In which your narrator vies
for a free MLB.tv account.
When I was thirteen years old, I was playing baseball with my buddies. I had two strikes on me when I hit a line drive into the gap in right field. As I rounded first base, I felt a pinch in my groin area. By the time I reached second base, I was somewhat in pain. Feeling embarrassed, I told my friends that I heard my mother calling—this was a lie—and that I would be right back. I limped home. The pain was getting intense. I confided in my father about the pain; surely, he would understand. I told him that I was playing ball, and the next thing I knew, my testicles were hurting. My father looked at me for a second and said in his very authoritative voice, “It sounds like you pulled your groin. But don’t worry. It’s not a big deal. A lot of guys do that.” I looked at my father in shock and immediately blurted out, “Honest, Dad, I didn’t touch anything!”
— JAMES SWEENEY, Clarks Green, Pennsylvania
IN 1961, THE TOTAL ATTENDANCE IN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL was 18,894,518 souls. When Roger Maris hit his sixty-first homer on October 1, 1961, in Yankee Stadium, which held 58,000 seats, 23,154 were there, most of whom were gathered in right field, hoping to catch Maris’s homer and collect the $5,000 reward. That season, 673,057 fans visited Wrigley Field (an average of 8,303 a game), 597,287 visited Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. (7,374 a game), and 590,039 went to Shibe Park in Philadelphia (7,282 a game). These games were not broadcast on television, and if you wanted to listen to them on the radio, you had to live within the limited range of the AM station or reside on a very tall hill.
When you look at pictures from Maris’s sixty-first homer game, what’s immediately most striking is how many empty seats there are. If you believe Billy Crystal, Bob Costas, and every baby boomer prone to waxing rhapsodic about the Golden Age Of Major League Baseball, that game was the final resolution of the central question of the age: Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, or Babe Ruth and his asterisk? They’ve made films about that game. Its importance has been considered vital not just to baseball history but world history. It’s a stand-in for some innocent age, back when everybody drank Ovaltine, worked out in oil fields to support their nuclear family in the off-season, and spent their evening drinking bourbon with sportswriters and, presumably, astronauts.
And there was nobody there. Hardly anyone was watching.
The lowest noted attendance of any Major League Baseball game since 2002 was an April 22 game at Tropicana Field between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Toronto Blue Jays. Tampa Bay’s James Shields outpitched Jesse Litsch in a 6–4 victory thanks to home runs from Eric Hinske and rookie Evan Longoria, playing only his second week in the majors. There were 8,269 fans there. That’s more than the average attendance of the Griffith Park Senators and the Shibe Park Phillies. That number, of course, does not include the hundreds of thousands of people watching the game at home on television, or on their computers through MLB.tv. Even considering the small number of Rays and Blue Jays fans that could be classified as loyalist enough to never miss a game on television, you’re looking at a minimum—and I’m being conservative here—of ten to fifteen times more people watching that dull game on a Tuesday evening inside a dome on an eighty-degree day in St. Petersburg, Florida, than watched what is supposedly one of the most important days in baseball history.
So much of the discussion of baseball is steeped in the notion that somehow baseball has lost its mojo, that what was once The National Pastime has Lost Its Way. Expansion, free agency, exorbitant contracts, the designated hitter, steroids, sabermetrics, interleague play—they’re all supposedly symptoms of the central illness of baseball, the loss of the game’s pastoral beauty, the idea that Things Just Aren’t What They Used To Be.
Which is true. And thank God for that.
IN NOVEMBER 2000, Bob Bowman had never worked in professional sports. A Brewers fan, Bowman was former president of ITT Corporation (whose Web site breathlessly reports it is “one of the world’s largest and pre-eminent conglomerates,” though it takes a bit of research to discover that this “conglomerate” specializes in “water and fluids management”), had founded howtoguru.com, a “sports instructional site,” and served as CEO of consumer technology retailer Outpost.com. In November 2000, the dot-com boom was collapsing—personally, I was laid off by three different dot-coms in 2000—and everyone was pretty much convinced that you were never going to make money off the Web. In sports, no one had any idea what to do. ESPN was futzing around with their old ESPNet Sportszone site, something called Sportsline USA had an unusually high market share, and you couldn’t watch any sports highlights on the Web unless you were willing to dial up and wait around for a couple of hours.
