Denial, bargaining, acceptance
2021's baseball season has come to an end. The labor war is about to begin. In spite of its faithless stewards, the game remains undefeated.
I had no reason to cheer on the Atlanta Braves. I never have, and there’s a chance I never will again.
But there I was, rooting for the team that ripped the heart out of Milwaukee almost 60 years ago (and, to be fair, the members of the Milwaukee County Board practically opened up the state’s chest for them.) The team against which I cheered in 1991 when the Twins and Braves went from worst to first. The team I loathed in 1992 when Francisco Cabrera singlehandedly killed the Pittsburgh Pirates franchise. Look it up for yourself. It’s the Cabrera curse. The team that exploited a feeble Brewers offense three weeks ago.
The Braves have been a nemesis pretty much my entire life. And I was happy when they laid the wood to the Houston Astros 7-0 in Tuesday night’s championship-clinching Game 6 win.
This was a no-win situation for Major League Baseball and commissioner Rob Manfred. The Houston Astros are still radioactive from the trash can/sign stealing scandal that was dwarfed only by the worst public health crisis in a century. Their team is full of talented, but unlikeable and unrepentant guys and their fanbase, weaponized by a scandal that has only emboldened them, has all the belligerence of Phillies fans and none of the cache. They were outcheered by the Braves contingency last night, and the high-rent district behind the plate was visibily vacant as last night’s game wore on toward its inevitable conclusion.
Houston, you got one thing right last night by booing Manfred all the way through his presentation of the hunk of metal to the visiting victors.
The Atlanta Braves aren’t exactly choir boys, either. We’re only a few years removed from John Coppolella and their rampant abuses of MLB’s international free agency scheme. The All-Star Game fiasco. They actively employed Marcell Ozuna. Their scintillating superstar, Ronald Acuna Jr., blew out his knee in the summer. Joc Pederson is an October folk hero and an active on-field liability the other six months of the baseball year. I can’t wait for some club like the Rangers to overpay for a half-season of competence.
And then there’s the Tomahawk Chop, offensive in both its unoriginality and insensitivity, not terribly different from the suburban Atlanta it moved to when it abandoned Atlanta proper four years ago. Like their Houstonian counterparts, they are weaponized by the very things that make them culpable. If you call me abusive one more time, I’ll beat you up!
Regardless of who won the World Series, Manfred would have this cloud overhead, a cloud he seeded when his talk both two years and ten days ago spoke more feebly than his actions.
MLB is facing a number of public relations nightmares entering this offseason. The piece of metal will be celebrated by thousands of chopping fans over the next few days. After that, the league and the players will have their smelliest fart contest until the collective bargaining agreement formally expires in a month, at which point the game will be in its first formal work stoppage in 17 years, and its unofficially second in two years. (I argued then that the COVID-related stoppage was a de facto lockout, and still maintain that view.)
The game itself is plagued by plodding play spared only by (damning with faint praise) an uptick in strikeouts league-wide, a national marketing initiative that falls flat, a precipitous drop in attendance — its worst showing at the turnstiles since 1984 — and a national broadcaster presiding over these events who sounds like he’d rather be anywhere else than where he is, which typically happens to be the catbird seat at most sports’ biggest events.
For those of us who still believe that baseball is the best game on the planet, it’s not a good situation. For MLB’s stakeholders, which includes an overly-leveraged Sinclair Broadcast Group by way of Diamond Sports Group, which spent $8B it didn’t have for regional sports networks that had truncated scheduling in 2020 and uneven business resulting in layoffs in 2021, they have to be a little more than nervous.
I’m under no real impression that sports commissioners have ever been really in charge of the sports they are paid to commission. Commissioners operate in the interests of ownership. There is no such thing as rule of law here. But with Manfred, it’s even more obvious. He’s a labor lawyer. Win for your side at all costs. The cost might be way more than anyone is able to pay. And the two parties that don’t seem to realize this are the two principal parties.
In spite of all this, I watched Game 6 last night with one of my two daughters, who had never really expressed much interest in following a baseball game on television before. She was reading a book and chattering to me about all sorts of things because that’s what 8 year old girls do.
Then she heard the crack from Jorge Soler’s bat. The book fell to her lap as the ball took flight.
‘Whoa.’
For the first time in our lives, the game got her. She didn’t quite understand everything that was going on, but she knew that she liked it.
And that’s what really matters: parents and children, the shared experience of a pastime, the formation of relational heirlooms.
These things get lost within the byzantine nature of collective bargaining, the millions of dollars bickered over by rich and richer people, the incompetence of its stewards on display for everyone to see. Ours is a game that demands attention and rewards patience, running counter to everything America stands for in the age of algorithm-fed epistemic deterioration and a now-reflexive impulse toward gotcha moments. It’s a paean to the middle class, fast being whittled away by inflation and the disappearance of tactile, owned property. Nothing is owned anymore, only financed, rented, licensed, borrowed.
Except this game with a face for radio, the game that charms those who come to the ballpark to the point that everyone says that they love the game when they’re there. Where the absence of offense is as dramatic as its prevalence and the game cannot end without a decided winner. Where a crack of the bat will make grown men shout and little girls stop what they’re doing and take notice.
This game is just too good for all this other detritus. We’ll know in a few weeks and throughout this winter if owners and players agree.