The 1990s as told by Major League Baseball

It is interesting how the present forms into themes that we don’t understand until it is past.

The book on the 1990s is still being written, of course. We need the benefit of distance to get it right. But some things are starting to emerge.

• In the 1960s, we had to deal with major cultural shifts that were as necessary as the civil war and the New Deal.
• In the 1970s, we learned to adapt to those new cultural norms.
• In the 1980s, conservatives rejected many of the new norms and recast society as an individualistic and consumer society.
• In the 1990s, we expanded this concept.

I was thinking about it this morning, and the best example of this is actually baseball. No kidding! Baseball personifies the mistakes, miscalculations, glory, and dysfunction of the 90’s.

With Bud Selig as commissioner, we saw the problem of putting a businessman in charge of bureaucracy (I know you are thinking Bush better personifies this than Clinton, but politics lags behind public opinion, remember).

• Early on, we had a work stoppage that was so pro-owner that we saw the failed use of scabs and the further damaging of the sport’s reputation.
• The post-lockout period was dominated by successive home run chases, first the McGwire/Sosa battle, then Barry Bonds.
• Pitchers had the worst statistics in decades, making offensive numbers so, ahem, offensive. Many jokes about the scores looking more akin to football.
• Player salaries balloon as free agency becomes a crack addiction for owners.
• Bud Selig uses blackmail and economic pressure to force cities and states to pay for new stadiums for across the country.
• Selig encourages half-brained schemes to boost interest with neither regard to tradition or logic, including interleague play and the all-star game determining home field for the World Series.
• Attendance soars, owners turn wild profits, players make crazy money: ticket prices shoot through the roof.
• And steroids.

As everything, the 90’s and 00’s bleed together, but most of the above issues take root and grow in the 1990s, in no small part due to the leadership of Commissioner Bud Selig. The leadership, like the 1990s was about two things: market manipulation and making money. The Selig Era has shown no interest in the sport, tradition, or in legacy. It has taken as irrelevant the wishes of the fans, communities, players, managers, or umpires, leaving only owners. Here are my thoughts on the issues (and how they relate).

The lockout showed the increasing position of the government to prefer the freedom of owners and companies to the rights of the workforce. This includes the ever-expanding difference between the extreme wealthy and the rest of us. But worse is the fundamental shift in extreme prejudice toward one wealthy person’s right to hold his/her labor force hostage over the worker’s basic right to a decent wage and working conditions. I know this seems far-fetched with pampered professional athletes, but unions are unions and businesses are businesses. The decreasing power of unions is not due to ability, but the preference of one person’s rights (the owners) over another’s (the workers). This is even more aggregious when the preferred person has inherent advantages (wealth and ownership [independence]) over the worker (much lower income and job dependent on others)

The home run chase, the steroids issue, and minor rules changes all lead to a fundamental intention of the Selig Era: increased scoring. Selig was often quoted as suggesting that what people watched baseball for was the homerun. It is an idea that is akin to suggesting that people like football for touchdown passes, hockey for slap shot goals and basketball for dunks. Though all of these things are exciting, and “innovations” in each of the sports, appearing in some cases in the latter half of the 20^th Century, but none is, by itself, anybody’s real reason for watching a sport. If it were, homerun derbies and slam dunk contests would be the most watched events. The manipulation of the game to increase offense using the above reasons, but also expansion and dilution of the pitching throughout baseball plus the potential of a juiced baseball (treated by the media as a conspiracy theory, despite some compelling evidence) all lead to more offense; and ridiculously long, less compelling games. It led to the late 90’s Athletics truly exciting game plan of getting on base and letting the next guy hit a homerun. Yes. Baseball was never as riveting as this. People love true competition. They love underdog Davids toppling Goliaths—not two Goliaths slugging it out for 4 to 5 hours before getting too tired to stand up, let alone punch each other. In our financial system of the 90’s, we developed a similar principle: market manipulation is bad when it means parity and fairness and broad competition, but good when it means expanding the wealth potential of the über-rich and minimizing competitive and market forces. Think about the narrow sense of the “free marketeers”: they are interested in competition as a rationale for their dealings only, but have sought favorable rules changes to allow them to eliminate competition. Put in another way, competition comes from a variety of factors, not the least of which deals with how one automates, purchases goods with which they will manufacture a product, markets their product, and sells that product, not merely whether another company makes a similar product. Free marketeers think there is competition when another person or company has the potential to produce a similar product and may at some point be competition to them. Any other aspect of the market can and should be manipulated in their favor. Meanwhile, the consumer receives an inferior and inefficient product.

