Time for MLB to step up to the plate
Here in the U.S., NFL Football is the undisputed king of sports. Some time in the last quarter of a century, Football caught and overtook Baseball as the American past time. I don’t know exactly when the NFL dethroned the MLB, but the strike of 1994 certainly increased the gap between the two sports to a gaping chasm. Currently, there is a void at the #2 sport in the U.S. in my opinion. Nascar has gained traction, but I don’t think it will ever be mainstream enough. Basketball has a following, but again it doesn’t invoke the passion that is necessary. I think it is the responsibility of MLB to fill this void.
The baseball strike was 13 years ago now and baseball has slowly crawled back to the public interest. It may just be me, but I feel that there is a growing attraction to baseball again. This is a sport that is so intertwined with the American fabric. Little league programs are everywhere and these are always well organized and serious leagues. Watching my son play several years of little league has caused me to re-evaluate the game and I love what I see.
However, I have several things that need to be fixed.
- Get the product to the people. Not just the Yankees, not just the Red Sox, but MLB needs to make a serious effort to get several games a week including all clubs televised and available across the nation. When I see Poker as a prime time entry on ESPN, while at the same time there is 10 SPORTING events occurring in parks across America, I want to throw my set out the window. The commish needs to grow a pair and get a real league wide television package.
- Get a salary cap and revenue sharing already! A sporting league is only as strong as its weakest component. Communism is the ideal model for how a sporting league should be structured. I understand that this is a hard sell to the owners of the big market teams. But, the overall success of the Yankees and Red Sox is inevitably tied to the success of the smallest franchise in the league. Sports is about competition. I want to see a league where every team is a contender at the start of the year.
- Get serious about steroids… or don’t. When someone first mentioned this concept to me, I thought he was insane. I still think he is insane, but this is a pretty good take on the whole steroid issue. The most frustrating thing about the steroid use in sports is the cover up that occurs. Most testing programs implemented to date have been pretty weak and only recently have they started cracking down. Beyond the legality of it (and that is a big issue), if you basically condone its use by doing nothing to test it, why even implement a steroid policy at all? Obviously that is not going to happen, so get a steroid policy with some teeth in it.
There you go. My simple fixes for Major League Baseball. Please respond here if you would like me to be the next commissioner.
One of the big problems I’ve noticed mentioned on the Internet is that MLB is acting more like the RIAA/MPAA when it comes to money. MLB would rather maximize its short term profits rather than build the brand, which is exactly what you don’t want to do when it comes to sports.
If you peruse the archives of Techdirt you’ll see there are many articles talking about how MLB is trying to use “shady tactics” to prevent people from enjoying the game, from claiming trademarks it doesn’t have to claiming it has copyrighted the statistics. All this does is drive the fans away; if they can’t have fun with the sport, they’ll just go somewhere else.
I also have a problem with steroids. I personally don’t consider anyone who uses “the juice” to be any good. People like Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire didn’t make their hundreds of homeruns on their own merit, in my opinion, and therefore they shouldn’t be considered as homerun kings. I don’t care whether steroids were legal at the time; their performance was artificially enhanced and therefore it doesn’t compare to the old timers like Hank Aaron.
Comment by crystalattice — July 13, 2007 @ 11:04 am