No sports league had anything resembling a useful Web site, but, as you might suspect, crusty old Major League Baseball was the worst of them all. Months before Bowman was approached by Major League Baseball, the URL mlb.com directed you to a Philadelphia law firm. Bowman was skeptical: The last place you’d expect to see the Web revolution would be at MajorLeagueBaseball.com. He told me in an interview that he mostly just thought “it would be fun to watch Brewers games for my job.”
MLB Advanced Media started in 2000 with a $75 million investment pooled from the thirty clubs; that’s roughly the salary of a slap-hitting middle infielder on each team. Bowman spent much of his early budgets buying up server space. At the time, market analysts were skeptical that American homes had the broadband capacity for massive streaming of live video. Bowman looked in a different direction: the office. “We essentially have baseball games from 1 P.M. every day until long past midnight,” he says. So the focus needed to be on the fan who could pop in throughout the day. The idea: The old broadcast model was leaving money on the table. The league generates so much content—2,500 games a season—that no one TV network (or three) could possibly broadcast it all. Fans were being underserved.
“In 2002, the first year we tried streaming live games, we did a total of thirty,” Bowman says. “And it was anything but a success. It was difficult to watch.” The quality improved as Bowman grew the infrastructure, and he began to expand his original vision, “to get the games immediately available on every possible device,” he says. “If it takes a plug or a battery, we should have baseball on it.”
MLB Advanced Media bought up a ton of server space to stream video—to the point that they now rent out their video servers to other companies; the majority of the time you’re watching something live online, whether it’s a concert, a press conference, or the NCAA Tournament, it’s running off MLB.tv servers—with the understanding that if you gave people the opportunity to watch baseball anytime they wanted to, they would take advantage of that opportunity. They have.
MLB Advanced Media has turned online video into such a cash cow that it’s a major reason why analysts believe baseball is about to pass the NFL in total revenue. In 2007, Major League Baseball hauled in around $6.7 billion, just even with NFL’s $6.7 billion. Its biggest growth engine was MLB Advanced Media, which brought in $450 million (up from $236 million in 2005). Continuing at its current pace, MLB should catch up with the NFL next year. “The growth has exceeded our wildest expectations,” says MLB president Bob DuPuy. “No one in the game believed that the Internet would be as pervasive a commercial vehicle for us in such a short amount of time.”
Think about that: Major League Baseball has a chance to pass the NFL in total revenue. This is entirely against the accepted notion of what Americans value and obsess about in sports. We baseball dorks have been complaining for years that ESPN and other networks have nearly turned into all-NFL, all-the-time gladiatorial exhibitions masquerading as athletic metaphor for America. And lookie there: Baseball’s about to catch up.
What changed in the last fifty years? You want to know what baseball’s golden age is? It’s right now. It’s this very second. There are more people watching baseball right now than at any other time in human history. Mickey Mantle is a relic. And he never drank Ovaltine anyway, not really.
HERE ARE THE AVERAGE attendance figures for Wrigley Field—which has essentially had the same capacity for seventy years—during the Cubs’ contending seasons (I shall note, with a smug titter, how few there are):
CONSIDERING THE CUBS are attempting to clinch the National League Central today, it’s no surprise that this game is a sellout, like almost every other Cubs game this season. They’d probably sell out this game at Busch as well—the Cardinals-Cubs ticket is always a hot one—but clearly the stakes are considerably higher for the blue team than the red one. The Cardinals are, sad to say, twelve-and-a-half games behind the Cubs, at 80–73 after a recent downward swing pushed them out of the NL Central race. They’re technically still alive in the wild-card chase, five-and-a-half behind the Phillies, but there are three other teams in between them, and let’s face it, gang, there’s no hope. (Shame they couldn’t sneak into the NL West: They’d be in first place.)
One of the many amusements of an extended, 162-game baseball season is the havoc it wreaks with any plans a team had initially. The lineup the Cardinals are fielding today would have given manager Tony La Russa a heart attack in Spring Training, had he known this would be his best crunch-time, pennant-chase option. It’s all twisted, weird, and flaccid.
