MLB lockout threatens to alienate faithful KC Royals fans with spring training plans
Richard Gerald Mulligan was born in 1886, farmed in Cass County and was among the first generation of zealous baseball fans. At lunch, he sometimes became so consumed with newspaper accounts of the game that his wife, Ida, had to nudge him back to work. Baseball would become part of the soundtrack of his life, always in the background as the years passed by and the game became a staple of radio and, later, television.
In his late 80s, he moved in with the family of his daughter, Jerry, and passed his love for the game down to yet another generation. His dedication to even late-night West Coast games forever stayed with granddaughter Nancy Hanson — who cherishes the memory of hearing his rocking chair creaking back and forth from his darkened room as he listened along no matter the hour.
Just over 100 years after her grandfather was born, Nancy Hanson and her husband, Phil, had their first child, Mark. And as with so many families when it comes to baseball, the love of what was once America’s pastime was handed down and embraced yet again as Mark toddled into the world in a home where baseball always was on TV and soon became fascinated with the game.
That ultimately helps explain why spring training this year became the destination location for a family celebration of a poignant anniversary in Mark’s life.
“He’s always loved baseball,” Nancy Hanson said. “And we have celebrated important events in his life with baseball.”
The fact that those games may not be played evidently is of trifling concern to MLB owners who imposed the lockout in December. And maybe it’s of meager consequence to the MLB Players Association.
But it will make all the difference to a family that booked roundtrip flights for eight, rented an expensive Vrbo for a week, reserved two rental cars and bought tickets for two games with plans to go to more.
Their tale makes for a compelling microcosm of the broader point about the increasingly precarious place of baseball in our lives.
You may be like me and feel most of the onus is on the owners, or you may figure the players are to blame. Or something in between. But from a certain distance they’re really all in this together: To most people, it’s just one big indecipherable blob of greed vs. entitlement.
As we all sit in limbo waiting for reconciliation of what most fans see simply as a battle of billionaires against millionaires, the perennial rhythm of the season and place of the game in our culture is being further cast off its axis.
Every day the lockout persists, and further threatens the start and length and integrity of the season, baseball fritters away more goodwill and further alienates the very core of its existence: That would be the fans who still want to love it — even amid its ebbing appeal to younger audiences — but that the game insists on kicking in the teeth.
This story might seem to be about just one family’s forever devotion to the game, not to mention it’s frustration as it prepares to embark on a long-planned and touchingly motivated trip to spring training. But it’s also a snapshot of the fan-base that baseball shrugs off at its peril.
The idea of the game as a focal point of people’s lives already is in jeopardy, with a 2017 Sports Business Journal survey showing its fans are the oldest average age (57) among major professional sports and as prices increase and access is oddly less available because of the bizarre disconnect on the ability to even watch Royals games.
Meanwhile, one week of spring training games already has been canceled, and the prospects are diminishing for there being action when eight members of the Hanson family are scheduled to go to Arizona from March 13th to 19th.
For her part, Nancy Hanson says if that turns out to be the case she’ll be more disappointed than angry. But disappointed in the way that perhaps sends a shudder through you like it does me: the way a mother might say it to a misbehaving child.
“The look I would be giving the major league owners would be, like, ‘Really? Really? You thought that was appropriate to do that?’ ” said Hanson, who retired from Hallmark after 37 years. “Maybe they need a mom … Somebody needs to give them the ‘mom’ look.”
She managed a laugh as she said that, but there’s ample truth in her point.
And plenty of her exasperation with it is from another element of being a mother of three whose oldest attached himself to the game almost as young as possible. By the time he was around 6 or 7, by his recollection, Mark was looking at The Star every day the Royals played and logging the score on a computer file.
“I can’t really remember not being a Royals fan,” said Mark Hanson, now a certified medication technician.
Over time, that’s come to mean the 33-year-old has a Royals golf bag and that his phone screen-saver nearly always features Royals imagery. It’s come to mean that he sometimes seeks out the 2014 American League Wild-Card game on YouTube, and that he recently switched service providers to avoid the infuriating mess underscoring watching the Royals.
The game is so ingrained in him that he’s in a fantasy baseball league with a bunch of guys in their 60s since, in part, he doesn’t think he could get a league together with buddies his age.
It’s also become a bit of a tradition that he’ll take his wife, Kate, to opening day to celebrate her April birthday.
“Now I have to think of a different idea,” he said, with a rueful laugh.
The spring training trip was predicated on something else deeply meaningful in his life.: With the fifth anniversary of his sobriety approaching in January, his mother pitched attending his first spring training as a way to have a family celebration of the momentous occasion.
“That would be incredible,” Mark said.
At this point, though, it may or may not be the full experience they were hoping for.
Sure, Nancy and Phil (the president and CEO of the Truman Heartland Community Foundation) and their three children and significant others would still make a good time of this trip. They know they can get their money back for the game tickets in Surprise and hike or golf more and have a great time.
But if the games aren’t being played, it sure won’t be the same as what they set out to do.
“There’s an outside chance they’ll play; I’m still holding out hope,” Mark said, before adding, “But it’s kind of dwindling by the day right now.”
So baseball will stack up yet another loss if it disillusions a family with baseball coursing through its blood for a century-plus. Surely, it’s one among many just like it that only feel heartbreak instead of seeing sides in what looks like a gratuitous battle from the outside.
“Nobody’s going to feel bad for you when you’re making ($570,500 minimum) a year,” Mark said. “Then again, you’ve got the billionaire owners.”
Add it all up, and this lifelong fan who typically reads voraciously about the game is so disgusted by what he sees now that he feels “out of touch with baseball.
”It’s just been difficult; I’m not going to lie,” he said.
He stops short of saying “it’s going to scar baseball for me.”
But the fact he even invoked that term as he voiced his concerns is part of something deeper baseball best heed: It’s one thing to be losing popularity in general but quite another to agitate even the truest of believers from a long lineage of the faithful that has been such a part of the romance of the game itself.
This story was originally published February 25, 2022 at 9:45 AM.