It is an accident that you root for your favorite team. If you are, say, a Giants fan, then it is likely that you grew up in the Bay Area, which was a decision made outside your control, or perhaps you grew up elsewhere but you had a parent who was a Giants fan, which is still a decision outside your control.
Maybe not, though. Maybe you had a relative, or friend, or nemesis, and that person rooted for the Dodgers (Boo Dodgers! Boo!), and so out of childish spite, you decided to root for the Giants. Maybe you have no connection at all, but you were watching a game one night and you latched onto Buster Posey, or Barry Bonds, or Will Clark, or (if you’re from, uh, a different generation) Willie Mays. That player just as easily could have been Yadier Molina, or Albert Pujols, or Ozzie Smith, or Stan Musial, and then what? That’s right, you’re a disgusting Cardinals fan.
Hypothetical You makes me sick. Sick!
So you shouldn’t feel any sense of superiority when you see this:
That is, if you’re keeping track, three (3) teams not trying to win and two (2) teams, seeing an opportunity to half-ass it, half-assing it. That’s the entire division. Because someone has to win, one of those teams, absolutely not committed to putting their best product on the field, will win the division and go to the playoffs. This team will be viewed as a model of good business sense and strong baseball acumen; their GM or President of Baseball Operations or whoever will win Baseball America’s Executive of the Year. Teams will start imitating the model, they won’t have success, and then it’ll go away.
This is what baseball is. This is what the owners have wanted it to be for a very long time, and our national crisis means that they got their wish. The thing that fans want is to watch the highest quality of baseball; the thing that owners want is to make as much money as possible in the short-term, and damn the consequences, and who cares if you alienate some people in the long term because you’re making money. The commissioner, in theory there to do what’s best for the game in the long term, was hired by the owners and can be fired by the owners, so he’s pretty much gonna make them as much money as possible in the short-term and damn the consequences.
Baseball is made up of a game, which generally people enjoy watching, and the business side of making money off the game. These are not equally valuable to the typical sports fan; somehow, the business side became way, way more important in sports media and way more important to a subset of the fans who love watching the sausage get made and screaming, “MORE PIG ANUS, YOU COWARDS.”
I assume that baseball will not spend the next decade eating its own future for moderate short-term gains, but on the other hand, I mostly just don’t want to acknowledge that that will happen and have nothing more to back it up with. The owners are fighting hard against creating new fans or maintaining labor peace or putting the best product on the field they possibly can. Yes, COVID will impact their revenue streams, but you create better future revenue streams by investing in your product now, instead of cutting costs and letting everyone know that you suck.
There is no future to the owners. There is only what you can get away with in the present, repeated ad nauseam for years and years until you can’t get away with it any more. These are the people in charge of the game, and in charge of leaving something behind for the next generation, and they’re not only wholly incapable of doing that job, but they’re uninterested in being good at it.
Boy, that sounds like another prominent American figure in recent years, huh? Pretty wild! Let’s move on.
If anyone is still wondering how you can be not romantic about baseball, this is how. If your team was one of those five — if you saw your Reds just absolutely tearing their team apart because of money issues, you wouldn’t be able to be romantic about that. If you were a Cubs fan, already annoyed that what should have been a dynasty got you just one title, you’d have the right to be livid seeing your team not give a shit about competing again.
Baseball does not want to do any more than the bare minimum to keep existing, keep printing money, and do it again tomorrow. They openly say that this is their plan and expect applause and adulation. I don’t know about you, but I just keep looking at that tweet, summarizing all the organizations that aren’t going to put the best team possible on the field. I just keep staring, hoping it isn’t saying what it’s saying, that I’ve just been reading it wrong.
I haven’t, though. Neither have you. It’s as plain as can be. They’re just not trying. Romantic as hell, right?