The Cardinals are:
Injuries are a part of this (ordinarily Rick Ankiel would be playing center field), but regardless: This is not the lineup of a team in any position to contend for the postseason. This is not the lineup of a team that instills much hope that it will avoid causing my father to watch the Cubs clinch the National Central right in front of him in his first trip to Wrigley Field.
“How in the hell did these guys win eighty games?” Dad says.
Mike shakes his head. “Aw . . . how cute.”
I expected more guff from Dad when I asked him, back in June, if he wanted to come to this game. After all, Wrigley has all those Cubs fans. The conversation was quick and simple, somehow.
WILL: Hey, Dad, you wanna go to Wrigley Field in September? For that Cardinals series?
DAD: Are you going?
WILL: Yes.
DAD: Sure, let’s do it.
If I’d had any idea it would be that easy, I would have done it years ago.
At last count, I have been to twenty-six baseball stadiums, and other than St. Louis, I’ve never been treated better, as a Cardinals fan, anywhere than I’ve been treated at Wrigley Field. Dad had been concerned about this, announcing that he’d be wearing his Cardinals 24 Rick Ankiel jersey, “and I just dare anyone to give me any shit about it.” He needn’t have worried. Even though our nice seats have the two of us as the only splash of red in Section 131—there are plenty of swaths of red in other parts of the park, just so you know—the good vibes at Wrigley have turned us, and our team, simply into fellow travelers on the road to history. Today the Cubs are clinching the National League Central during the one hundredth season since they won the World Series, and no one is going to keep it from happening, least of all a couple of Leitch boys from downstate wearing “ANKIEL” on their backs.
I LEARN LATER that someone named Maria Kanellis, a “WWE Diva,” is announcing the lineups on Fox’s national telecast of the game, and it’s probably for the best that none of us know this at the time.
Maria Kenellis, according to about thirty-five seconds of Web searching (aka “Thanks, Wikipedia!”), is “Maria Frances Louise Kanellis (born February 25, 1982), an American professional wrestler and model of Greek heritage, currently signed to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) performing on its SmackDown brand. Kanellis was a contestant on the reality show Outback Jack in 2004. In the same year, she placed fifth in the Raw Diva Search, but was later hired by WWE as a backstage interviewer. Kanellis began competing in the ring as a wrestler in 2005. It was not until 2007, however, that she received her greatest push in the company, as the on-screen love interest of Santino Marella. As a result, she received more airtime and began winning more matches than she had previously. She also posed for the April 2008 cover of Playboy magazine, “which was incorporated into a storyline on Raw.”
So that sums up everything you might possibly want to know about Maria Kenellis, except: She is a Cubs fan. A rather serious one, it seems. According to an interview she did with WWE.com, she claims that the thing that would make the Ottawa, Illinois, native happiest would be the Cubs winning the World Series. She’s twenty-seven. She’s young. She takes chairs to the head occasionally.
I remember a talk I had with my father back when I left for college in August 1993. My father did not tell me to be wary of drugs and alcohol, to study hard so I could have a life he never could, to use a condom, to call my mother. He told me not to date a Cubs fan.
“There’s going to be a lot of Chicago people up there, and a lot of Cubs fans,” he said. “You can fool around with a Cubs fan if you want, but don’t you dare bring one home.”
Maria Kenellis, by all objective measures, is an attractive woman. (This checks out with multiple sources.) But I have to tell you: She is in no way arousing. She actually kind of makes me ill. Maria Kenellis is freaking hideous, man.
THE CROWD SETTLES IN. Ted Lilly finishes up his warm-up tosses. Cesar Izturis readies in the box. Mike is bobbing up and down on his feet; the air is one of quiet anticipation. The abstract is becoming concrete. A guy standing behind us asks my father to move so that he might take a picture of Ted Lilly’s first pitch, and when someone is desperate for a snapshot of Ted Lilly, clearly something momentous is occurring. We are awash in Cubs sentiment. At this moment, I’d do anything to see Izturis knock Lilly’s first pitch over the wall and shut the sonuvabitches up.
Lilly kicks and fires . . . and Izturis hits the first pitch about fifty feet in the air and five feet behind him. Geovany Soto, if just to be polite, throws his mask off and makes an easy catch, and Wrigley Field is already in a collective tango.
“Goddammit, Izturis,” Dad says, and I mark an “FO” in my scorebook and we are off and rolling.
