Perfection Is Ruined by Greed

Once upon a time in this country, there used to be a sport called baseball and it had a beautiful symmetry to it. There were eight teams in each of two leagues and they played each other 22 times a year, 11 at home and 11 on the road. And at the end of the year, the winner in one league played the winner in the other and they called it, rather grandly, the World Series. Had a nice ring to it.

There was a great source of continuity to it. There were nine men to a side, bases were 90 feet apart. Parks were deliciously eccentric, but the rest of the game was as perfect as an equilateral triangle.

There were minor leagues that flourished and had lucrative rivalries of their own. The game’s enduring poem, “Casey at the Bat,” was, after all, a paean to minor league baseball. Baseball had a commissioner, which was a good thing because the game needed a warden to keep the quarreling, contentious owners from breaking or bending the rules to suit their own teams’ purposes. And commissioners did things like break up the old chain-gang farm system by which Branch Rickey signed up most of the able-bodied baseball players in the country and kept them for himself. Without a commissioner, the old St. Louis Cardinals would have won the pennant each year by 20 games.

Baseball seemed about to live happily ever after. But into this Garden of Eden one day crept the serpent of over-the-air transmission of wireless radio, Marconi’s diabolical invention that would not only change the game, but the world around it.

The owners feared it, hated it. Originally, they fought it. Banned it. They felt it would keep people from the ballpark. “Why give away the product” they asked rhetorically, “when I’m already giving some of these players $7,000 a year?” Initially, a lot of owners refused to permit home game broadcasts.

Gen. David Sarnoff, who mid-wifed the development of network radio, had tied the new medium to the advertising dollar, effectively blocking pay-radio, which baseball owners would have liked as another way of selling a seat to the game. Sarnoff argued successfully that radio’s greatest good to society would be moving goods, notably soap and cigarettes, not selling a product direct to the consumer.

When the owners grudgingly accepted the new medium, the ante went steadily up--but it grew lopsided. The New York Yankees, already enjoying economic hegemony, one of only two teams in baseball--the other was the Cubs--to draw a million customers in the pre-war era, got the swollen receipts. Smaller markets couldn’t compete.

Expansion moved in and baseball became unbalanced. You played some teams more than others.

Then television came on the scene. The gorilla came to dinner. It ate the game. Pretty soon, that dreaded word crept into the lexicon of the game-- playoffs. Television wanted them. They wanted to put some spice into late-season scheduling. No more limbo-like Septembers when the Yankees were 20 games ahead by Labor Day and the rest of the season was merely a formality, a tilted pinball game. Minor league baseball all but disappeared.

Television wanted baseball to borrow a tactic from pro basketball and football--play a whole season to run a couple of ribbon clerks out of the game and then settle in for a second season, the real season, the playoffs.

Baseball grudgingly agreed but argued that it would cheapen the World Series. In 1973, the New York Mets got in the World Series with the fourth-best record in the game, 82-79. Television said, “So what!” Television is not into integrity. Television is into the 3 R’s--ratings, revenue and reruns. Integrity is for “Masterpiece Theatre.”

So, baseball lived with playoffs. Television gave them a billion dollars. Then, it lost half a billion on the deal.

Baseball was embarrassed. It was open to suggestions.

TV came up with a lulu. It would form a combine with baseball, a joint venture of the game itself and ABC and NBC. Rather than take front money, baseball would take a risk with the networks, take its cut from whatever billings the grand old game could command. It would also borrow a page from basketball, football and hockey and expand its playoff structure. Give eight of the 28 teams a shot at the pennant.

The prospects for embarrassment under this proposal are endless. The team with the eighth-best record in the game could now end up World Series champion. We could get a “champion” that didn’t play .500 ball over the season. Television also added the ultimate indignity of proposing to televise playoff games only regionally. And most regular-season games not at all.

All of this is dismaying to the purists. But as Bill Veeck used to say, “If you depend solely on the people who know and love the game of baseball, you’ll go broke by Mother’s Day.”

Veeck gave us exploding scoreboards, Bat Day, Camera Day, midgets at the plate. Television gave us $7-million salaries, designated hitters, playoffs and World Series games that end at 1 a.m. in the East.

But how can you argue with excess? In 1932, the best team in baseball, the Yankees, drew 962,320. The second-best, the Cubs, drew 976,499. Last year, the best team in baseball, the Toronto Blue Jays, drew 4,028,318. The second-best, the Atlanta Braves, drew 3,077,400. (In contrast, in 1935, the Braves, then in Boston, drew 232,754.).

Radio-TV has harmed the game, but not the gate. It isn’t the game we grew up with. It has lost something in the restructuring. What hasn’t?

Change is not always for the better, it’s for the profit. That’s why we get discount houses instead of lovely opulent department stores and Cinema II’s instead of palatial Moorish castle movie theaters.

That’s why teams will only have to win eight games at season’s end, instead of 100 through the summer.

John McGraw wouldn’t like it. But John D. Rockefeller would understand perfectly.