DETROIT – ‘Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America better learn baseball,” the French historian Jacques Barzun famously wrote back in 1954, the year Willie Mays made his famous catch in the World Series. For a brief moment, I was thrilled earlier this month when the baseball strike was suddenly settled, and it was announced that there would be a full season.
For a moment, that is. Then I read the full agreement, and realized that what was once truly America’s national game was getting even further away from the game I once loved.
Yes, you are welcome to say that I am an old fogey, and you could even use another word stronger than that. I happily plead guilty — but I still believe greed has largely ruined the game.
Greed on the part of both the owners and the players. Flash back to one of baseball’s greatest moments: October 8, 1951, when Bobby Thomson hit the “shot heard round the world,” the stunning ninth-inning home run that capped a miracle comeback that won the Giants the National League pennant.
Even the most casual baseball fan has heard the recording of announcer Russ Hodges yelling over and over, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”
That meant that the Giants went to the World Series — and the Dodgers, who were in first place for most of that season, were done. Today, all that epic home run would have barely mattered, because both teams would go to the playoffs.
No other sport has nearly as many games every year as baseball: 162. The season is that long partly to test all the skills of the players and the managers and make sure that the really best teams win.
Now, with seemingly endless rounds of playoffs, the regular season means less and less. There are too many teams — 30 — and under the new agreement, a dozen will be in the playoffs.
They want more playoffs, because that means more games and more revenue, especially television revenue. That also means that the seasons now start in March and can continue into November. You don’t have to be very religious to realize that the gods did not intend for people to play baseball outside in Detroit in either month.
Increasingly, everything is for sale. Nearly 40 years ago, when I was doing some political and economic reporting from Japan, I paused to do what a somewhat patronizing story on Japanese baseball. I was fascinated by the fact that Japan was the only other major country where baseball ever really caught on, but I made fun of the way they had commercialized the sport. Why, they allowed corporations to own and name teams and stadiums!
That would have been unthinkable here, I thought. Fifth Third Field and Comerica Park were far in the future then. Next year, however, we will up the ante by allowing teams to place advertising on players’ jerseys and helmets. The year after that, they are making the bases bigger, presumably to ensure more baserunners. Though some of the most refined baseball comes in what used to be called “pitchers’ duels,” low-scoring games attract fewer viewers.
Similarly, the National League has finally followed the American League in adopting the designated hitter, which greatly changes and distorts the strategy of the game.
But hey, it causes more home runs, and means pitchers almost never pitch a complete game. Back in 1982, I did a feature story for The Blade on Mickey Lolich, the pitching hero of the 1968 World Series, who was then running a suburban donut shop.
His top salary had been about $130,000 (about $540,000 in today’s dollars) and he complained bitterly about the quarter-million dollar salaries lesser pitchers were making after he retired.
Today, Max Scherzer, a pitcher who, like Lolich, was once with the Detroit Tigers and moved on to the Mets, makes $43.3 million a year, not counting endorsement deals, etc. He is unlikely to ever have to run a donut shop, or dig graves in the off-season, as Richie Hebner, a teammate of Lolich’s back in the day, actually did.
The Detroit Tigers, who were baseball’s worst team for a few years and finally moved up last year to mediocre-minus, are now spending lavishly to try and buy enough players to assemble a winning team. That is not how baseball teams used to be assembled.
Teams largely trained their own talent in the minor leagues, supplemented by a few smart trades. A solid core of Detroit Tigers played together from 1965 t0 1974, for example, and fans knew them and their quirks almost as if they were family.
Teams, in the old sense, are not what we have today. Now, there is evidence that I am wrong about the game being ruined. Far more people go to games today. That legendary 1951 New York Giants team drew barely a million fans, fewer than the putrid (47-114) 2019 Detroit Tigers did.
Some teams have drawn as many as four million fans in a single season. In 1951, several teams drew less than half a million.
Yet while everyone loves to quote Jacques Barzun, few know that even he gave up on the game. In 2007, when he was a still-alert 100 years old, he said “I’ve gotten so disgusted with baseball, I don’t follow it any more. The commercialization … it’s a disaster.”
He always thought baseball was the key to the American soul. I used to hope, and now I fear, that he was right.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
