Whenever Major League Baseball decides to stop treating its fans like spent sunflower seed shells and chewed-through bubble gum, it’s going to have to lure them back to ballparks to buy tickets and overpriced everything else.
How about handing out a special gift to cut through the tension?
A custom-edition foam finger would be nice. Instead of the index finger, the middle digit could stick straight up. It would be a good reminder for fans of how little they have mattered during this lockout. You know, in case they somehow forgot.
It happens, forgetting. I’m guilty of it. I’m lucky if I can make it one week without losing my wallet. When I start feeling good about keeping track of my wallet, I realize I have misplaced my keys.
But I do remember the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Better than I would like. I figured that was something no one could forget. For those of us in the sports world, the time was a very clear reminder of the importance of sports fans.
Robbed temporarily of the lifeblood of their revenue and playing on without the drumbeat to their seasons, teams suffered and games just felt, well, blah. The screeching of nails on a chalkboard now is No. 2 on my list of worst sounds in the world, behind that creepy fake fan noise ballparks pumped through their speakers in 2020.
Last season wasn’t normal, either. The Cardinals, remember, opened in front of a “sold out” crowd of 12,000 in Cincinnati. The 2022 season, finally, was supposed to be the normal one. At least as long as baseball read the room and realized a nation’s distaste for collective bargaining agreement drama after two pandemic-impacted seasons. But baseball didn’t read the room.
It wasted precious time, fought its way into a lockout, and now finds itself in a race to find common ground between players and owners before the cancelation of regular-season games has to be added to a list that includes a snuffed free agency, wiped out winter fan events and a mangled (at best) spring training.
Whenever the owners get around to talking again instead of hiding behind human punching bag and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, the question will be asked.
How could they do this to baseball fans?
The best-case scenario is that the game’s stewards somehow forgot how much a nation needed a normal season out of its national pastime.
The worst-case scenario is more likely, unfortunately.
They know what they are doing, and they think it is worth it.
Are we really supposed to believe that leaders of a sport who have become obsessed with value didn’t run a plus-minus on this mess before it began?
The owners who instituted this lockout and moved glacially slow on even the most reasonable asks from players during negotiations will do things like keep a player at the Class AAA level for an extra week in order to delay his free agency years later. Are we really supposed to think they did not at least consider the financial blowback that could come from fans if the regular season gets scarred? Sorry, I’m not buying that. Whatever cost-benefit analysis being used here has the owners convinced this approach will be worth it in the long run.
What I’m not so sure about is if the owners did their math right. The longer this goes on, the more likely it becomes that they underestimated fans’ future forgiveness. Messing with spring training is one thing. Messing with the regular season? It’s a different game. Simply blaming players doesn’t work as well as it used to, and fans know who started the lockout.
Even diehard fans are suffering from boiling blood now. The more who start thinking about how they are the ones paying for the revenue pie owners and players would rather fight about than play to earn, the more empty seats there could be on a potentially delayed opening day. No, it did not have to be this way. No matter what happens next, don’t forget that part.
I feel very foolish, embarrassed even, for hoping baseball’s navigation of the unavoidable disaster that was the pandemic might inspire its caretakers to sidestep the entirely avoidable labor disaster everyone saw coming for years.
I will always remember thinking after spring training was canceled in 2020 that maybe, just maybe, something good for baseball could come out of so much bad.
“Baseball is a great, great sport and a great thing for people to look to when there is hardship for any of us,” Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr., said back then, the day the team’s camp was shuttered. “It is the American game. Always has been. I think when baseball comes back, playing it will be a big lift for the country.”
They forgot, or worse.
If the regular season becomes mangled, they better hope they are right in thinking the fans will be forgetful, too.
