Talkin' baseball, past, present and future
Still important, but for those of us who've loved it, also a lot of caution signs
Sometimes, I need to use my vacation time to help the household. And that was the case today. My wife, who usually has to absorb all family duties at night while I work away, had some plans out tonight. So with some unaccounted-for PTO, I was going to help get two of my sons to a baseball tournament starting today. Until most of the team that one son coached and the other plays on was out of town. So tournament invitation dropped (and you get an unexpected Substack post.)
Which all goes to set up that baseball, especially at the park league level, already takes a lot of time in our house. But this morning was just the latest example of baseball taking me back to an earlier time: HBO has lined up a four-part Pete Rose documentary. And the opening just smacks of the era when baseball was the national pastime, not the NFL, and every game wasn’t on TV … wait, where is every game on TV?!?
Like I said, I work nights, so I’ve made my peace with missing out on every nine innings played by the home team. But it was part of the reason for wanting to move to Minneapolis-St. Paul, a big league market. It’s just different trying to follow the game without a home team as a lens. A lesson I found out in the first decade of my career. But we seem to be there again, at least in the Twin Cities and other markets. I’ve been shorted on baseball for a while after I dropped cable for YouTube TV. And YTTV soon prized price stability over ever-demaning regional sports networks, and dropped them. So goodbye, Twins, Wild and Wolves. (And hello, portable radio, which I bought for this summer to track the baseball endgame.)
We cord-cutters still account for a minority, albeit a sizable one. But then the great RSN bankruptcy pushes the network from the Comcast lineup. (Amazing what happens when you don’t pay your bills). And now, most people are in the boat I’ve been in the past few years, unable to watch the home team.
We’re not baseball-free, by any means. The whole family has probably had its fill in June from two park-league teams needing to practice and compete. Like I said, I miss most of the action even when I had it because of work. But it does remind me of those days embodied by Rose, when baseball was still the U.S. game in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and before you could find more than a couple games of week on TV.
What HAS changed was the expectation: Back then, we were happy to recap the WEEK’s action when Sports Illustrated came in the mail. (Unless it happened not to, through some vagueries of the U.S. postal system.) Now, it’s highlights and hot takes on demand. If you can find baseball talk on TV, what between Lakers and Cowboys chatter all the time. “Baseball Tonight” is too slow to be on ESPN anymore.
So what does that mean for baseball, the game without a clock? And it’s been saved from turning into cricket by its rule changes. (And yes, cricket had its time in the sun this summer … the kind that already sped up its play.) But in a world of TikTok and streaming, baseball being invisible there might be a bitter pill to swallow later. I don’t think that the game would disappear, as hinted in the “Star Trek” future of “Deep Space Nine.” But it certainly needs to pivot. Quickly.
Back in college, a go-to writing subject for me in my media classes was the pitfalls of the MLB TV contract, especially in contrast to the NFL system. Here’s the Cliff Notes version: Baseball prizes the team, while the NFL takes an almost socialist-like approach of sharing the pie equally. Is that why the NFL is healthier and more seen on TV? Not so simple, especially when it’s a matter of 17 games a team per season vs. 162, one in an open-ended amount of time and the other in a more-scheduled format. But a media ecosystem being minded by the league vs. one with each team out of itself does tend to make better decisions. Especially when you pit media markets like New York and L.A. in the same system as ones like Tampa and the Twin Cities.
The problem with baseball vs. football is that it built its whole economic system on getting bags of cash every year from some TV network. And it’s been able to survive that move from local to cable to RSNs driving the boat. But in that rush to cash the checks, no one ever thought to question the system and whether it might ever peter out.
Baseball has always prized itself on an ability to be where its audience is. And I thought the time-of-game challenges would be a bigger hurdle for the big-league game to figure out in a timely basis. So I have some confidence that it might get into the streaming game soon. Maybe it should avoid its original sin, be more like the NFL and put that in the commissioner’s hands rather than each team’s …) Like Rose, you don’t want to be on the outside, staring back in.
And here’s the HBO trailer. P.S.: I don’t have HBO or Max, so if you do, let’s get together later this month.