"THIS SUCKS!": To say it's been a bad week for Major League Baseball is putting it mildly. The All-Star Game was called off in extra innings because neither team had any pitchers left. Irate fans were, rightly, demanding refunds. After the non-game, an unhappy young fan was asked by Fox News for a comment as he left the stadium. "This sucks," the lad replied. Make that kid the State Department's spokesman! Apparently, TV viewers thought it sucked from the git-go: ratings were down about 9% from last year's All-Star Game broadcast.
Compounding baseball's woes are rumors of a possible strike. (There's something more than funny about millionaires on strike.) Just before labor negotiations were set to resume today,
baseball commish Dud Selig claimed that one team may not make its payroll next week and another team may not have the funds to finish this season. He declined to name the teams.
What accounts for Major League Baseball's current state of sucky-ness? There's no shortage of fingerpointing. Players blaming stingy owners. Owners blaming greedy players. And some blame the commissioner. Check out
this AP photo of Dud Selig just moments before he called the All-Star game. Dud's body language isn't exactly what's associated with the histrionics of bold leadership. If anything, that photograph is a fitting symbol of baseball's sorry state. Judging from the accompanying article, New York Post columnist Michael Morrissey thinks Dud is responsible much of MLB's rot : "Once again, the priorities of millionaire players came at the expense of fans. In the middle of the 11th inning, Torre and Brenly reconsidered their decisions to use All-Stars as liberally as toilet paper and asked the most ineffectual leader in sports to bail them out. In front of his hometown fans and with people all over the world watching live, Selig played his role of incompetent, idea-bereft commissioner to the hilt during a conference with the managers."
That Selig is in over his head is obvious. But the problem pre-dates the Selig era and is more fundamental than players demanding too much or owners paying too little. Major League Baseball has gradually abandoned its core business: selling tickets to fans. Instead, the league and its owners concentrate on selling broadcast rights, selling merchandising rights and conning local and state governments into providing taxpayer-funded stadiums. In other words, MLB has removed the customer, i.e. the ticket-buyer, from the economic equation. The consequences are obvious: embarrassingly low paid-attendance at stadiums, exorbitant ticket and concession prices, declining television ratings and, as this week's All-Star Game demonstrated, an inferior product.
