Baseball’s almost back, but mutual destruction has been done. On missed opportunities
We’ll have baseball again, real baseball, Major League Baseball, the best hitters in the world guessing 98 mph fastball or soul-stealing slider, the best pitchers in the world walking that tightrope between conviction and staying away from that guy’s nitro zone and ... yay?
I guess?
There are, basically, two types of baseball fans right now: those who’ve followed MLB’s self-destruction closely enough to know the difference between a negotiated restart and the owners implementing a season, and the fans who don’t care about any of that and just want games again.
Neither is wrong. Neither is better than the other.
We all want the same thing, and now — starting July 1 with spring training 2.0, then July 24 or so with games, if it all goes to plan — we’ll have it.
But nobody is celebrating.
This about it like this: The petty infighting from players and owners has both overshadowed that the pandemic remains a monstrous threat to the season and muzzled the sport’s focus on dealing with that problem.
Players won’t wear microphones during games. That’s a small thing, a tiny detail, but it sticks. It represents more. The profits have always been in the details. The reasons we fall in love with sports and each other have always been in the details.
Let’s explore this.
We’ve talked about missed opportunities. Baseball is desperate for new and younger fans, and here comes an opportunity to reach new and younger fans and the sport reacts by falling face-first in the mud.
This sounds strange, but the coronavirus pandemic was a chance for baseball to grow. New audiences. Americans desperate for live sports, for action, for something to bring us together. Instead, men partnered by baseball have shown themselves to be as divided as any group of politicians.
This should have been baseball’s time of opportunity. It could have been among baseball’s best moments. The sport could have experimented — electronic strike zones, enforced pitch clocks, in-game interviews to make baseball’s inherently subtle magic moments come to life.
Instead, bupkis. They’ll adopt the minor leagues’ extra-inning rules, with a runner starting on second base, and the universal DH. Those are considered safety enhancements. The sport needs popularity enhancements.
The microphones. Keep coming back to the mics.
Baseball is a game of personality that for too long masked that color with a robotic and manufactured act-like-you’ve-been-there mantra. The sport’s rhythms provide so much time for thought, for conversation, and while that’s usually a reference to talking through a game with your friend, it’s also the basis of a million stories told in dugouts or on base paths.
Baseball players have learned to fill those gaps with pranks, with jokes, with stories. The sport’s culture is loosening — MLB itself ran a “Let The Kids Play” ad last season, for crying out loud — which means fans are beginning to see more bat flips and walkoff celebrations and the emotions appropriate for a lifetime of work to reach a profession’s pinnacle.
In other words, the curtain that’s always separated fans from players’ passion and how they talk to each other is lifting.
Baseball players, generally speaking, are quick to laugh and hold the game they play in high regard. They can watch a seemingly mundane play and tell you six things you missed. They can watch a 1-2 slider and offer a 5-minute breakdown about the pitch selection, location, whether the pitcher is tiring and what the hitter was expecting.
They can unlock the game’s mysteries. All you have to do is ask.
The microphones. Keep coming back to the mics.
This was chance to grow the game. To present the game in a new way, to new audiences, to offer not just baseball’s aesthetics but its soul.
You might remember in spring training, when the Cubs’ Anthony Rizzo predicted a 2-2 fastball as the pitcher began his delivery and promptly lasered a fastball into right field. The pitch was high, almost certainly ball three, but Rizzo was locked-in enough to get the barrel to it.
“That’s why I choke up there, to get to those pitches,” he told the audience in real time.
That’s a small thing. You might have missed it, or you might have seen it and forgot. We have so much information flying at us, so many highlights, so many moments, all just a thumb’s scroll away.
Which is the point. Baseball has a thick layer of content to break through. The sport’s gems are mostly subtle, and subtle is being pushed out by social media and memes and instantly available entertainment. Baseball needs to live in today, and part of that means pushing the sport’s personalities and hidden strategies toward the front.
Again, the microphones. Keep coming back to the pics.
That was going to be part of the reboot. This season was always going to be shortened — that’s on the virus, not the owners or players — so the sport was more open than ever for change.
Microphones would be part of that, with players speaking directly to broadcasters and fans in a way never before seen in regular-season games. We’d have had a million moments like Rizzo’s, from outfielders throwing good-natured barbs at teammates to hitters breaking down what they saw and felt as it happened.
Picture this: top of the 9th, two on, two out, down two, Whit Merrifield barrels the closer’s 2-0 fastball over the right field fence.
The screams and claps from his Kansas City Royals teammates bounce off the empty Kauffman Stadium bleachers, filling the broadcast with a surreal energy. Merrifield stomps on home plate, yells back at his happy friends, and then immediately takes everyone watching through the triumph — maybe a previous at-bat informed his thinking, or the pitcher’s glove placement told a story, or he simply sold out in a favorable count.
How many new fans might moments like that create? How many people who’d allowed baseball’s nuance and understated style to fade into the background might be pulled ahead by this kind of instant feedback?
How many kids might be made lifelong fans from a new approach like this, particularly when we’re all so starved for action?
Microphones. They won’t be used now, not in those ways, at least, because that would fall under the umbrella of “broadcast enhancements” that required a negotiated restart. There are a million things like this that could’ve given the sport a better runway for success.
That’s all dust now, ashes, because two groups who should be working together have made themselves such bitter enemies that they turned an opportunity to grow into a showcase of mutual destruction. They did this for no better reason than spite.
They are actively harming the game they purportedly love, the game that made many of them rich, all because they wanted to win an argument.
It doesn’t matter which type of fan you are now, the one who knows what a negotiated start is or the one who doesn’t care.
All that matters is there aren’t enough of either.