Over the past decade or so, there has been an increase in the numbers of those who say that baseball is no longer the American Pastime. Football gets better TV ratings. Hell, the Super Bowl is basically a national holiday. The inner city has very few places to play baseball and the few available venues are basketball courts. Helicopter parents prefer soccer – that game seems less dangerous to their precious little bundles.
Yet, as Honest Abe once said, “in a larger sense,” baseball remains the game that best reflects the character of our country. And that is certainly true lately. The Lords of baseball, both owners and players, have decided that they will no longer offer the game to their hundreds of millions of fans until they come to terms on their financial arrangements.
Now this would be entirely understandable if the owners and the players were struggling to make a living. If they were having trouble meeting ends meet. However, that is far from the case. The only ends that these people have trouble meeting are the far ends of their massive mansions.
The owners are among the highest one percent of the highest one percent, and the value of their ball clubs are an integral part of their wealth. The estimated value of the New York Yankees is $5.2 billion. Out of all thirty teams, the Miami Marlins are ranked as the least valuable. Yet, when Jeffrey Loria bought that team in 2002, he paid $158 million for it. He then sold it fifteen years later at a time when his team had just finished under .500 and 20 games out of first place. What did he get for that not-even- mediocre team? He got $1.2 billion. Not a bad return. Yet, the owners cry poverty.
Now, I have always been on the players side on these work stoppage issues. I always decried the hypocrisy of the owners who complained that salaries were too high when they were ones agreeing to pay those salaries – salaries that they could well afford. This time, though, my view is tempered. There are limits to even what the owners should be asked to do. The players are being paid salaries that are as far from modest as Donald Trump is. According to the most recent data, the average major league baseball player salary is $4.17 million. This can be deceiving, of course, because some players make over $35 million a year. But even the mean salary is $1.1 million. What other workers in the universe would be unhappy with that work status?
There is certainly an argument that major league baseball players are unique. Out of all the kids in the world who pick up a bat and a ball, these guys are the best. But unique is one thing. Greed is another.
And so, I propose that the baseball situation today exemplifies why that sport is still the national pastime. It is that because it reflects the essential nature of the American spirit – that no amount of money is enough.
What could better represent the way our country works? What could be a better representative of how money controls the gears of the American machinery? What is more a symbol of how those who want to be in control must be the ones who never settle until they get the most money; how it doesn’t matter if you have enough money to get along, or even if you have enough money to never have to work again. No, that’s not the American way. To the contrary, it is the American way – today’s American way – is that you must continue to try to get ever more and more and more.
It used to be that baseball was the American pastime because it was pastoral. America was then itself pastoral – most Americans lived in farming communities. It was a relaxed pace. Baseball has no time clock. It is played out at its own pace. In a pastoral America, that was the American pace. But no longer. The American pace is Wall Street. It’s uber-capitalism. It is do whatever is necessary to stay ahead of the other guy, even if the other guy is the law. Pastoral? No. Not hardly. Avaricious? Yes. Sadly.
I will still love baseball just like I love America. Not for what it has become, but for what it is intended to be.
We were right 
And, as the multi-million players tussle with the multi-million owners, the real victims, as always, are the little people, the average Joe who can no longer afford to take the family to a ball game at the amazing new multi-sky-box stadium serving lobster rolls and magnums of champagne. But, not to worry, there’s enough business owner fatcats buying tickets for their attorneys, bankers and politicians to save the day and the flush tv contracts will provide more camera coverage for the peons watching from home.
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Oh, yes, the game will survive. But how? Wait until they are not available unless you have the cash to subscribe to a streaming service and those services raise their prices because the players and owners escalate the costs of their “game.” Killing the Golden Goose doesn’t even cover it.
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