From brink of ‘disastrous outcome,’ baseball is back and somehow we can’t stay angry
Albeit from an infuriating predicament entirely of their own making, Major League Baseball and the Players Association summoned an epic comeback on Thursday. One that somehow averted the looming “disastrous outcome” that commissioner Rob Manfred himself recently forecast if the MLB-imposed lockout led to canceling regular-season games.
For the time being, anyway, that stigma evidently was forestalled with a tentative agreement, first reported by ESPN’s Jeff Passan, that was ratified Thursday night.
And so against our better judgment, our first impulse is to feel relief and even some degree of exhilaration about the prospect of an intact 162-game regular season beginning on April 7 … and Royals players reporting (to say nothing of the rest of baseball) to spring training in Surprise, Arizona … and now being able to full-on anticipate the big-league debut of Bobby Witt Jr., the would-be catalyst for a fresh frontier of Royals relevance and contention.
While the specter of the 1994 strike and the near-ruinous ripples loomed over all this, it mercifully evaporated before that ill will could completely seize the scene again. And galling and contentious as the 99-day lockout was, the resumption of baseball surely was salvaged in time to be a particularly welcome rite of this spring.
Exasperated as we’ve been by this mess, it turns out we’re still channeling the ever-gullible Charlie Brown, suckers for Lucy teeing the football back up for us.
Because as we all seek diversion from a world in considerable disarray and can at least envision an emergence from the pandemic on the horizon, if not right before us, what says “normal” more than having baseball assume its traditional role in lifting us out of winter?
Especially now, in what to some degree feels like a two-year winter since COVID-19 convulsed the world right at this time in 2020?
Who knows how the two sides ultimately came to realize, at least in theory, that the only real win for each was to strike a deal ASAP … if not sooner?
With each passing day, they risked inflicting further damage, and some irrevocably, on the soul of the game and its well-spring and reason for being: the fans who mostly only see this as billionaires vs. millionaires and were further being alienated at a time the game’s popularity has long been sagging to begin with.
As baseball reconvenes amid what is sure to be a furious flurry of transactions with some 200 major league free agents stranded in amber since the lockout was imposed in December, the general relationship between ownership and players figures to be slow to thaw.
Happily enough, the Royals might be understood to enjoy an exception to that foul dynamic.
In a recent radio appearance on the “Cody and Gold” Show on KCSP (610 AM), the team’s union representative, Whit Merrifield, made it a point to distinguish Kansas City’s CEO and chairman John Sherman from the broader group.
Merrifield spoke of how Sherman is in the business for the “right reasons” and loves the game and added: “I guarantee you if we had 29 other owners like John Sherman and the ownership group that we have, at least from what I’ve heard from (president Dayton Moore), we wouldn’t be in this position anyway,” he said.
Still, that’s just a sliver of the bigger picture of baseball within which the Royals must live. Trust has been in short supply between the sides for decades now, and bridging that will be a monumental challenge. And maybe that wariness is destined to just be part of the DNA of the game forever more.
But the most glaring ongoing issue for baseball isn’t that relationship. It’s in its inherent and essential compact with fans, plenty of whom have felt betrayed in these last few months as they fretted over when the season would begin because of the posturing and preening in what Manfred blithely shrugged off as “the art of the process.”
Tell that to all the people in the tourist industry in Arizona and Florida who depend on spring training for their livelihood and sense of community and culture.
Tell it to all those in industry-related jobs, left in limbo and doubt.
And tell it to the families who made elaborate and expensive plans to attend spring training, some for the first time ever, only to have that be collateral damage in “the process.”
It’s not just that baseball came off as so oblivious or insensitive to all this in the lockout.
(Though, here again we’ll add that the Royals proved an exception: As far as we know, Moore was the only one holding such an office to speak to fans through the media after MLB announced it had postponed the regular season. Along with his abundant diplomatic skills and evident integrity, his conviction in speaking about the “heart of baseball” made us wish he were the commissioner.)
It’s that baseball already had been at a crossroads, a pastoral game in a speed-of-sound world. Even before the pandemic threw everything asunder in 2020, MLB attendance was in decline for seven straight seasons.
That’s doubtless a reflection of a pace of play that moves like molasses compared to other sports … at a time when perpetual motion and instant gratification is everything.
There’s a reason that a 2017 Sports Business Journal survey revealed that the average age of a baseball fan is 57, older than any fan base among major professional sports. And it doesn’t help the Royals that their television package remains a fiasco, leaving many of us wondering how we will even be able to watch them.
So now that baseball is past this absurdity, its next challenge is, in fact, the more fundamental one of dealing with the status quo.
Still, as much as we want to stay mad about what’s happened, we’d also be lying if we didn’t say we can’t wait for the season to unfold and, most of all, follow the trajectory the intriguing Royals are on.
Even if all isn’t forgiven from here exactly, somehow “play ball” still has a certain stirring resonance that even this nonsense has yet to douse. Stepping away from the brink of that relative disaster of canceling games, as it happens, feels much different than actual disaster.
This story was originally published March 10, 2022 at 9:34 PM.