21: Baseball is back! What about that elephant in the room?

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by SavannahGuy

SAVANNAH, GA – Spring is fast approaching and the excitement of a brand spanking new baseball season is upon us. Braves pitchers and catchers have reported and all other players soon arrive in camp. With great anticipation and high expectations we await news. It’s a great time for baseball fans.

Can’t wait…but before the southern Dogwoods and azaleas bloom and I once again become too enamored with real live baseball being played, I’ll get a few issues off my chest and put them on the table.

There’ll be plenty of time soon to get caught up in the games, the players, the teams, trades, stats and standings. Before all of that begins and we baseball fans become immersed in all that is good and wholesome and competitive I wonder: What about that other stuff that can turn good fans into cynics? You know, the baggage…the steroids, the allegations, the excess…the ugly stuff we ignore until it hits the headlines again.

Maybe it’s just my cathartic opine and statement of the obvious, but excuse me sports fans…uh, there’s an elephant in the room. Oh, I’d like it to go away but it won’t leave anytime soon. Perhaps by acknowledging its existence and calling it by name, it’ll at least be put it in its proper place, if but only for a little while.

This big, fat hairy elephant is not just steroids and the players that cheat. It’s the inept or corrupt trainers and team doctors. It’s the enabling owners, the unreasonable and elusive union, it’s the media and most of all it’s the MLB. It’s flamed by the always more, bigger, better, faster, further, stronger, never enough culture we live in.

Theatre of the absurd.

Off the field of play, baseball is seriously flawed. After years of the curse of steroids and a fundamentally rudderless, myopic MLB with a seemingly owner-managed, Howdy-Doody Commissioner, major league baseball has once again become tarnished. Oh, it’s happened before with the Black Sox and the strikes…but never quite like today. Sure, baseball will survive and thrive for the foreseeable future and we’ll enjoy the games themselves, but the gaps between the businesses of baseball, the game of baseball, the players and loyal fans continues to grow wider.

Baseball is in the midst of a perfect storm of steroids, outlandish salaries and payroll pressures never before seen or imagined. Each cascading wave of the storm has a cumulative effect on television costs, game broadcast times and coverage. During the regular season but particularly during playoffs, the games are being played later at night, ignoring an entire generation of youth…the next generation of future fans.

Hey Bud, it’s also the economy, stupid. If MLB leadership doesn’t take a good, hard, rational, big-picture, long term look at baseball then provide reasonably affordable, dependable and consistent access to its fans, they could be unwittingly reducing an American institution to just another reality television property. Our American pastime risks becoming an elitist stadium event and a mid-level television commodity, competing with an explosion of entertainment content choices today.

Don’t blame the players on baseballs economy. Sure, the phenomenon of super-rich players hoisted to the “stratusphere” of an athlete society elite make easy targets, but they are the game. They’re the only reason we watch. They are the content. They take the field and play the game. They are the talent. They play their hearts out. They hit, pitch, catch, throw, scrap and claw, run the bases, score the runs and entertain us with their valiant effort. Like film actors, artists and musicians, they deserve whatever the market will bear. They are the actors on the stage we watch, write about, talk about, measure and obsess over.

Our game is changing. Baseball is either evolving or devolving, depending on your point of view. Perhaps there’s a transformation…no, make that transmutation taking place, but it is in no way unique to our favorite pastime or even sports. The state of baseball is but a reflection of our society, an index to a larger, faster, bigger, better, “let’s see how big we can grow it and how far we can stretch it until we break” it American culture.

Media plays its part in our changing sport culture. Around the clock sports news and non-stop gossip, steroid and designer drug scandals, the he said-she said blather, the paparazzi-like, star-worshiping sports journalists, a “blog universe of rumors” may just mark a shift in sports to attract and appeal to a 24/7 generation of stat-obsessed, instant gratification hooked, win or you stink – lose and we’re personally miserable sports fan culture.

Now, back to that big fat hairy elephant. Wait, that’s no elephant. That’s a Tyrannosaurus rex and baseball may not be evolving…it may be knee deep and wading further into the tar pit of irrelevancy.

So, where does that leave us? Where is the good old inter-subjective, traditional fans game we can get behind and root for? Where are apple pies and the American flag? Where is the Star Spangled Banner? Where are the peanuts and Cracker Jack? Where are the Blue Angel flyovers? Where are the boys of summer? Who in baseball has the “right stuff” to fix it?

What would Tom Wolfe say?

With his “new journalism” style and his amazing ability to go instantly from tarmac to 30,000 feet and back like no other, Mr. Wolfe can delve into the depths of a subculture and emerge holding the beating heart and speaking the vernacular of a generation. Wolfe can coin a phrase, give title to a cultural movement and capture the behavioral, aesthetic essence of a particular group. With that talent, what would the esteemed author write about America’s traditional pastime, the game of baseball?

Tom Wolfe played baseball. In 1952 he earned a tryout as a pitcher with the New York Giants. His baseball career ended when he was cut after three days. A failing Wolfe attributed to his inability to throw good fastballs. Fortunately, for those of us who have long appreciated his social commentary and exploration of sub-cultures, Wolfe abandoned baseball.

How might Tom Wolfe describe the myopic MLB that allows the sport and many of the players to remain caught up so long in a self-perpetuating, ostentatious tsunami of excess, unreasonable expectations and illegal “drugs for enhancement” culture? What would he think of the lowered bar of personal integrity and sportsmanship of those that cheat and those self-serving enablers that look the other way? How would Mr. Wolfe illustrate the ignored health risks taken by drug taking players?

What would Wolfe write about a Player’s Union that staunchly supports excess and eludes drug testing? What of the owners that benefit from the “financial steroids” of a full stadium, big TV deals and enjoy the artificially “pumped up” long ball even more than the chicks!

Perhaps Mr. Wolfe might apply just one word to describe the dark side of baseball. Omerta.

Be wary of the strawberry Kool-Aid.

Perhaps there is an “electric Kool-Aid acid test” for traditional baseball fans. That is, after swallowing all of the news of controversy, steroids and financial excess of our great American pastime, we can still appreciate and enjoy watching the game itself. Despite all of the controversy, so many good, young athletes with God given talent still take the field and play the game.

Kenesaw Mountain Landis is gone and Bud Selig is entrenched at the fenceless zoo, so what can we fans do? We continue to watch the games and root for the old home team, but we have to speak out whenever possible and wherever appropriate. Oh, and give Bud a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

Where is Tom Wolfe when you need him? Perhaps baseball needs a high profile outsider with an understanding and appreciation of baseball that can do what the MLB and misguided Congress can’t do…capture the beauty and essence of the game, identify the threats to the game, magnify the problems, shine a light, put it all into perspective, write the book, make the movie, generate simultaneous love of game and outrage at the ineptitude and corruption around it, create a catalyst to change the culture of the game…and entertain us all at the same time.

C’mon Tom…you could do it.

~SavannahGuy~

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