BLEACHER TICKETS at Busch Stadium, the old, ugly, metal, Astroturf, multipurpose Busch Stadium, used to cost $6. My father and I would go every Sunday the Cardinals were at home. This was not a planned event. The surprise of it was what mattered. Dad would wake me up at 8 A.M., like he did every weekend, baseball or otherwise, for some new chore—wood-splitting, weed-eating, trash-burning. (One of the highlights of growing up in Central Illinois was that you were expected to burn your trash. This was back before Al Gore told us it was bad to incinerate Styrofoam. There is no better chore for a twelve-year-old kid than burning trash. “Hey, Will, take this big bag of random crap and set it on fire.” Yes, please!) When the Cardinals were in St. Louis, Dad would tell me that if I finished my chores in time, we’d go to The Ball Game. It was a one-hour, forty-five-minute trip to Busch from Mattoon, and we’d wait in line an hour before the game to get bleacher tickets. They were never sold out. We saw about ten games a year, for a total of $120, plus gas.
When Mark McGwire came to town in the late nineties, the bleacher seats stopped being the point of easiest entry at Busch Stadium and became the most desired seats in town. Today, two bleacher tickets on StubHub for a September Cardinals-Cubs series at Busch run $275 apiece. That’s more than twice what it cost for the both of us for a whole season.
But in the late eighties, the Cardinals were terrible. They made the World Series twice in the aughts, and the playoffs nearly every season. Much of that was made possible by the expanded fanbase and extra revenue. Would I have made the trade-off? Would I rather have a cheaper, more interactive fan experience? Or would I rather have a winning team?
There’s no question in my mind: Go Cardinals. Raise those prices. We’ll pay them. You do your job, and we’ll do ours.
RYAN LUDWICK is having an amazing season, one no one could have foreseen. He was in the minor leagues just last season, a twenty-seven-year-old still trying to overcome his Failed Prospect status from his years in Oakland. He was mostly a curiosity, one of the few odd ducks (Rickey Henderson is another) who hits right-handed and throws left-handed. This is basic baseball wiring done backwards. We were just hoping he could fill in left field occasionally and allow Chris Duncan to sit against left-handed pitchers.
We have gotten a tad more than that. Ludwick comes into today’s game hitting .294 with 34 home runs and 104 RBIs, all career highs by a multiple of at least three. This has been disorienting. Watching a baseball team all season—as both my father and I inevitably do, every day, every pitch, every game recorded, in case the real world rudely steps in the way for an hour or two—exponentially both increases and diminishes the value, importance, and staying power of each game. When someone nondescript and relatively unaccomplished—say, Nick Stavinoha—knocks in a couple of runs, we see him both as a better hitter than he is in the short term (as he was in that particular at bat, or that particular game) and as an anomaly in the long term, just one guy getting one hit at one time. Baseball is a game that rewards perspective, but when you watch a baseball game every day, the same team in the same uniform in different situations, perspective is the one thing you don’t have. This is why sabermetricians and old-timey scout types are always fighting: Either you’re too far away to see what’s happening, or you’re too close. You become less of an expert the more it seems like you are one.
Which is a fancy way of saying it took us forever to realize that Ryan Ludwick was great. He wasn’t a full-time starter until May, and we didn’t embrace him as the best-hitting outfielder in the National League (which he was) until August, at the earliest. We started with surprise, then amusement, then bewilderment, then denial, and it’s only now that we’re really accepting it: Ryan Ludwick is awesome. He’s a symptom of the constant churn of baseball, a guy who was once the hottest prospect in the game and faced such a relentless string of injuries for so many years that by the time he was ready to play, everyone had forgotten why they considered him a prospect in the first place. The Cardinals fans, forever terrified they’re going to waste the prime of our Ted Williams, Albert Pujols (there is a general notion that the 2006 World Series Championship was a bit of a fluke, and that Albert deserves more, in a Michael Jordan–type way), spent most of the year screaming for “lineup protection” for Pujols, a big bat like Matt Holliday or Manny Ramirez to “protect” Albert. Ludwick has been better than both of those guys, all year. But we didn’t notice.
