If someone was to look into the history books going back 30 to 35 years, they could find evidence saying Major League Baseball (and baseball in general) was called “America’s Pastime,” and not just because it was the first professional sports league ever established in the United States and Canada. The sport was appealing to kids who dreamed of playing it when they grew up, and between MLB, the NFL, NBA and NHL, baseball is the only one of the four major North American sports leagues who has a chunk of their regular season all to themselves, where they don’t have to share the spotlight with others. Currently, football is by far the king in this country when it comes to popularity, and even though baseball is a global sport, soccer and basketball is what would win the numbers game in other countries around the world. On top of the rising popularity of the other sports, MLB found themselves dealing with a work stoppage that halted the 1994 season and an era that was ravaged by the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) during this 30 to 35-year threshold, among other issues. All of this equals a sport that is in peril, and if MLB doesn’t find answers to some of these problems that will get covered in this article, we could be talking about a league permanently losing millions of fans before too much longer.
It is understood the other leagues, particularly the NFL, continue to grow in the country’s popularity scale. A big reason for this is how football is marketed throughout the year. Even with the season being shorter than the others, the NFL is a topic year-round because they have different events (such as the combine, draft and minicamps) through the offseason that have us ready to get to July, which is when training camps start league-wide. The same can not be said for MLB, who has done a horrible job marketing their players. This is sad because baseball has a wealth of young stars, and Mike Trout, who plays for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, is in the prime of his career and probably the league’s best player. As good as Trout is, he can probably walk down the street, and the general fan wouldn’t even know it was him, where as NFL stars, like Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, can be spotted from nearby cities. The days of relying on play on the field for popularity are gone, and MLB is getting left further and further behind with their outdated marketing strategies.
Speaking of the play on the field, that has been the worst I remember seeing in my life. The quality is completely gone, being taken to unwatchable heights by the managers, front office gurus and scouts who are interpreting the analytics (fancy word for statistics). It’s to the point where computers might as well be in these aforementioned positions, because it’s rare we see a starting pitcher go past six innings, or see a team find ways to manufacture runs through singles, doubles, triples and stolen bases. It’s either a home run or a strikeout, and both have led to changes that made the quality of play worse (more on these changes in a bit). Regardless of what has transpired with the rules, MLB was already taken down the rabbit hole because of the trend to let analytics take over and dictate the way the game is played. Human instincts and heart is rarely a factor when it comes to making crucial decisions, and this is part of the reason why quality of play has severely diminished.
While MLB wants to show progression in some aspects, they are probably the league who holds on to traditional methods the most, and part of that includes the unwritten rules used to police the sport on the field. First off, unwritten rules are not rules if they can not be found a rule book. Secondly, can somebody tell me what is wrong with someone celebrating a home run a little bit? Why does the next batter, or maybe the person who hit said home run, has to be subjected to retribution? If a pitcher doesn’t want to get home runs hit off of them, get the hitter out. I equate a batter getting beamed to pitchers being sore losers. They are great if they have success, but the minute things go south, now it’s time to cry. Last time I checked, this is supposed to be a league played by adults, so handle the business like adults. If things do not work out as planned, make adjustments to ensure they do next time. As for the unwritten rules, they really are not much different from gray area. I thought it was the objective to get rid of gray area. If we are to believe that is the case, then it is time for the rules that are not written to go.
To compound all of the issues facing MLB, they lost a golden opportunity to perhaps win their way back into the hearts of many fans, even those that may have been lost from the past. We all know 2020 was a year unlike any other due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sports world shut down in March of last year, and with the season that normally starts around early-April, baseball could have been the one sport that gave us something to watch and kept us together. Instead, MLB and the Players Association could not agree to a start date, with things as trivial as deciding whether or not to have a designated hitter in the National League coming between them. Therefore, the season did not begin until July 23, almost four months after the normal start date, and it was compressed into 60 games. With people dying and losing their jobs and homes because of the pandemic, the last thing people want to hear about is a league worth billions of dollars fighting over more money. Too many times, MLB gets in their own way, with out-of-touch owners not caring about anything else besides cashing checks, and a players union that seems to have trouble policing a game that’s supposed to take care of itself. Sadly, 2020 was just the latest example, and the once great game continues to get closer to the point of no recovery.
Major League Baseball has some tough questions to answer going forward, and what they come up with is critical for the sport’s future. The front office does not seem to know what they want to showcase on the field. In 2019, a record 6,776 home runs were hit, breaking the previous record (set in 2017) by 671. After the shortened 2020 season, MLB decided to do something about the baseballs being used during games, which pretty much acknowledged the balls were “juiced” during recent years. In this current season, the league batting average was lower than it has been in history, and six no-hitters have been thrown. After weeks of research, it has been discovered pitchers are using foreign substances (such as Spider Tack) to have better control of the ball and increase the spin rate, the amount of revolutions, on their pitches. The substance use in and of itself is something that is not really new, but is alarming because of the degree of the use across the league. So MLB decided to crack down on the usage, making it legal for umpires to do random checks on pitchers for these substances, and giving the league the right to suspend the players if caught. As far as the batting average goes, the fact pitchers have been using what is essentially performance-enhancers does not help what has been a bad season for hitters, but the downward-spiral was long underway because of the way hitting is taught these days. This is where MLB is has to figure out what direction they want to go in terms of getting the best possible product on the field. Either they want offense, or they want pitching to dominate. Instant replay continues to be questionable, and the league deals with some sort of scandal at least every other year. Do they allow minimum foreign substance use for pitchers? Should pine tar be allowed for the bats of hitters? In other words, the sport is in complete and utter disarray, with no answers in sight.
Even with my writing of this article, I am a fan of baseball, and to see the product MLB is running out there for our viewing displeasure is disheartening. With all the problems facing MLB, it does not help the current collective bargaining agreement expires after this season. It appears the two sides are not anywhere close to reaching a new deal, and for a sport that is falling out of favor altogether, that is the worse possible news for even the most hardcore of fans. It took years for MLB to recover from the strike in ’94, and even longer to come out of the steroid era. A work stoppage come next season, and that could be the final blow that puts MLB in a spot of never being able to gain popularity back. The clock is ticking on the league’s (inept) leadership to get a clue and learn to evolve with the times, or else, “America’s Pastime” will become an afterthought in the minds of fans and marketers alike.
BOFA Sports 