Organized baseball was started by corporate robber barons in the nineteenth century. That is why it is such an enduring American tradition. Baseball should ban white older men from owning teams. Here is a list of things the old white men who have always owned and operated Major League Baseball have been opposed to.
A) The radio. That’s right, they presciently anticipated that if the games were broadcast for free, it would hurt attendance. Most teams had no regular radio presence till the 1940s. Even then, they didn’t do all the away games but did cheap, in-studio re-creations. Our greatest senile president, Ronald Reagan, attained his firm grasp on reality in that atmosphere.
B) Letting anyone play who wasn’t white.
C) Hiring proper paid umpires. In the nineteenth century, one ump worked the game. He was way behind the plate, so he didn’t get clobbered with a foul ball. He more often got hit with bottles and food and drunkards running up to punch and beat him. Then when someone got on first, he moved behind the pitcher. Runners dashing from first to third rarely touched second, knowing the ump couldn’t see everything. In other words, cheating ruled.
D) Paying the players as human beings. Players were chattel till just a short while ago. Chattel means “slave.” The owners had a reserve clause allowing them to control who played for whom and for how much cake. It took till the 1970s and Marvin Miller, the labor negotiator, to organize the players into the strongest, most successful union in the United Snakes.
E) TV. Again, they felt suckers—meaning paying fans—wouldn’t come and spend their hard-earned clams at the rotting stadiums that brooded over the wrecked cities then. You got one crappy game of the week in the ’60s and ’70s, and it was always the bloody Red Sox. We freely admit that football and basketball are way better TV shows.
F) Shouldering the blame for alcohol abuse, speed, steroids, and the fantastically acronamed PEDs, or performance-enhancing drugs. In the olden days players were often drunk on the field. So were the fans. Then came the newer days and amphetamine, so the players could play the mad six-month schedule. Then the ’80s came and the players did lots of coke and the owners looked the other way and never offered substance abuse help. Then came ’roids. The players got huge and cranked giant homers. The owners watched, sat back, did nothing, and raked in the money for decades. Then the black man Barry Bonds broke the white guy Mark McGwire’s single-season home-run record and the shit hit the fan. Then came the outrage: Barry Bonds invented cheating, he was the devil, he was arrogant to writers, he gazed lovingly at his soaring taters much as Rembrandt appraised his canvas after painting a masterpiece. So he had a Barcalounger and a TV in front of his locker—that didn’t mean he was a demon. He was big, black, and didn’t make it easy to get a quote. Notwithstanding the fact he was the biggest drawing card in baseball, Barry was pilloried. The owners blamed the players for doing what they wanted them to do. Get huge and make the game popular with people again. Hypocrisy is so easy and fun and easy.
G) Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are the two best players of their generation. End of story. Did they use ’roids? Yes. Did everyone? Yes. Was it illegal when they did it? No. Are they any less moral than other players? Really? When you cheat at work by stealing a Post-it pad or eating someone else’s lunch out of the fridge, it makes you an ass hat. When Barry and Roger cheated, small children cried tears of joy. You decide who is a bigger charlatan.
H) Playing baseball on the West Coast. The major leagues had no team west of Milwaukee for almost one hundred years. Guess they figured too many burning wagons and such.
I) Negotiating. There is a popular trope that goes, “I would love to be an athlete. I would play for nothing.” Right. What happened to the love of the game and all? The truth is, everyone in every line of work negotiates to get the best pay they can all the time. The owners of all sports teams, who are mostly white and rich, with a very few exceptions, negotiate relentlessly to pay the concession workers less, to charge the fan more for tickets every season, to screw the towns they play in by threatening to leave unless the taxpayers buy them a new corporate revenue dome, and on and on. But if players, whose careers are limited, want to be compensated, they are greedy. That argument makes anyone sound like an angry, white, portly guy hosting a shouty all-sports radio show called 99 the Weasel or Petey and the Cracker.
J) Anything good. Owners have turned ballyards into noisy, mindless, NASCAR-intelligence-level, nonstop-sensory-overload video game joints. Baseball is a stately, boring game with sudden breaks for action. Every moment doesn’t have to be celebrated with giant ads and hideous music that sounds like a toaster dying. Parents and children can speak civilly to one another at a baseball game because only an organ is playing. Baseball at its best is church with spitting.
K) Children. Yes, that’s right. The owners hate children. Kids don’t understand what a lockout is. They cry when the team moves or a player is suspended or Tim McCarver is mixing a metaphor with a mistake. Tickets in L.A. are over $100 apiece to sit near the field down the line. Kids always have that kind of ready cash. Baseball is also notoriously racist and male. What is not for a young mind to love?