The Greedy Financial Leeches Slowly Absorbing Baseball's Lifeblood
#SellTheTeam
Money has already been poisoning sports in the United States, but there perhaps is no greater victim than the sport of baseball.
Now, this is not one of those doom-and-gloom articles about how baseball is dying and may not survive the end of this generation. MLB to be honest is way too big to fail.
That being said, we have seen a plethora of worrying storylines and trends that revolves around greed and always seeking the almighty dollar even if it risks the quality of the product entirely.
For starters, we have seen the owners in baseball prefer profits over quality to an even greater extent than usual, and they have been greatly supported by the polarizing and business-centric Rob Manfred---probably the most disliked commissioner in professional sports in this entire hemisphere. We are seeing the Oakland Athletics fall apart as a franchise as they face an uncertain future, and we don’t even know where they’ll be a few years from now. This is an issue that can be resolved today, but instead Manfred has allowed As ownership to do whatever they want, much to the chagrin of the longtime fans.
It’s not receiving as much attention in sports media for reasons I’ll tackle later, but the Athletics dilemma has become the biggest fandom protest in the entire history of baseball. Not a single game goes by without seeing the protests in forms of signs, t-shirts, hats, chants, and all of this is happening in Oakland AND other stadiums across the country. They’re even tailgating before home games and ending up not going inside the stadium. But its not just the Oakland Athletics in terms of (forced, unnecessary, greedy, and ridiculous) relocating, we are seeing similar actions elsewhere with minimal worry from Manfred and his upper-level cronies.
The Tampa Bay Rays, Kansas City Royals, and even the long-standing Chicago White Sox have had ownership hint and flirt with ideas of moving their franchises elsewhere, likely as a way to curry up some taxpayer money, but sadly the strategy has a history of working. Nonetheless, it is never healthy or good for a league to see so many instances of teams switching teams or even threatening to. But here we are with many teams not only considering, but also doing severe financial cutbacks to save money, collect the profits, and then decide what to do next.
No league where fanbases have to ponder year to year if the current season going to their home team’s games will be their last. This is no fun way to fandom. Teams aren’t spending, teams aren’t competing, letting the bigger fish absorb all the spending to keep the interest in baseball high, and then secretly get the lion’s share while the fanbases they’re in charge of constantly witness great talent disappear after the rookie deals are up. Capitalism is where you spend money to make money, while these owners are practicing in extreme capitalism where they want to snatch as much wealth as possible instead using the paths of least resistance and risk.
I’m sure a big reason for expanding the playoffs is so that the cheaper teams by cheap ownership can still stay in the race and keep the fans interested and hopeful. But of course, the playoff format we’re seeing has this backwards-effect of devaluing the regular season, as now with more openings, the urgency drops a bit. Even worse, if the random teams winning 10-20 games less than their competitors keep ending up riding all the way to the championship, then maybe even the large-market teams will stop spending.
Then to keep MLB as the undisputed baseball king with no challenger, the league also declawed the wild entertaining world of Minor League Baseball, cutting down the number of teams, controlling their methodology of marketing and player development. They’ve even gone after the independent leagues, essentially forcing all the baseball leagues to remain connected at the hip with MLB. What makes this all the more tragic is how baseball already has a terrible TV blackout problem which mean some of these “flyover cities” and “flyover states” who depended on local baseball to get their fix because of disconnected access to their favorite teams will have even fewer options to pick from while trying to watch baseball.
Baseball has very likely lost some of their small market fans to college football with decisions made in the last 20 years. With all of these changes, baseball stopped being America’s Pastime as they’ve made it harder for entire swaths of America to actually watch/listen/attend said baseball. But not all of this is because of MLB, you might want to look elsewhere to see how money has affected baseball’s growth and popularity.
ESPN and Fox Sports have obviously been diverting their focus away from baseball and more towards football and even basketball within the last decade as the respective companies have invested more money towards said leagues associated with the sports. ESPN is owned by Disney, whose CEO has strong ties to the NBA’s current commissioner Adam Silver. So with the strong partnership, elevated immensely by the Covid Bubble postseason, Disney has spent great money on securing the rights to the NBA’s biggest games, whether it be the playoffs, the finals, and their infamous in-season tournament.