Player salaries outpace the increase of salaries in other markets. This dovetails with the overpayment of services rendered by our celebrities of all types, regardless of industry. In the 1990s, the most important people in the country are not our politicians, innovators, diplomats, doctors or any other leader or visionary or care provider, but our celebrities. We developed an unhealthy demand for relationship with our baseball players that finds us disappointed when we find out Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens are/may be cheaters. We are happy that Barry Bonds is a cheater because it justifies our dislike for him anyway. We want to know who Derek Jeter is dating because we don’t want him to be a heroic golden boy, but the womanizer and partier of another Yankees great, Babe Ruth. The salaries themselves don’t represent sound business decisions. We are only beginning to see that teams can build through the draft and completely forgo free agency.

The half-brained schemes that are Selig’s trademark show how off-the-mark Selig’s strategies really are. Like his move for more offense at the expense of a watchable game (which seems like Microsoft’s corporate MO), the changes of virtually no practical significance that dramatically alter the culture of the game served as a short-term money-making ploy. The idea being to get teams that never play each other, but are territorial rivals (ie New York’s Yankees and Mets and Chicago’s White Sox and Cubs, for instance) would be matchups that people want to see. And they did: for a couple of years. Now they’re just games. Not to mention Detroit playing Arizona seems to have virtually no value. This move was intended to maximize short-term profits, which is the 1990s MO. Butchering profitable companies for short-term personal gain for the board, leaving the shareholders (the fans) left to pick up the pieces.

This leaves the worst mark of the Selig Era: the stadium gambit. As commissioner, Selig has certain powers. He encouraged the realignment, expansion and put some teams on notice for contraction a few years ago (including the Minnesota Twins and the former Montreal Expos). His most dictatorial and disgusting move has been using the threat of relocation as a bargaining tool (less like a “chip” and more like a metal rod jammed somewhere) so that the city in question will build a new stadium. Renovations are not enough. There must be new stadiums. This was sold to the people with the incentive of increased revenue. They looked at Baltimore’s Camden Yards and said, “if it can work for Baltimore…” and then Cleveland struck proverbial gold. By building a young core of players along with a new stadium, the Indians went to a World Series with record profits. This became the template for all teams that Selig believed needed that boost that come from a new stadium. Since Baltimore and Cleveland’s builds in 1992 and ’94 respectively, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Texas, and Washington have all built new stadiums. Plus the Yankees are building a new one for next year. Unlike the previous comments about short-term profits, this serves as the ultimate money-making scheme. First, you get the people to pay for your facilities, putting the financial risk on not only the fans, but on the local community. Second, the owners, not the taxpayers or even players or personnel of the team, benefits directly from the short-term boost in attendance. Third, teams are often given a sweetheart deal in purchasing the stadium (as Texas did under the direction of George W. Bush), meaning the team gains the benefits of ownership (no rent, plus being able to rent it out to others generating additional income in the offseason or during road trips), while taking virtually none of the cost. They also used Enron-style accounting, which was made possible in the 1990s by a Republican Congress. Lastly, raising prices of tickets mean an increase in profit per ticket, as building costs are quickly offset. The true crime in this has not even been these questionable contracts that many of these cities have gone into for the building of stadiums, but the blatant and despicable requirement on the part of the commissioner to demand new stadiums be built: in the case of some, the old one was not only tremendously serviceable, but a true icon (such as Tiger Stadium) or is still “new” by building standards (The Metrodome in Minneapolis was built in 1982). Neither team in Los Angeles or the Boston Red Sox is being threatened with relocation, despite the age of their stadiums are all over forty years old (Fenway is 96). This demonstrates the use of “laws” and restrictions to manipulate the outcome in the way that is preferred by a political party or a collective of wealthy companies. It is like the continued “deregulation” of media ownership rules that allow mega-corporations to own more and more networks, news outlets, newspapers, and radio stations in the same city. The future potential of industry giants to manipulate the news and directly influence local situations to their direct benefit is unprecedented.

Selig’s manipulation of the stadium vs. relocation issue is intended to directly benefit the owners and Major League Baseball, but has the side effect of driving fans away and jeapordizing the long-term value of the sport. With rising ticket prices, fans are no longer able to go to 10-30 games a year, dropping by the ballpark because they have an afternoon free or taking the kids each Saturday. This is an essential component of a season that sits at 162 games. Making each game an event sure seems strange when you are sitting in a half-empty park in early May watching a meaningless interleague game or in September for a team that is far from playoff bound. The visit to the ballpark is now more spectacle and event than ritual and participation. Other examples, such as in Montreal should serve as a serious warning. When threatened with contraction or relocation, the fans in Montreal chose to let the team leave: they stopped going to the stadium, making their already low attendance drop through the floor.

I’m tired of waiting for Bud Selig to leave office and he certainly should have been impeached long before now. But like many of the things from the 1990s, it will take a long time to fix things for the new present and for the future.