14
Baseball in Postindustrial America (Since 1975)
by the mid-1970s, the post–World War II boom had started to fizzle. The median family income stopped growing: Two-income families were earning what one-income families used to make. In 1973, 20 percent of all American workers earned less than $20,000 (in 2015 dollars); just six years later, 30 percent of Americans made less than that amount, and by 2015, nearly 40 percent earned less than that paltry sum. In the 1980s, political economists referred to these developments as the Great U-Turn. The decline was largely due to changes in the world’s economy. By the seventies, competition was reemerging from Europe and Japan. This foreign competition raised costs while decreasing prices, which squeezed the profits of American companies. National borders began to lose their importance in economic relationships, as globalization—the development of an increasingly integrated world economy characterized by free trade, free flow of capital and information, and the exploitation of cheaper foreign labor sources—incorporated regional economies into a global economy. American businesses responded by restructuring their organizations, including the elimination of many middle management positions. They also attempted to increase productivity, especially through the adoption of automation, and to decrease their costs by reducing their labor force, cutting wages and benefits, and outsourcing formerly in-house jobs to contracted outsiders. In an effort to cut costs further, many businesses left their traditional homes in the Rust Belt, first for places in the Sun Belt and then eventually for Latin America or overseas—places that had lower wages, less stringent environmental regulations, fewer laws protecting workers, and weaker unions or no unions at all. In their wake, these companies left behind increased unemployment, which resulted in a shrinking local population, and often a host of environmental problems. The government under President Ronald Reagan also tried to help businesses withstand the Great U-Turn by lowering corporate taxes, eliminating or ignoring federal regulations, and taking the side of business during labor disputes. Starting in the mid-1980s, corporate profits (although not personal income) started to rise again, and no one seemed to care that the rules were not being followed and regulations had been eviscerated—at least not until the outbreak of the Great Recession in 2008. That downturn, the largest since the Great Depression, was severely exacerbated by slack regulatory enforcement and years of economic struggle. Baseball, too, struggled to adjust to a new economic reality during this era.
On the evening of September 8, 1998, anticipation filled the air as a crowd of nearly fifty thousand packed into Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis hoping to see history in the making. Sammy Sosa, right fielder for the visiting Chicago Cubs, was entering the game with fifty-eight home runs, just three shy of the record set by Roger Maris in 1961. But the throng was not there to see Sosa. The day before, Cardinals first baseman Mark McGwire had tied Maris’s record with his sixty-first home run. All summer long, McGwire and Sosa had chased Maris’s home run record, stirring memories of Maris and Mickey Mantle pursuing Babe Ruth’s record thirty-seven years earlier. On August 19, in the fifth inning of a game against the Cardinals, Sosa pulled ahead of McGwire by hitting his forty-eighth home run, but the Cardinals first baseman homered in the sixth and eighth to retake the lead. Now the two teams faced each other again, with McGwire on the threshold of setting a new record. For Major League Baseball, the home run race could not have happened at a better time. Baseball’s popularity had been in decline since a labor dispute canceled the 1994 World Series, and for the first time in five years, fans had become excited about the game.
With two outs and nobody on base in the bottom of the fourth—and with the Cardinals down by two runs—McGwire lifted a pitch from Steve Trachsel 341 feet down the line into the left-field stands. For eleven minutes afterward, fireworks illuminated the Missouri sky. As he crossed the plate, his teammates and his ten-year-old son, Matt, a St. Louis batboy, congratulated the slugger, while Sosa dashed in from right field to join the celebration. When the season ended nineteen days later, McGwire held the new record with seventy home runs, but Sosa also had eclipsed Maris, hitting sixty-six dingers.
To many people, however, something seemed wrong. In August, McGwire had admitted to an Associated Press reporter that he had been taking a muscle enhancement called androstenedione. At the time, the substance, which was available over the counter, had not been classified by the Food and Drug Administration as an anabolic steroid, and although the drug was banned in many sports, it had not yet been prohibited by Major League Baseball. As rumors circulated about baseball stars taking performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), many fans again became disillusioned with the game. Records that were formerly held sacred now appeared tainted. Suspicions heightened in 2001, when Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants hit his seventy-third home run of the season, establishing a new record. In 2007, when Bonds hit the 756th regular-season home run of his career—breaking Hank Aaron’s lifetime record—fashion designer Marc Ecko purchased the record-setting ball, branded it with an asterisk, and then donated it to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Although it undermined the confidence of many fans, baseball’s doping scandal was only part of the challenge facing the sport in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Baseball, like America, had been struggling under the new economic paradigm that emerged in the mid-1970s. Solutions to the challenges facing baseball, like the challenges facing the United States, still seemed elusive.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, baseball struggled with a number of problems that first emerged in the mid-1970s. After the allowance for free agency, ballplayers were no longer bound to the same team for their entire career. After a player’s contract expired, he could “play out his option” and become a free agent, selling his services to the highest bidder. Free agency affected all major league teams. Poorer clubs in smaller cities often could not afford to re-sign a player when he became a free agent. As a result, they often traded away players whose contracts expired so they would at least get something for the player they were about to lose. Other teams in pennant races were willing to acquire a potential free agent, even if they knew they could not afford to sign the player, because the player’s bat or pitching arm might be just what the team needed to make the playoffs. Wealthy teams were also willing to acquire players in their option year, as they might be able to re-sign the player before he became a free agent.
