadium issue has been ongoing for years, and Jerry Reinsdorf is threatening to move the White Sox again. I mean, Tampa doesn’t have much history, and even though the A’s have only resided in Oakland during my lifespan, they are the nomad franchise of major league baseball. But moving the White Sox out of Chicago? That’s too much for me. It’s hard to feel much allegiance to a team if you feel like you’re being held hostage by them. Especially if your team isn’t even trying to compete.

Coming out of the 1994 Strike, the economics of baseball were all out of whack. It was virtually impossible for small market teams to compete. Thankfully, some corrections were made, but it’s still slanted heavily toward larger market teams. (To be fair though, I don’t want to hear any billionaire owner cry poverty.) Baseball is the most regional major sport, so unlike with the NFL and NBA, if your hometown team sucks, you’re much less likely to connect with another.

Of course, thanks to a salary cap, this is much less of an issue in the NFL and NBA. If a team sucks for an extended amount of time in those leagues, it’s usually because of inept management, and has nothing to do with an economic imbalance. Moronic management can be replaced, but fixing a rigged system is a lot trickier. I realize it sounds counterintuitive, but until the MLBPA (the most powerful player union in American sports) is convinced it’s actually in their long-term interest, a salary cap isn’t going to happen.

Which is too bad, because on the field, the product is better than it has been in years.* Rob Manfred is an awful commissioner, but most of the new rules he’s instituted have been positive. There are always going to be holdouts who will never come around (baseball fans are still complaining about the DH fifty years later, after all), but even the adoption of the pitch clock, arguably the biggest change to the fundamental rules of the game in my lifetime, has been surprisingly smooth.

*The modern game still has plenty of flaws. The hitting is abysmal, thanks to overpowered pitching and selling out for home runs. Baseball will be a lot better when it rediscovers the importance of simply making contact. It might take a while, but, perhaps naively, I believe baseball will eventually correct itself in that regard. And in the meantime, at least the pace has improved.

I agree with the stubborn old heads who believe baseball shouldn’t need a clock, but here’s the thing. Baseball shouldn’t need a clock, but it did. In a single season-and-a-half, it’s already had a dramatic effect on the game, making it so much closer to the game I fell in love with in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

I won’t get into blocking the plate or breaking up double plays here, but now that the pitch clock has sped up the game, can we get rid of the Manfred runner in extra innings? It’s the one rule change I think most of us hate. I’m not sure it actually results in too many more runs, and since the games are shorter now anyway, who cares if extra-inning games run long?

More importantly, the doomsday prophets are always bringing up the kids. It’s true baseball has lost ground with kids and the fanbase skews older, but I also think this problem is grossly exaggerated. Nothing I’ve seen makes me think baseball will be dead and gone two generations from now. Lots of kids still play little league (including my own), and the ballpark is full of kids every time I go to a game.

The key is hanging onto them, but here’s why I think the problem is a little overblown. Baseball is one of those games that really gets its hooks in you when you’re young, and it doesn’t let go easily. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to live and breathe it continuously. My middle son is a great example. He was all about baseball twenty-four hours a day two years ago, but now it’s on the back burner. He still likes the game, but he’s got new interests. Music, girls, that sort of thing. But I’m confident he’ll eventually come back.

The same thing happened to me. At one point in my life, I had little time for sports. I was devoting myself to “more important” things. But here I am, in my forties, writing a newsletter about baseball. Crazy how that works.

Just because I believe the problem is exaggerated, however, doesn’t mean I think it doesn’t exist at all. MLB could do so much better at promoting its superstars, of which they have many. I don’t why it is such a struggle for them to get behind players like Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Ronald Acuna, just to name a few. But somehow, MLB finds a way to screw it up.

And of course, it wouldn’t hurt if MLB made it easier to watch games in general. In my opinion, the accessibility issue is the biggest problem facing baseball, especially as the cost of attending games continues to climb. It’s 2024, it shouldn’t be so difficult for me to watch my hometown team on TV. The fact that I, and so many others, continue to jump through hoops to do it every year is maybe the best proof that baseball isn’t dying anytime soon. But MLB would be wise to not take us for granted.

Let’s face facts. Baseball isn’t ever catching football. Not in our lifetimes anyway. Football is king, and basketball is second-in-command, but that doesn’t mean baseball is failing. It’s got its work cut out for itself to protect its portion of the market, and if the powers that be are smart about it, they might even manage to expand its imprint.

I’m not sure I trust them to do so— MLB has proven it excels at shooting itself in the foot— but I’m not predicting the death of baseball either. Despite all the talk, baseball never dies, although it sometimes feels like it’s hibernating.

Here’s hoping it’s about to wake up.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. This might be the last edition for a while. Hopefully, that didn’t elicit too many cheers from the peanut gallery, but life and some other projects are conspiring against me, and there are only so many hours in the day. That means PBN will be on temporary hiatus for a bit. I’m not sure how long the break will be, but hopefully we’ll be talking baseball again sooner than later. In the meantime, as we head into the All-Star break, I thought it was a good time to reflect on the state of the game. Feel free to agree or disagree or share your own thoughts in the comments.