Southpaw 24: A Preseason Brainstorm
Three ways to make the game of baseball better.
Dear Readers,
Baseball is back! Kind of. The boys are down in Florida and Arizona, working on their skills, playing messy Spring Training baseball, and generally getting back in shape for Opening Day on April 1. While we here at Southpaw try to cover different sports from unique angles, baseball is admittedly our first and truest love, and it’s the sport we spend the most energy thinking and bickering about. (Ian’s Nationals won the last “real” World Series, while Calder’s Mets . . . did not. But he really thinks that this is their year—as he did last year, and every year before that.)
So, as we prepare to kick off the regular season, we’ve decided this week to dedicate our virtual column inches to a sort of informal brainstorm on the state of the game and what Major League Baseball could do to improve it. Some of our suggestions aren’t strictly speaking “political”—whatever that means—but when it comes to baseball, the personal is political, so cut us some slack.
-Calder and Ian
Baseball needs changing. Here are three ways to make the game better.
1. Create a Salary Floor
The most contentious issue that is likely to arise in the upcoming round of negotiations for the new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the players’ union and the league is the fact that most teams are not trying to win. Tanking in baseball is here, as teams with no shot at winning a World Series have fully embraced the strategy of selling off their remaining stars and refusing to shell out money for new ones in the hopes of saving money and securing top draft picks. This tactic pleases the analytics guys who have become increasingly influential in many front offices, and it allows owners to turn big profits while fielding lousy teams, all in the service of some marginally brighter, far-off future. Fans had a front-row seat to a particularly brazen example of tanking during this past offseason as the Colorado Rockies shipped off their All-Star third baseman Nolan Arenado to the St. Louis Cardinals for a dismal return and only partial salary relief. As a result of this depraved deal the Rockies, who are sure to be terrible this year, are actually paying Arenado to play against them.
Tanking takes a toll on competitive parity in any sport, but is particularly hard to endure in baseball, where fans, coaches, and players have to then suffer through a 162 game season of half-assed baseball. To address this issue, the new CBA should include a salary floor, which would require owners to spend a minimum amount of money—the union has suggested $150 million—annually on players’ salaries. A salary floor would be good for most players, who would earn more money, and for the sport as a whole, since a salary floor would help to equalize disparities between payrolls. (Currently, only ten teams pay above the $150 million thresholds, and the team with the highest payroll in 2021, the Los Angeles Dodgers, is spending more than five times as much as the team with the lowest payroll—$238 million compared to Cleveland’s $40 million.) As an added benefit, it wouldn’t unduly damage the owners’ bottle lines, since they are essentially guaranteed to make money, no matter what they say to the contrary. Even in recessions, team values rise, and paying stars only helps teams generate more revenue from ticket and jersey sales. If the owners don’t like it, they can sell—plenty of billionaires would be happy to add a professional baseball team to their trophy case.
2. Market Your Stars
Every year, when some young new player does something cool on a baseball field, people complain about it. In 2020, that player was Fernando Tatis Jr., who in October of last year was roundly chastised after hitting a home run and flipping his bat. After the game, Tatis Jr.'s manager, Jayce Tingler said Tatis should have taken the pitch because the Padres were already comfortably beating the Rangers, and the Rangers manager Chris Woodward said that Tatis Jr. had broken baseball’s sanctified “unwritten rules.” Tatis Jr.—who just signed an absolutely gobsmackingly large contract extension with the Padres—later apologized for hitting a home run. Rinse and repeat.
We’re certainly not the first ones to complain about baseball’s stodginess in this regard, but even as people around the game realize that the league needs to market its players’ personalities rather than try to stamp them out, they apparently have yet to figure out how to do so. MLB’s strategy has included initiatives like “player’s weekend,” where the league allows players to put their nicknames on the backs of incredibly ugly jerseys. ESPN has attempted to fill their broadcasts with player interviews, but this both distracts from the game and is made worse by the fact that ESPN’s broadcast team is plain awful. There are some things MLB has agreed to that have worked fairly well—micing up players during games comes to mind—but these fixes remain at the margins.
The first step is for Major League Baseball to categorically shame anyone like Tingler and Woodward who complains about players making the game fun. At the end of the day, the “unwritten rules” that old-timers revere is just another way for the league to police players’ behavior and discipline their labor. As a start, the league should encourage stars to be active on social media—though also strongly discourage harassment of the sort pitcher Trevor Bauer is known for—rather than grouse about it. In the NBA in particular, stars have gained tremendous institutional (and political) power by being cultural icons. MLB might be concerned about this possibility, but if we were them, we’d be more concerned about maintaining long-term interest in the game.
3. Rebuild the Minor Leagues
To save some money, MLB decided last year to drop 40 teams from its minor league system. This is very sad, 1) because minor league baseball games are extremely fun, and 2) because the minor leagues are among the few remaining small-d democratic institutions in this country that actually brings local communities together around something admirable. We think MLB can afford to lose some money funding this veritable wellspring of democratic fellow-feeling, but the reality is that baseball is a business, and the minor leagues are a cash suck. So, hear us out on our proposal for a reformed minor league system.
At the moment, minor league teams play almost exclusively in the continental United States during the summer months, concurrent with the middle part of the MLB season. But as the craze for Korean Baseball League (KBO) during the pandemic demonstrated, when Major League Baseball isn’t on television, there’s a small but loyal group of fans who need to satiate their baseball fix and will tune into whatever resembles a major league game. While shortening the duration of the current minor league season, MLB could also invest in existing winter ball leagues in Arizona and Venezuela, extending those seasons and using the resources they save from the pared down summer run to grow those leagues—and pay their players more. Given that winter ball teams aren’t affiliated with any MLB teams, managers could draft unorthodox squads that would give fans a chance to see top prospects interacting with one another on the same team before playing against one another in the big leagues. Players coming off of injuries or former MLB players looking to make a comeback could also take their talents to these leagues. If MLB could pull this off baseball could essentially continue year-round. And that, dear reader, would make us pretty happy.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about. . .
. . . Bianca Smith, MLB’s first female coach? “The First Black Woman to Coach in Pro Baseball Thanks Her Mom for the Job,” by Juliet Macur in The New York Times (March 3, 2021).
. . . the WNBA players’ latest campaign? “WNBA players’ next cause: Educating themselves—and fans—on vaccine safety,” by Candace Buckner in The Washington Post (March 4, 2021).
. . . a salacious soccer scandal that led to a police raid on one of Europe’s most storied soccer clubs? “The ‘Barcagate’ scandal goes right to the top of the world’s biggest soccer club,” by Barnaby Lane in Insider (March 4, 2021).
. . . a new amateur basketball league that’s hoping to lure top-prospects away from the NCAA with the promise of “economic empowerment”? “Overtime basketball league to offer prep prospects six-figure deals, economic empowerment,” by Glynn A. Hill in The Washington Post (March 4, 2021).