Charlie Finley was one owner who could not afford to keep his stars once free agency took effect. Oakland was the smallest city in the major leagues, and although the San Francisco Bay Area was one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country, the A’s shared the market with the Giants. Before the 1976 season began, Finley traded Reggie Jackson, along with two other players, to the Baltimore Orioles for three major leaguers. In June 1976, faced with the prospect of losing left fielder Joe Rudy and closer Rollie Fingers, Finley sold both players to the Boston Red Sox for $1 million each. He also sold starting pitcher Vida Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million. Three days later, however, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn voided all three deals, claiming they were not in the best interest of baseball because the transactions decimated the A’s while strengthening two already powerful teams. At the end of the season, Fingers signed a free-agent deal with the Padres, while Rudy jumped to the California Angels. (Blue, who had agreed to a contract extension as a condition of his sale to New York, remained on the A’s. Finley finally sold the pitcher to the Giants in 1978.)
While free agency made it difficult for teams in small cities to retain players, it became a boon for teams in large cities like New York. In 1973 a prosperous Cleveland shipbuilder named George Steinbrenner purchased the Yankees. Having last won the American League pennant in 1964, New York was in the midst of a twelve-year dry spell when Steinbrenner took command. The club was wealthy, based in the largest city in the United States, with an enormous fan base and a huge television market. Now the team had an owner committed to spending money. Steinbrenner already had entered the free-agent market by signing pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter to a five-year, $3.35 million contract in 1975, after the pitcher was declared a free agent because Finley had failed to make a payment to his insurance annuity account. After the Seitz decision, Steinbrenner became totally committed to free agency. Following the 1976 season, the Yankees signed Reggie Jackson to a five-year, $3 million contract, and then won the next two World Series. Jackson, who also had been on the three-time World Series champion Oakland A’s, picked up the nickname “Mr. October” when he hit five home runs in the 1977 World Series against the Dodgers. Three of those homers came in Game 6, tying Babe Ruth’s fifty-one-year-old record for the most home runs in a World Series game.
The Yankees benefited from free agency, but most major league owners hated it, claiming that it was impossible for teams in smaller cities—like Oakland—to compete. When the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the Major League Baseball Players Association expired, the major league team owners insisted that free agency be changed. The players refused, and when the two parties could not reach an agreement, the ballplayers went on strike in June 1981. The 1981 Major League Baseball strike lasted fifty days, from June 12 until July 31, and 712 games were canceled. Finally, the day after their strike insurance policy ran out, the owners gave in and agreed to a CBA that kept free agency in place. Because the strike wiped out the middle of the season, the owners feared that fans, especially supporters of less competitive teams, would not come back. Therefore, for the 1981 season, the owners adopted a split season similar to the one the National League had used way back in 1892. When the season ended, the division winners of the first half played the division winners from the second half in a best-of-three division playoff series. Not everyone, however, was satisfied with the temporary playoff format adopted in 1981. When both halves of the season were combined, the St. Louis Cardinals had the best record in the National League’s Eastern Division and the Cincinnati Reds had the best record in all of baseball—yet neither team qualified for the playoffs.
Free agency continued, and with it, major league salaries increased dramatically. Between 1970 and 1990, the major league minimum salary rose from $12,000 a year to $100,000, while the major league average shot up from under $30,000 to nearly $600,000. But not all the news was bad for club owners. Because of the excitement free agency brought to many clubs, fans seemed to be more interested in the sport, and attendance nearly doubled between 1970 and 1990. In 1986, for the first time ever, all twenty-six major league teams drew more than a million fans. Not only were major league teams attracting crowds, but so were the minor leagues. The Triple-A Louisville Redbirds of the American Association drew more than a million fans in 1983, while their intraleague rival, the Buffalo Bisons, drew more than a million fans in six straight seasons from 1988 to 1993.
