Loving baseball this spring has been pretty hard. I’d feel a lot worse if I didn’t know it has been an awfully difficult three months to be a fan of anything.
This week, baseball — we have been told — is officially back. Technically this is true. Commissioner Rob Manfred is indeed setting a schedule that will hopefully begin around July 24 and end on Sept. 27, with the playoffs and World Series immediately thereafter. Barring COVID-19 outbreaks that make playing out a season impossible — far from an absurd possibility — there will be baseball in some form this summer.
But the process to get here has been depressing to watch. And what has Major League Baseball learned from this experience? That could be depressing, too.
But the process to get here has been depressing to watch. And what has Major League Baseball learned from this experience? That could be depressing, too.
It is one thing for a team sport to be forced to shut down because of COVID-19: Every professional American contact sports league has had to do so, and, so far, none have found their way back, though the National Women’s Soccer League and Major League Soccer are getting close. But it is quite another to have your delay extended not because of health protocols or safety concerns but because management and labor have decided that, of all times, this is the exact moment to have a knockdown, drag-out fight to the death over what, at the end of the day, are relatively minor financial issues.
Baseball could have returned on July 4, the first North American team sport to return, with millions of fans salivating to watch even the most banal, uninspiring game. Instead, with unemployment at record highs, unprecedented cultural upheaval and a deadly pandemic — not to mention the high emotions already stirred up by a presidential election year — baseball dithered with an endless cavalcade of Zoom spitballs for three weeks. And they never did end up coming to an agreement.
The fact that we may now have some semblance of a season is not because the two sides came to an agreement; they just ran out of time and thus punted all their discussions until December 2021, when their current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires. That not only means that all this in-fighting was pointless; it means we’re just going to have to go through it all again in a year-and-a-half.
The sport, having a fight over money in the middle of a national catastrophe, couldn’t have done more harm to itself if it had hired an outside hitman. I love baseball as much as I love anything in the world, and I kept finding myself downright ashamed to be a baseball fan. I wasn’t the only one wondering if baseball was actively self-destructing.
Except: Look at how everyone reacted to the news that baseball was returning. (Read the comments.)
Baseball fans have responded to the compromise this week with joy. Do those people look furious at baseball to you? Does baseball look like a sport that has self-destructed? There were naysayers, of course; those who worry (not without justification) that baseball (and sports in general) are rushing back to play before it is safe to do so, for financial reasons. And yet, there is something inherently freeing about those simple words, “Play Ball.” My mood has brightened considerably since learning baseball is returning — or is at least going to try to — and I’m obviously not the only one. I’m just ready to watch some baseball. I suspect all of us are.
The real question, then, is: What happens next? What happens when this euphoria is over?
The real question, then, is: What happens next? What happens when this euphoria is over, when baseball is back, when people embrace the sport again … and then it’s time to start negotiating again? One of the silver linings of the disgust everyone has directed at owners and players was the hope that there would be some sort of realization on both sides that this fighting was destroying the sport. One hoped for some sort of step back from the brink, a recognition of the damage both sides were doing to the game. You wanted them to feel chastened.
But why would either players or owners feel chastened now? The argument each side has always made during times of nastiness is that, eventually, fans will forgive and forget. And keep the money spigot open and flowing. That argument sure looks pretty smart right now, and it’ll look even smarter if the television ratings for baseball games are as high as many suspect they will be. (Assuming, of course, teams do end up playing.) That may cause each side to dig in even more before the December 2021 negotiations. It makes it look like stridency has no real punishment.
It is also possible players and owners will accept their fans’ love with modesty, with humility, with an understanding of the obligation that both sides have to the sport and its spectators, and thus a shared sense of cooperation and responsibility, with … OK, I actually couldn’t finish that sentence with a straight face. This is going to get uglier in a year than it just was. Let’s enjoy this beautiful game while we can. We can love it. But let’s not kid ourselves: We are also enablers. It’s our primary utility as fans, it turns out.