Disney has also greatly increased their interest in college football, especially as the NIL Era has opened the door wide open for more money, more profits, and more playoff action in the future. So of course, with more invested towards other sports, ESPN and Fox Sports have stopped being as balanced in their focus on the sports available in the United States, despite their popularity. There’s a reason why Disney Springs ended up with the NBA Experience when an ESPN Zone would have been significantly more successful in that space. (R.I.P. DisneyQuest, never forget)
One hilarious example of the unbalanced coverage and interest among sports media and broadcasting is the yearly must-see-tv El Clasico between Barcelona and Real Madrid being buried to ESPN Espanol despite the yearly viewership crowd of 400 MILLION, and in the Sportscenter and news segments being nothing more than a blurb before deciding to spend another 45 minutes on the upcoming NFL Draft.
A huge part of the popularity of Patrick Mahomes and LeBron James is the amount of attention they receive on these sports news segments, usually keeping baseball coverage light unless the Yankees start winning or something wild happens (Like Ohtani being Ohtani). So even the biggest sport in the entire universe, soccer, will remain a footnote in U.S. sports news coverage, especially as Major League Soccer has become an exclusive Apple TV product. The fastest-growing sport in the world, cricket, has also remained largely ignored.
Money dictates how much coverage a league receives and I promise you in the near future the WNBA under the latest crop of young stars is going to end up with even more coverage from ESPN than MLB, despite the sport having a fraction of baseball’s popularity. This is nothing against the woman’s basketball league, but you can follow the money and realize that Disney has poured more money to showcase the games and therefore the incentive to pump more popularity to the product will end up silently downgrading MLB and the product it produces. MLB remains the second or third most-popular sport in the U.S., but you’d never realize it from watching the biggest sports media channels and networks.
Its kind of a funny irony how in baseball’s internal greed, they’re not realizing that their product is stagnating because of other powers also having greed and profits as their motive. So, whether the harming of baseball is coming from the inside or from outside sources, money overall has really become a major obstacle in the sport’s overall growth among sports fans throughout the western hemisphere, when it truly has so many opportunities to elevate the game to new heights.
Unfortunately, the owners would have to agree and sign off on a variety of the solutions that exist within MLB’s control if they really wanted to enhance the product and reach out to potential new fans and rescue longtime fans who might be tuning out:
End the blackouts.
Improve the starting times of regular season and playoff games. Especially the World Series.
Offer free-entrance baseball games at least once a year so low-income families finally have their chance to physically see a game, growing the game even more with better accessibility.
Shorten the season. Split the season.
Make playoffs exciting again (maybe give the World Series the Gold Cup treatment and make it bi-annual?)
Have an MLB team in Mexico, maybe also bring it back to Montreal.
Force clauses in ownership contracts that demands the group cannot move the baseball franchise they own for at minimum 25 years, and the clock resets if and whenever the team gets sold.
Salary floor. Expanded rosters. Better pay for minor league players. This bears repeating, but a salary floor is definitely necessary.
More baseball tournaments within international baseball teams and maybe even minor league ballclubs, similar to U.K.’s mega-popular F.A. Cup. Incentive playoff and tournament success with expanded revenue sharing, and punish those just delivering bad teams with no effort.
As I stated in the beginning, this isn’t meant to be my declaration of MLB’s downfall, its more so my complaint in how the league and its ownership and executives have taken greed to new levels and therefore has damaged the product and made it difficult for new fans to join. Rob Manfred has transformed the baseball league into a money-first model that values finances above everything else, even if some of his greed-based ideas have worked (extra-inning runner on 2nd, the controversial pitch clock).
Baseball deserves better. Baseball fans, especially those living in Oakland, Kansas City, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, South Side Chicago, and Tampa Bay, deserves significantly better. And hopefully, down the road, the owners will realize how much damage they’re causing, and how much money they’re actually leaving on the table while pursuing expanding their own pockets at minimal actual cost.
#SellTheTeam