Nobody has asked me to take the job. Nor are they likely to in the foreseeable future, simply because I would be the least qualified person they could think of to hold it. You see, if I did, I would not be the tool of the owners, nor would I be the tool of the players' union. I would be the tool of the fans. Ugh!
Supposing for the wild, hypothetical purposes of this essay, that I did have the job, what would I do? Well, for starters, I would try to save the game--a modest but perhaps worthwhile undertaking. Does the game even need saving? I believe it does. I think it is slowly, but surely becoming a little more irrelevant with each passing year. Despite gross receipts and bottom lines of the successful teams, I sense there is not the excitement about the summer game that there used to be in my youth, and, I should point out, I am 63 years old.
There are a number of reasons for this encroaching apathy. While the reserve clause that bound a player to one team was, all too often brutally exploited by miserly club owners, it served the benign purpose of building fan loyalty to a given player that translated into loyalty to the club. All that loyalty manifested itself in a much keener interest in the game itself. Now, a player with any kind of ability will think nothing of leaving the hometown fans in the lurch for a better deal elsewhere, and those hometown fans have largely become inured to the process, but, somewhere along the line, the old bonds of genuine affection for the hometown hero seem to have atrophied. Then too, we did not begrudge the big star his handsome salary, which many players made, reserve clause notwithstanding. After all, an athlete's career is very short, and he must get it while he can. But we find it hard to relate to the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars some of them believe that society owes them to ply their trade for the highest bidder.
And that brings us to the two biggest alienating factors. Back in the 1990s, before I retired, I came upon a few employees bitterly berating the cheapskate owners of the Chicago Bulls basketball team, because they were expressing some misgivings about paying Michael Jordan $40 milling a year. "Gentlemen," I told them, "without question, Michael Jordan is the finest athlete in team sports today, but where do you suppose that 40 million dollars is going to come from? Do you think God is going to rain thousand-dollar bills on the Bulls owners from Heaven? That money is coming you of your pocket, Joe Fan." Turning now to the big baseball salaries, the same principal applies. The average ticket today costs $25.00. That's average, not the best seat in the most expensive city, but average. A guy trying to take his family to a ballgame can expect to get skinned for maybe $150, between the tickets, the concessions, transportation (including parking) and souvenirs...if he is lucky. How many family men in today's wonderful economy have between $150 and $200 to throw around for one lousy ballgame? That is because, for some unfathomable reason, the athletes on the field feel they need millions and millions of dollars a year to scrape by. And to help the fan pay for all those fat contracts, television has kicked in with ever bigger payments, but at a price. Where TV used to be grateful to get the concession to broadcast the games, when baseball was actually popular, now the game must dance to the network's tune. As a result, you have the climax of the summer game being played on bitterly cold Saturday and Sunday nights in November, while the autumn game, which lends itself just fine to nighttime play, is allowed to take up those daytime slots that used to be allocated to the World Series.
Okay, enough background. Let us get back to supposing I am the commissioner. First, I will not have taken the job without the condition that I have absolute power over all contracts for the length of my term, and I cannot be fired until my term is up. My first act is to declare all players' contracts null and void. My next act is to order all owners to scale their ticket prices from $15, for the best seats (Okay, luxury boxes aside) on down to no more that $5 for the bleachers, and that's for adults. Children, everywhere, get in for $1.00 or less. If we are going to re-vitalize this game, it is going to be through the children. Put aside your greed, people, and think about your future. Then, I would re-negotiate the television packages, as soon as possible, to give major league baseball better exposure, even if that meant taking less money. For many years baseball as been the whore of the networks, but, guess what? The networks are whores too. Give them a sweet enough deal, and one of them will do what I want. Note that I am not going to bring back the dreaded reserve clause. It is not only illegal, it can still lend itself to outright abuse. I am simply telling the owners and the players, "This is the new pie you have to slice up. It is not as big, so use a little common sense for a change."
There are other things that have been detrimental to the game I have not yet touched on, which I would address. I would come down much harder on steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. There has already been enough of a racket made about this problem for there not to be any tolerance of repeat offenders. If you were busted before my regime, and you get caught again during it, you are banned for life. Period. As for the achievements of the drug-enhanced athletes, we can't remove them from the record, but I would remove them from the record books, if you catch the distinction. In other words, we cannot erase the fact that Barry Bonds hit the number of home runs that he did, because we can't go back and change all those box scores and the results of all those games. On the other hand, since we now know he cheated to do so, I would recognise Henry Aaron, who came upon his home run total honestly as the lifetime record holder. Nor would anyone who cheated to enhance his performance be eligible for admission to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose were banned for activities related to gambling, This kind of thing is just as dishonest or even more so, in a different way.
Finally, any club owner with an attendance ranking in the upper half of the major league clubs who shall be caught extorting the city in which his club is situated to build him a new stadium, upon pain of losing the franchise, shall be fined $1,000,000 for each extortion attempt. It will be perfectly all right to negotiate a new ballpark with the hometown, just without the extortion.
I have not the slightest doubt that, the very nanosecond my term was up, I would be told to clean out my desk and that security would be alerted to escort me from the commissioner's office on the double, but the fans would be a lot better off. So too would the people in the game, whether they knew it or not.
Free Artickle Source: www.mintarticles.com
Author: Thomas C. Lane
I am a semi-retired freelance writer with an A.B. degree from Kenyon College. My principal avocation is community and non-union theater.
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