Remember when you, the sports fan, mattered for like, 5 minutes?
It was nice, wasn’t it? When the pandemic shut down sports like nothing we’d ever seen since World War II, and the glorious return created these weird Bubbles and made-for-TV-games. Do you remember how players and coaches regularly, repeatedly, gushed about how much they missed you? Dear Fans?
And we were all so grateful to be so prized.
Even when small amounts of fans were allowed to trickle back in scattered smatterings, the life and energy real people brought to their competitions was so much better than the fake fan noise echoes in stadiums and COVID-19 sanitized coliseums with no pulse.
It was nice while it lasted. The era of The Fan.
That’s all dead now.
This major-league baseball mess isn’t just symptomatic of all that is ugly and disappointing and disgusting in sport. It’s an insult to all of us – the people who kept these businesses going.
Do you even care, at this point, about the finer details, and the haggling points, of MLB’s current conundrum? Other than how much the small market teams like Milwaukee will be further handcuffed from keeping up with the national TV network’s favorite mass media markets?
The rest – the owners, the players, the union – just look like one greedy group whining louder than another greedy group.
Great timing guys, when war on the other side of the world is tearing families apart and innocent, regular Russians are suffering under a mad man. Ukranian men old enough to be grandfathers are buying guns to enact martial law and defend their wrecked homes. Besides the humanitarian devastation and sin going over there, that war is likely to jack up our gas prices and grocery bills even more here in the good ol’ US of A, where we’re already bracing inflation. It might mean … nothing to you.
Gosh, we’re so sick of your arguments. You don’t have any idea anymore in your theater-style living rooms and cockpit-outfitted smart cars and organic served meals after team-issued massages. The NFL lockouts of 2011, the NBA pushing the world champs right back on the court after just weeks off and these seemingly never-ending MLB fights between owners and players – it’s all the same to us. You all look guilty and greedy. And worse, it’s all distracting from what’s happening to sports.
Seasons are stretching out longer and longer – not in-season schedules, but the offseason demands – so more players are needed to survive the fiscal calendar year of the sports (corporation) franchise. That larger work force of players – not to mention bloated coaching staffs – must also be competitive, since more leagues are allowing more teams in the postseason. Being left out is catastrophic.
It all makes investments in players, coaches and support staff more expensive and mistakes less forgivable.
And then the awful byproduct is that – at least in the NFL and NBA – almost no one has to pay their dues any more to get in to the Bigs.
Guys are awarded the big pay day (and guaranteed roster spot) with Contract No. 1, which leads to so much sewage we don’t want to see. Corruption at the college level. Exploitation of student-athletes as commodities. And maybe the worst: overinflating the egos of too many ridiculous draft and recruiting ‘experts.’ We have too many basement podcasters pointing their analysis at unlucky, unready teenagers.
And yet we go along with it, me, you, the fans. Why? Maybe, I don’t know … because we had so many birthday parties as a kid at County Stadium with our best friends, because Mom and Dad could actually afford the cheap seats. And maybe, just guessing, we skipped homework for a test to sneak off to that same stadium to watch real history unfold, The Kid, hit his 3,000th on a frosty Fall night.
And maybe we forget what happened in 1994, when the Chicago White Sox had a real biceped bomber, Frank Thomas, and a lead in the AL Central and then greed and fighting shut the whole thing down. First it was for days and then weeks and then, unthinkable. The entire season just shut down, a plot twist with no end, a team with no closure.
Maybe like all unhealthy relationships, we should own our part of the blame. We pretended the game wasn’t juiced for awhile, and we fell for Sosa and McGwire. And after a few months we stopped booing the cheaters that even shared our own dinner tables, because baseball is family. Even when a storm is coming, we always looked for the rainbow in rain delays.
But it’s getting hard now, right? Don’t we pause when we fork over hard earned paychecks for playoff tickets that make braces for our kids look like a bargain? We wash down that uneasy feeling in our gut with a warm $12, 10-ounce beer.
At least during those two or three months of lock down during the 2020 pandemic, we were forced to do something else. Buy a bike, take a hike, go to bed at a decent hour instead of waiting for that ninth inning four-hour West Coast stint to play out. We supported local restaurants – end each other – when struggling. It was good. It was healthy. For all of us.
But it was also apparently easily forgotten by the folks who count on fan support to make the money that they make.
I know you won’t do it, because you’re a romantic, and you will never throw that old glove in the garage away. But I beg you, if you won’t break up with baseball for good, then maybe you would at least give it the silent treatment. For a while.
No one deserves to be taken for granted like this, especially not you.
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