And despite the dire predictions that free agency would kill baseball in smaller cities, the small-market teams did not disappear. In fact, free agency seemed to bring parity to baseball. During the fifteen seasons between 1979 and 1993, twelve different teams won the World Series, and none of them were named the Yankees. Five World Series champions during this period—the Pirates, Royals, Twins, Athletics, and Reds—came from small-market cities. And only three teams—the Dodgers, Twins, and Blue Jays—won the World Series twice between 1979 and 1993.
In the 1980s, baseball enjoyed a surge in popularity. Sales of licensed caps and jerseys increased dramatically, while the baseball card industry exploded. From the 1950s to the 1970s, only one company, Topps Chewing Gum, regularly issued baseball cards. But the business became so lucrative in the 1980s that other companies entered the market, including Fleer, Donruss, and Upper Deck. And the cards were no longer being purchased only by young boys, as adults also began collecting them as an investment. Even Hollywood recognized baseball’s popularity, producing films like The Natural (1984), Bull Durham (1988), Field of Dreams (1989), and A League of Their Own (1992).
During the eighties, fantasy baseball—the first of the fantasy sports—was invented. Originally called Rotisserie League Baseball, after the New York City restaurant where the first fantasy league was formed, the pastime quickly gained popularity, and publishers issued books explaining league rules, while newspapers ran weekly statistics for fantasy league participants. For some fans, obsession with baseball went beyond fantasy. In 1971 a group of baseball enthusiasts formed a semischolarly baseball historical society called the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Although SABR members explored all aspects of the game’s history, some concentrated on an empirical analysis of the sport’s statistics. This approach, called sabermetrics, analyzed stats for new insights into baseball, including, for instance, why a team wins or loses a specific number of games. Starting in 1977, Bill James, a night watchman with an economics degree and one of the pioneers of sabermetrics, issued an annual statistical evaluation of current major leaguers called The Bill James Baseball Abstract. Although his books sold only a few hundred copies in the seventies, James’s yearly abstract had reached a mass audience by the 1980s—so much so that, citing burnout, he discontinued it in 1988. With his statistical approach, James has become one of the most influential minds in baseball, having authored more than two dozen books on baseball statistics.
Much of the increased popularity of baseball was fueled by nostalgia. In the 1980s, many teams discarded their gaudy uniforms for a return to the classic styles of the fifties. Clubs began to build new ballparks in urban neighborhoods rather than in the suburbs. Starting with Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, which opened in 1992, ball clubs started building “retro parks” inspired by the grand ballparks of the first half of the twentieth century. Both Coors Field, which opened in Denver in 1995, and Citi Field, which replaced Shea Stadium in 2009, shared design features once found in Brooklyn’s old Ebbets Field. Although the new stadiums replicated the atmosphere of old-fashioned ballparks, they featured modern amenities, including electronic scoreboards, luxury boxes, on-site restaurants, and perhaps the greatest ballpark innovation since floodlights—cup holders. Baseball teams were no longer content to share multipurpose stadiums with NFL teams, and with the opening of Marlins Park in Miami in 2012, the Oakland Athletics was the only team in Major League Baseball to share its facility with a football team.
There was trouble in paradise, however. Just as the prosperity Reagan’s America enjoyed in the second half of the 1980s benefited businesses at the expense of workers, the success enjoyed by baseball teams in the 1980s was based on a rigged system that denied players the full benefits of free agency. In 1985 Peter Ueberroth became the commissioner of baseball. As the head of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, Ueberroth had successfully orchestrated the 1984 Summer Olympics. Over the following three years, in a deal that smacked of the government response to the Great U-Turn, he secretly worked out an agreement with the twenty-six major league clubs in which the teams agreed to not outbid each other for free agents. The arrangement, known as collusion, not only kept salaries down, but it also violated the CBA the clubs had with the Major League Baseball Players Association. When the agreement became public, the MLBPA took the matter to an arbitrator, who ruled that Major League Baseball had violated its contract with the union. The arbitrator awarded the players’ union $38 million in damages, and Ueberroth, who only had a year left on his contract as commissioner, resigned in disgrace. The club owners replaced him with National League president, and former president of Yale University, A. Bartlett Giamatti.
Giamatti was a lifelong Red Sox fan who had long coveted the position of commissioner, but he entered the job as a major scandal was about to break. Early in the 1989 season, rumors were circulating that Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose had been betting on baseball games. Rose had been a star player for the Reds’ “Big Red Machine” of the sixties and seventies, and in 1985 he had surpassed Ty Cobb’s record of 4,192 hits. When Rose retired as a player in 1986 with 4,256 hits, the major league record, he remained with the Reds as their manager. Giamatti ordered an investigation, which determined that Rose had been betting on games involving the Reds, a practice that violated rules that had been in place since the Black Sox Scandal. Although there was no evidence that Rose had ever bet against the Reds, simply betting on games involving his team was a serious violation. As a result, in August 1989 Giamatti imposed a lifetime ban on Rose. The controversial decision to expel baseball’s all-time hit leader undoubtedly weighed on Giamatti, who died eight days later from a massive heart attack.
To replace Giamatti, major league club owners turned to his close friend, Francis Thomas “Fay” Vincent, who had been serving in the newly created position of deputy commissioner. Vincent’s tenure as commissioner proved to be short and tumultuous. No longer able to keep salaries down through collusion, when the CBA with the players’ union expired in 1990, the team owners demanded that the new contract include a salary cap to limit the amount of money a team could spend on players’ salaries. Believing this would limit the opportunities available to free agents, the union rejected the offer, and during spring training, the club owners responded with a lockout. Vincent intervened to negotiate a new CBA, but it did not contain a salary cap. Because of the lockout, the 1990 season began a week late, but every game was played. Many owners, however, resented Vincent for undermining their attempt to force the adoption of a salary cap.
Vincent continued to irritate the club owners. Realizing that the cities of Chicago and St. Louis are farther west than Atlanta and Cincinnati, he attempted to have the Reds and Braves switch divisions with the Cubs and Cardinals, a proposal rejected by the National League clubs. He also favored eliminating the designated hitter rule, a rule the American League clubs were unwilling to abandon. Fearing a decrease in television revenue once Major League Baseball’s lucrative four-year television contract with CBS expired in 1993, the owners also did not trust Vincent to negotiate a new network agreement. In September 1992, following a no-confidence vote among major league owners, Vincent resigned. Club owners named Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig acting commissioner, and Major League Baseball would continue without an official commissioner until 1998, when Selig was permanently given the job. By naming a sitting owner as commissioner, however, baseball dropped the illusion that the commissioner put the best interests of the sport ahead of the best interests of the owners.
The increased popularity of baseball in the eighties led the National League to finally consider matching the American League by expanding to fourteen clubs. In 1985, Major League Baseball invited representatives from thirteen cities to New York to present their case to be considered for a National League expansion team. After hearing from the potential groups, baseball narrowed the field to six finalists—Buffalo, Denver, Miami, Orlando, Tampa–St. Petersburg, and Washington, DC. The collusion ruling forced baseball to speed up the expansion process in order to defray the $38 million fine. Charging each club $95 million to join, the National League placed a team in each division: In Miami, the Florida Marlins joined the Eastern Division, and in Denver, the Colorado Rockies joined the Western Division. Both teams began play in the 1993 season.
But after only one year, Major League Baseball decided to realign each league into three divisions—Eastern, Western, and Central. The new format allowed for another round of playoffs—a best-of-five League Division Series. The three division winners in each league qualified for the Division Series, as did a fourth team—the nondivision winner with the best record, which was awarded a wildcard playoff berth. As a result of the realignment, for the first time since the Temple Cup series of the 1890s, teams that did not finish in first place could qualify for postseason play.
Table 14.2. Major League Baseball, 1994–1997
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American League |
||
|
Eastern Division |
Central Division |
Western Division |
|
Baltimore Orioles |
Chicago White Sox |
California Angels |
|
Boston Red Sox |
Cleveland Indians |
Oakland Athletics |
|
Detroit Tigers |
Kansas City Royals |
Seattle Mariners |
|
New York Yankees |
Milwaukee Brewers |
Texas Rangers |
|
Toronto Blue Jays |
Minnesota Twins |
|
|
National League |
||
|
Eastern Division |
Central Division |
Western Division |
|
Atlanta Braves |
Chicago Cubs |
Colorado Rockies |
|
Florida Marlins |
Cincinnati Reds |
Los Angeles Dodgers |
|
Montreal Expos |
Houston Astros |
San Diego Padres |
|
New York Mets |
Pittsburgh Pirates |
San Francisco Giants |
|
Philadelphia Phillies |
St. Louis Cardinals |
|
The 1994 baseball season promised to be exciting. With an extra round of playoffs, baseball offered twice as many pennant races. And individual players were having banner years, including Tony Gwynn of the Padres, who was flirting with hitting .400, a mark that had not been reached since Ted Williams did it in 1941, and Matt Williams of the Giants, who was on track to break Roger Maris’s thirty-three-year-old record of sixty-one home runs in a season. Neither Gwynn nor Williams, however, would have the opportunity to set a record. The CBA between Major League Baseball and the players’ union was set to expire at the end of the year, and both sides had dug in their heels. The club owners once again demanded that the Major League Baseball Players Association agree to a salary cap, which the players refused to accept under any circumstances. Recognizing that the owners had always caved in to the players in the past and believing that a mid-August date would allow a work stoppage to be resolved in time to resume the season, the union set a strike date for August 12. This time the players were wrong: The owners held fast in a rare display of unity and the season was never completed.
The 1994–1995 Major League Baseball strike shut down baseball. In September, Major League Baseball canceled the postseason, including the World Series, a ninety-year-old annual tradition that had survived the Great Depression and two world wars. Gwynn had to settle for a .394 batting average, while Williams belted only forty-three home runs. In December, with the collective bargaining agreement about to expire, Major League Baseball unilaterally adopted a salary cap—one that was so low that the salaries on 75 percent of major league teams had already exceeded it. And with no settlement in sight, the owners arranged to conduct spring training with replacement players—minor leaguers and other nonunion players. The MLBPA filed an unfair labor practices grievance with the National Labor Relations Board, and in late March requested an injunction with federal district court judge (and future Supreme Court justice) Sonia Sotomayor to stop the use of replacement players. Sotomayor, stating that “[y]ou can’t grow up in the South Bronx without knowing about baseball,” granted the injunction. The players agreed to return to the diamond under the terms of the expired collective bargaining agreement until a new agreement could be reached, which would not happen until 1997. The 1995 season began three weeks late, with a 144-game schedule, but baseball was back.
But would the fans return? Many fans, perceiving the strike as a disagreement between millionaires and billionaires, felt betrayed by the cancellation of the World Series. On Opening Day at Yankee Stadium, fans booed MLBPA executive director Donald Fehr. In Cincinnati, some fans chartered a small plane that dragged a banner in the sky above Riverfront Stadium with the message “Owners & Players: To hell with all of you!” And at Shea Stadium, three angry fans showed their contempt for the ballplayers by showering them with 160 one-dollar bills. When play resumed, baseball took a beating at the ticket office. After the strike, an average of six thousand fewer fans were attending each game. Major league attendance, which fell from 70 million in 1993 to 50 million in 1995, did not return to 70 million until 1998, but even that was partially due to the addition of two more teams. The average attendance at a major league game would not climb above thirty-one thousand until 2005.
Of all the major league teams, the Montreal Expos were hit the hardest by the strike. When the strike began on August 12, the Expos had the best record in baseball, and many fans of the Canadian team were confident that Montreal would play in the World Series. But with their team denied a chance to appear in the playoffs, Expos fans became disillusioned. Attendance, which had averaged more than twenty-two thousand per game in 1994, slipped to below twenty thousand in 1995, and in 1999 the Expos drew less than half that. In 2001 Major League Baseball took over ownership of the team.
Major League Baseball had both a public relations challenge and an economic problem. It had to improve its image to attract fans and it had to recover its financial losses from the strike. In an attempt to bring more fans to the ballpark, Major League Baseball instituted interleague play in 1997, which allowed fans in every city to see players from the other league. But although interleague play became very popular in the four markets that had a club in each league—New York, Chicago, Greater Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area—it was not the expected godsend in other major league cities. While the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers drew well wherever they played, few fans in cities in the other league were anxious to see the last-place Phillies or Royals. Purists, who already disliked the designated hitter rule and the wildcard berth, hated interleague play. To make interleague games seem special, Major League Baseball originally scheduled them only during a short period in late June and early July, limiting the intraleague contests to teams from the same region. Eventually, however, because of the demand for games against popular teams like the Yankees and Red Sox, baseball revamped the interleague schedule so that each team played every team in the other league over the course of a three-year span.
To relieve its financial losses, Major League Baseball fast-tracked two more expansion teams, one in Phoenix and one in the Tampa–St. Petersburg area, charging each a $130 million franchise fee. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays were placed in the American League’s Eastern Division, while the Arizona Diamondbacks joined the National League West. After it awarded a franchise to each league, Major League Baseball, realizing that fifteen is an odd number, asked the Diamondbacks to switch to the American League. The owners of the Diamondbacks, however, refused to switch leagues because they believed that Phoenix, which had been the home of a Giants farm team, had a National League tradition. Remembering that the old Milwaukee Braves had been a National League club and noticing that Milwaukee drew well when hosting interleague games against the Chicago Cubs, Brewers owner Bud Selig agreed to transfer his team to the National League’s Central Division. To make room for the Devil Rays in the American League’s Eastern Division and to fill the hole left by the Brewers, the Detroit Tigers switched to the Central Division. As a result, when the Diamondbacks and Devil Rays began play in 1998, the National League boasted sixteen clubs, while the American League had only fourteen.
Even with interleague play and extra playoff berths, fans were slow in coming back to the game. Then baseball unwittingly stumbled upon a solution. Performance-enhancing drugs had been used in baseball for decades, as ballplayers like Mickey Mantle were rumored to have taken amphetamines known as “greenies.” In the late twentieth century, more powerful substances, such as steroids and human growth hormone, became available. In free agency, players who put up big numbers commanded higher salaries, so many players took PEDs. Some marginal players, realizing that a little extra output would mean the difference between playing in the majors or playing in the minors, also began to take drugs. “Juicing,” as the practice was called, was against the rules and often illegal, but it seemed like a victimless crime. In 1997 first baseman Mark McGwire hit fifty-eight home runs, only three shy of Roger Maris’s single-season record. The following year, McGwire and Sammy Sosa began their season-long pursuit of the record, and the excitement continued three years later as Barry Bonds surpassed McGwire’s mark.
As the number of home runs increased, so did the number of fans following the game—and all the while, Major League Baseball remained suspiciously silent. Baseball might not have known about the players who were taking PEDs, but then again, it might not have wanted to know. Baseball benefited from the use of PEDs because more broken records meant more excited fans. And just as federal regulators looked the other way when banks and Wall Street firms ignored regulations, Major League Baseball did not act, failing to even adopt a league-wide testing program for PEDs until 2003. Fans, however, noticed that sluggers like McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds were significantly bulkier than they had been only a few years earlier. The scandal finally broke in 2005 with the publication of Juiced, a tell-all autobiography by former Oakland Athletics slugger Jose Canseco. In his book, Canseco not only admitted taking steroids himself, but he also implicated other major leaguers, including McGwire and pitcher Roger Clemens.
Mark McGwire’s 70 home runs in 1998 were tainted by his use of performance enhancing drugs. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Cooperstown, N.Y.
Just as the failure to enforce financial regulations considerably aggravated the Great Recession in 2008, by failing to enforce PED bans, Major League Baseball did more harm to the game, as records once deemed sacred were now tarnished. Fans, who were only just starting to return to the game, once again became disillusioned. In 2005 Major League Baseball tapped former US senator George Mitchell of Maine to investigate the use of steroids and human growth hormone in baseball. The Mitchell Report, issued in December 2007, named eighty-nine major leaguers accused of using banned substances. As new lists of additional players taking banned substances appeared, sportswriters and fans speculated about what other major leaguers might be implicated. Following the release of the report, Major League Baseball adopted a stricter drug testing policy. Once considered shoo-ins, McGwire, eligible since 2007, and Sosa, Bonds, and Clemens, eligible since 2013, have been denied induction into the Hall of Fame.
The Montreal Expos presented additional problems. In 2001, the year Major League Baseball took over ownership of the club, the Expos drew fewer than eight thousand people per game. Two days after the conclusion of the World Series, Commissioner Bud Selig announced that club owners had agreed to reduce their financial losses by contracting to twenty-eight teams. Although the identities of the teams targeted for contraction were never disclosed, media reports indicated that the teams in question were the Expos and the Minnesota Twins, whose owner, Carl Pohlad, had agreed to sell the team to Major League Baseball for $250 million. Twins and Expos fans hated the proposal, and so did both the players’ union, fearing fewer jobs for major league players, and the Metropolitan Sports Facility Commission, which managed the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome, the Twins’ home stadium. The union and the commission both filed lawsuits to prevent contraction, and baseball abandoned the plan. In 2004 Major League Baseball announced that the Expos—renamed the Nationals—would move to Washington, DC, for the 2005 season. The Washington Nationals provided an additional benefit for baseball: the return of Major League Baseball to the nation’s capital revived the annual tradition of a presidential first pitch to start the season.
