This is one of the better articles I have seen on the conflict between the owners and MLB players. From WSJ.
If There’s No Baseball, Will You Miss It?
An old sport is booting away the summer. They better hope that enough fans care.
Cardinals pitcher Andrew Miller sits on the bench following a loss.
PHOTO: L.G. PATTERSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Here’s what baseball needs to know: I watched a slug race the other day.
I’m serious. My children, who are now largely unsupervised and feral, found a pair of slugs while playing outside, and they set up a track to pair them off in a one-time-only mollusk match race.
Ready, set, slug!
It was fantastic. Brilliant. If you were there, I would have bet you $10 on the outcome. Maybe $20. I clapped. I cheered. I…I…gave up after about 12 seconds. Those slugs were, you know, slugs. They weren’t going anywhere. The race was a bust. We returned them safely to the earth.
The point is we’re trying. The point is we’re making do. There aren’t many sports being played—well, very few of them, outside of cage fighting and golf, which, let’s be honest, are basically the same sport—and we’ve learned how to do other things. Whether your life is still in lockdown, or fully opened up, we can’t just wander over to the television, turn it on, and fritter away the rest of the afternoon watching strangers chase a ball around.
We have to talk to our families. Make eye contact. Set up board games. Go for walks. Do puzzles. Bake cookies. Do the puzzle again. Go for another walk.
Would it be nice to have a ballgame on? Absolutely. Is it critically necessary? Well…
This is what the past couple of months have taught us: Humans evolve. We miss our rituals and past behaviors—but we adjust. I have not worn nice pants since the Super Bowl. It’s fine. I’ve become the Steve McQueen of Drawstring Sweatpants. I rotate the same three T-shirts. I will probably never go back to personal sartorial dignity. I may have a yard sale and sell all my dress shoes and collared shirts. I’ll tell you when it is. I’ll sell you a slug track, too, cheap. And all the puzzles.
This is what baseball needs to know. The creaky old pastime is fighting again, yowling about how there might not be a 2020 season, how the billionaire owners and millionaire players can’t come to terms on a deal to play a pandemic-shortened season. It wants us to yowl, too—demand that all parties come to the table and hash this dispute out. It wants us to get very, very, angry, and act like this is very, very important and very, very essential.
But the danger isn’t public anger. It’s ambivalence. It’s whether there are enough people who care enough to care.
To be clear: I care. I want baseball back. I want everything back. I’m already on record about this, I explained it the other day. I want lazy summer doubleheaders and games on the radio and the comical early season hopefulness of Mets fans. More important, I want baseball to keep going, so people who work in ballparks and team offices can keep their jobs. Pro sports are bigger than the plutocrats. It’s helpful to keep that in mind.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
How much will you miss baseball if the 2020 season doesn’t happen? Join the discussion.
(If nothing else, I want baseball to come back because I am really worried about my dear colleague, the Journal baseball writer Jared Diamond. You have no idea how despondent Jared is right now. If baseball doesn’t come back, he’s going to break into Yankee Stadium and run shirtless around the base paths.)
The danger is that the rest of the population, the non-shirtless Jareds, they’re moving on. They know what it’s like to not have baseball in their lives. We’ve spent these past few months making a whole lot of mac & cheese and gaining a whole lot of perspective. There are serious crises in this country—history-defining moments for public health, the economy, and equality and justice—and the absence of baseball just doesn’t rise to the top of the list of Most Important Things.
This is what baseball needs to get.
Rob Manfred, right, spoke with Mike Greenberg on ESPN's 'The Return of Sports' on Monday.
PHOTO: ESPNSports can’t presume anything right now. That was my takeaway watching Monday night’s “Return to Sports” on ESPN special with league commissioners. The bosses of several major sports got airtime to talk about the revivals of their games—well, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred got something slightly more than that; he got a light sautéing from ESPN host Mike Greenberg—and while everything but baseball appears to be coming back, everyone still sounds a little unsure about what to expect. NBA stars see protests in the streets and wonder if now’s the right time to detach into a sanitized Disney World bio-bubble. A handful of NFL players tested positive for coronavirus the other day—and it isn’t like football can be socially distant.
These are fair anxieties amid a scenario that is unprecedented in sports history. It’s clear the Return to Sports will be less of a triumphant, country-opening firework than it will be a cautious first step. These games are billed as a return to normalcy, but it’s pretty clear they’re not going to be normal at all.
That’s what baseball needs to get. Nothing’s the same, and it may not be for a while. Like I said, I watched a slug race the other day.
