Rest In Peace, Tim McCarver

Tim McCarver died yesterday at the age of 81.  McCarver had a 21-year career in the major leagues from 1959 through 1980.  After that playing career he became a broadcaster/color analyst for MLB games that saw him cover 23 World Series and that second career earned him enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a broadcaster.  He was  very good at what he did – – and he had a self-deprecating sense of humor.

I think he was a guest on David Letterman’s late night show when he told this story about himself.  It was in the mid-60s and he was catching Bob Gibson in a game where Gibson was not having a good outing; batters were hitting him hard and Gibson’s fierce competitiveness was showing .  McCarver said he went out to the mound to try to get Gibson to calm down and get back into his groove but Gibson was having none of that.  Gibson told McCarver to get back where he belongs because the only thing McCarver knew about good pitching was that he (McCarver) could not hit it.  McCarver said he trotted back to home plate so that everyone in the stands would think that he and Gibson had had a constructive exchange and that Gibson was going to settle down.

Rest in peace, Tim McCarver

Earlier this week, I wrote about the start of Spring Training as my tried-and-true harbinger of Spring.  I enjoy baseball and I particularly enjoy spending a warm summer evening in the stands at a baseball game.  However, I also am a bit apprehensive about the future of the game.  I read a report that said that in 2022 the average age of a person watching baseball on TV approached 60 years old.  And therein lies the source of my apprehension.

Sports in the 2020s – and presumably in the 2030s too – survive and grow based on TV audiences.  The Super Bowl had 113 million viewers; that is THE reason why advertisers paid FOX enough money for ad slots last Sunday that FOX could expect to clear $500M for the day.  MLB cannot come close to that and that fact shows up in other places.

Six months ago, there were two MLB franchises openly up for sale (Angels and Nats) and given the ownership tension that existed in Baltimore six months ago, the O’s might have been available for the right price.  Today, the Angels are off the market.  You may believe if you will that the reason is the owner there considers that he has unfinished business with the team and the city – – winning a World Series – – or perhaps after a year on the market the owner learned that none of the bids was going to come close to his asking price.  Maybe it is a little of both, but I suspect that “insufficient bids” is a real issue there.

The Nats remain on the market but let us just say that there has not been a stampede of billionaires to the Nats’ offices seeking to pour over the team’s business records.  If Forbes is correct, the Lerner family will make a tidy profit selling the team for $2B.  However, in the same designated marketing area of DC/Maryland/Virginia, the Washington Commanders will likely sell for something between $6B and $7B.  Moreover, there are indeed billionaires lining up to see the team’s books and records.

I believe there were two factors at work in the last 40 years or so that put baseball in the situation that exists today:

1. Complacency:  I think that the owners and the execs who ran the game of baseball convinced themselves that the historical significance of baseball as a part of American culture would never be seriously challenged.  They were very wrong.  As American culture tilted toward activities that involved shorter attention spans, MLB games lasting three-and-a-half hours or more fell out of favor quickly.  [Aside:  Ironically the games were too slow and the popularity dropped very fast.]
2. Labor/Management Power Imbalance:  Unions and management are always going to be at odds; that is axiomatic.  When either side is “too dominant” things get out of hand and the dominance of the MLBPA did not benefit baseball as an industry.  I know that anything is possible but can you imagine a situation where in mid-December with a few regular season games to play and with the playoffs and Super Bowl in plain sight, the NFL players would walk out and refuse to finish the season?  The MLBPA did the equivalent of just that in 1994; that did not help “the game”.

Finally, in 2022, MLB will use the pitch clock.  This has been “an experiment” in minor league baseball for at least the last 5 seasons and last year it shortened the average minor league game by about 20 minutes.  It is a fair question to ask the folks who run MLB and the MLBPA the following simple question:

• What took so long?

It is not as if slow pace of play and the tedium of 4-hour games in mid-season were unknown hinderances to the games.  There has been ample commentary on those sorts of issues for at least the last 20 years and maybe 25 years.  And it is that last point that makes me worry the most about the future of baseball as something other than a niche sport.  There will be a half-dozen or so new rules in effect for 2022 with the intent to increase the pace and the action of the games.  Odds are that these rules will not be perfect such that they can be written in stone and left alone for the next hundred years; odds are they will need modification and change.  And if I am right about that, then baseball as a game cannot wait for these folks to take forever to make said modifications/changes.  Yet, the same folks are in charge in MLB and the MLBPA who took forever to bring us the new rules in 2022.

Future behavior is best predicted by past behavior…

Finally, almost 70 years ago – when baseball was king – the historian Jacque Barzun wrote:

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game – and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.”

Would anyone write that in 2022?

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………