Moving the Expos to Washington solved baseball’s problems in Montreal, but other teams still faced challenges. Given the new economic realities of baseball’s free-agent-driven salaries and its apparently shrinking fan base, some clubs looked for new approaches to deal with the crisis. Like American businesses that pursued creative solutions to the Great U-Turn, poorer teams sought a cheaper, more efficient way to win games. Sabermetrics seemed to offer an answer. Although the Texas Rangers and the New York Mets utilized computers to evaluate opposing players in the early 1980s, sabermetrics did not gain a real foothold in the major leagues until after 1997, when Billy Beane became the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, the team in the smallest city in the major leagues. Recognizing that he could not afford to compete with the Yankees or Red Sox in the free-agent market, Beane evaluated players based on the number of potential wins they could bring his ball club. Writer Michael Lewis chronicled Beane’s approach in the 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt in 2011. Many traditionalists in baseball scoffed at Beane’s unusual method, but others saw merit in it. In 2003 Red Sox owner John Henry, seeking to end his club’s eighty-five-year championship drought, hired Bill James, the father of sabermetrics, as a special adviser to his team. The following year, Boston won its first World Series championship since 1918. But although it helped turn the Athletics into a competitive team, without the financial resources of a team like the Red Sox, sabermetrics did not help Beane bring a championship to Oakland.
Economics was not the only problem facing baseball. As the twenty-first century unfolded, several baseball teams struggled with an identity crisis. In early September 1965, in preparation for the club’s move to suburban Anaheim, owner Gene Autry had changed the name of his team from the Los Angeles Angels to the California Angels. When the Walt Disney Company purchased the club in 1997, in an attempt to rebrand Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, as a destination city, the company changed the team’s name to the Anaheim Angels. In 2003 Disney sold the club to businessman Arturo Moreno. Moreno, hoping to tap into the massive Los Angeles market, wanted the club to return to its original name, but Anaheim city officials objected, pointing out that the club’s lease with the city-owned stadium required it to use “Anaheim” in its name. To meet the requirement of the lease, in 2005 Moreno renamed the club the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
To the surprise of many, baseball had trouble developing a strong following in South Florida. In 1997 the Florida Marlins became the first wildcard team to win a World Series, but the following year Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga, preparing to put his team on the market, sold off most of the team’s star players. Under the leadership of a new owner, art dealer and former Montreal Expos owner Jeffrey Loria, the Marlins again won the World Series as a wildcard entry in 2003, but after that, the team slowly slipped out of contention. The team’s ballpark—the massive Sun Life Stadium, which the club shared with the NFL’s Miami Dolphins—had poor sight lines for baseball, and the seating configuration made fans feel too far removed from the game. In 2012 a new baseball-only stadium built by Miami–Dade County opened on the former site of the Orange Bowl. In exchange for the stadium, the club agreed to change its name to the Miami Marlins when it moved into the new ballpark.
Although it won the pennant in 2008 and has remained competitive since then, the American League’s entry in Florida has also struggled to attract fans. Part of the problem is the team’s home, Tropicana Field, a domed stadium built by the city of St. Petersburg in the 1980s, before Florida even had a promise of a team. The city built the stadium to get a jump on its larger cross-bay rival, Tampa, but the gamble nearly failed. Although the White Sox and the Giants both considered moving to the facility—in 1988 and 1992, respectively—neither team did, and even after the National League added two expansion teams in 1993, the facility remained empty. The dome finally obtained a tenant when the American League placed an expansion team in Tampa–St. Petersburg in 1998, but, by almost all accounts, the stadium ranks as the least attractive in baseball. Also problematic is the stadium’s location. Not only is St. Petersburg smaller than Tampa, but it sits on a peninsula on the other side of Tampa Bay, inconvenient to fans in Tampa and farther from other Florida metropolitan areas such as Orlando. The club also suffered from an identity complex. The team’s original owner, Vince Naimoli, wanted to name the club the Tampa Bay Sting Rays, but could not because the name had already been trademarked by the Maui Stingrays, a team in the Hawaii Winter Baseball League. So Naimoli settled on Devil Rays. The name, however, drew the ire of fundamentalist Christians who thought it conjured up visions of Satan. In 2008 the team’s new owner, Stuart Sternberg, dropped the word “Devil” from the name, allowing Tampa Bay Rays’ logos to represent both sunrays and stingrays.
Baseball as a whole was also dealing with an identity crisis. After a century of competition, in 2000 the American League and National League merged—the league offices were closed, the league presidents stepped down, and all thirty teams came under the direct authority of Major League Baseball. For a dozen years, fans hardly noticed a difference, but in 2013 the Houston Astros jumped to the American League, and Major League Baseball realigned into two leagues of three five-team divisions. The new alignment required interleague play to take place all season long. The year before, Major League Baseball added a second wildcard berth to each league and established an additional playoff round—a Wild Card Game in each league—with the winners advancing to the Division Series.
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, baseball, in some ways, had come full circle. A few teams, including the Astros, Blue Jays, Braves, and Brewers, had revived their colorful uniforms of the seventies. And in 2017 the Atlanta Braves left downtown Atlanta—and a park barely two decades old—for a new stadium built in suburban Cobb County. Both the owners and players seemed to recognize the damage caused by the 1994 strike, agreeing to new collective bargaining agreements in 1997, 2002, 2007, 2012, and 2016 without a work stoppage. The negotiations in 2002 came down to the wire. Only hours before the August 30 deadline set by the players, the owners and union accepted a collective bargaining agreement that included steroid testing, a luxury tax, and a significant increase in revenue sharing. The agreement also took contraction off the table, at least for the time being. The threat of a work stoppage has been averted for the foreseebale future, as the current CBA does not expire until December 2021. Major League Baseball also took a more serious attitude toward juicing, suspending Dodgers outfielder Manny Ramirez for fifty games in 2009. In 2014 baseball suspended Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez for the entire season when it was revealed that he had obtained human growth hormone from Biogenesis of America, an antiaging clinic in South Florida.
Despite improved relations between players and owners, in the twenty-first century, baseball, like America, faced other challenges. Television ratings were down, with the World Series drawing about a third of the viewers it had drawn in the mid-1980s. Attendance fell as well. After reaching a peak of more than seventy-nine million fans in 2007, attendance had fallen to less than seventy-four million fans by 2014. In public opinion polls, 34 percent of respondents listed football as their favorite sport, while baseball came in a distant second at 14 percent. The core of baseball’s fan base was aging, and many young sports fans had forsaken baseball altogether, favoring other sports. Particularly troubling was the decline of the number of African American athletes playing the sport, falling from about 19 percent of players in the late 1970s to less than 8 percent by 2015.
The situation, however, was not as dire as cynics claimed. Because of changes in television—including more channels, on-demand programming, and internet streaming—TV ratings declined for many programs, not just baseball. Yet broadcasts of hometown teams in local markets were still very strong. In 2014, baseball games were the most-watched programs in eleven of the twenty-six television markets that had a team. And although baseball attendance declined since 2007, the number of people attending major league games remained level, at between seventy-three and seventy-four million, since 2009; the NFL, with its shorter schedule, consistently attracted seventeen million fans a year during the same period. And, in any case, new technology such as Internet streaming was becoming a major source of revenue for the sport.
Each year, two million American boys and girls played Little League Baseball, while only a quarter of a million children from the same age group played in youth football leagues. In 2013 Major League Baseball launched a task force charged with developing programs to increase interest in the sport among African Americans. Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities, an outreach program for young people established in 1989, saw participation increase by 80 percent since 2009.
Table 14.3. Major League Baseball Today
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American League |
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Eastern Division |
Central Division |
Western Division |
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Baltimore Orioles |
Chicago White Sox |
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim |
|
Boston Red Sox |
Cleveland Indians |
Houston Astros |
|
New York Yankees |
Detroit Tigers |
Oakland Athletics |
|
Tampa Bay Rays |
Kansas City Royals |
Seattle Mariners |
|
Toronto Blue Jays |
Minnesota Twins |
Texas Rangers |
|
National League |
||
|
Eastern Division |
Central Division |
Western Division |
|
Atlanta Braves |
Chicago Cubs |
Arizona Diamondbacks |
|
Miami Marlins |
Cincinnati Reds |
Colorado Rockies |
|
New York Mets |
Milwaukee Brewers |
Los Angeles Dodgers |
|
Philadelphia Phillies |
Pittsburgh Pirates |
San Diego Padres |
|
Washington Nationals |
St. Louis Cardinals |
San Francisco Giants |
Baseball was still recovering from the 1994 strike and the subsequent doping scandal, but there were signs that baseball was bouncing back. In 2015 the Kansas City Royals won their first World Series championship in thirty years, generating renewed interest in the sport in the Midwest. And when the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians—two teams who had not won a World Series in a combined 176 years—met in the 2016 Fall Classic, television ratings soared, making the 2016 Series the highest-rated seven-game World Series in fifteen years and the highest-rated World Series of any length since 2004. As it had after the Players’ League of 1890, the Black Sox Scandal, the Great Depression, and two world wars, baseball survived.