You know the old adage about how, if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump out, but if you put him in a pot of lukewarm water and increase the temperature by five degrees every hour, he’ll eventually boil to death? Well, that’s absolutely not true: As James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly has reported, the curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History points out that frogs are not stupid. They would jump out, because boiling water is extremely hot and painful. Fallows suggests an alternate metaphor, of a man who owns a cat becoming so accustomed to the smell that he does not realize until a visitor comes by that the whole house reeks of feline urine. That one’s much better. Cardinals fans just realized that Ryan Ludwick makes Busch Stadium smell like cat piss. That’s what I’m trying to say.
A month before this game, during my last trip to Busch Stadium, I bought a Ryan Ludwick T-shirt. Now we believe. And he rewards us with a shot into left field that just soars over the glove of leaping left fielder buffoon Alfonso Soriano and nicks the bottom of the ivy. Ludwick cruises into second base easily. We are in business, and the loudest people in Section 131.
WITHIN NINETY SECONDS of Ludwick’s double, while Albert Pujols flares his nostrils at the plate, I am watching a highlight of it on my iPhone. (Soriano looks uniquely ungraceful even on a two-inch-by-three-inch screen.) I’m a subscriber to the MLB At Bat application, which allows you access to MLB.com’s Gameday service (real-time score updates with full box scores and stats) and provides almost immediate replays of important events in the game. The Gameday function actually updates faster than the famous manual scoreboard in center field at Wrigley Field.
The idea behind the application, Bob Bowman told me, was to cater even more intensely to the obsessive fan. “Even the most stat-oriented fan likes to have the context of what happened,” he said. “You can not only see the score, you can see everything that went into it, immediately. And as impressive as it might seem to have game highlights on your phone within a minute, it’s just the first step. Eventually you’re going to be able to watch a game, live, on your phone, no matter where you are.” He smiled. “I suspect this will make weddings, church, and even funerals more tolerable.”
I paid $4.99 for the application. I would have paid $50. Dad leans over to me. “You gonna watch the game, or you gonna fart around with your phone?”
I’ve set Dad up with an MLB.tv subscription on his home computer, but he’s never been able to figure out how to use it. He’s never been able to find the “T” on the keyboard.
ALBERT PUJOLS takes the first two pitches outside the strike zone, and it’s pretty obvious that Lilly wants to walk him with first base open. Of all that can be said about Pujols’s greatness—and trust me, you’re going to be reading a lot of it in this here book—he has one definite weakness that keeps him from the otherworldly (and, of course, enhanced) brilliance of Barry Bonds: He is not as selfishly patient. That is to say: Barry Bonds was perfectly happy to sit there with his bat on his shoulder all day until you gave him the pitch he wanted. If it wasn’t exactly where he wanted it, he would politely demur and trot over to first base. What Bonds was doing—walking—was ultimately helping his team, but I’m not sure that’s why he was doing it: I think he figured, hell, I’ll just walk, and if they lose, hey it’s not my fault.
Pujols is incapable of doing this. When he doesn’t have an outstanding hitter behind him—like, for example, RIGHT NOW, thank you, Felipe Lopez—Pujols feels compelled to make something happen, even if it means refusing the walk owed to him and swinging at pitches outside the strike zone. Which he does, pulling a low and outside changeup on 2–0—the quintessential hitter’s count—limply to shortstop Ryan Theriot. I know Pujols feels like he is helping. I know he is being a “gamer.” But I’d be a lot happier seeing him on first base right now.
Lilly takes Lopez to a 1–2 count, and broadcaster Josh Lewin, noticing that the crowd is rising to its feet, points out that “it’s not a frat party out there.” Wrigley Field is the only baseball stadium in which the announcer would feel the need to remind people that it is not, in fact, a bunch of drunk dudes doing Jäger bombs. Yes, I’m saying that because I am bitter. I am saying that because Felipe Lopez, Great Pujols Protector, Grand Striker Of Terror In The Hearts Of Lanky Left-Handers Everywhere, takes a curveball right down the middle for strike three.
I had been dreaming of a ten-run first inning for the Cardinals, followed by three hours of Old Styles, remembrances of times past, and Mike suffering repeated Leitch family wedgies. Alas.
I turn to my father, but he’s already gone. “Beer line,” Mike says. “He said he had to go now before the Cubs fans realize they’re batting.” I do hope he grabbed me one.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE