For Baseball, Action Is Truer Than Words

Now that a five-year labor agreement is in place, here’s a suggestion for baseball’s 30 club owners, their general managers, and all others with any authority to speak for the industry:

Why don’t you just shut up and play the games?

Stop complaining. Stop predicting doom. Stop agonizing. Stop apologizing. Stop blaming someone for whatever troubles you have. Stop trying to explain what your troubles are. Stop issuing statements intended to be politically correct, directed by market research or spin-doctored for public relations. Stop promising that you and your employees will behave better. Stop ascribing your team’s weakness to budget constraints and an opponents’ strength to big bankrolls.

Stop telling us how much you really care about “the fan.”

Just shut up. Play the games. Everything else takes care of itself.

You saw what happened in September and October when ballgames held center stage. The public was turned on as much as it ever was in the distant and glorified past. Then you succeeded in pushing your business affairs back into the limelight, reviving the disgust so wisely felt and endlessly expressed since August 1994.

So don’t even say, “No comment.” If you must talk at all, talk about baseball.

Nobody cares about your business except those in it or doing business with it. Nobody buys tickets to watch someone sign a contract or make a bank deposit.

No one is moved to declare allegiance to a ballclub by wearing its cap because, “It does a great job in managing its bottom line.” No outsider worries about whether neighbors and business associates praise or denigrate the all-too-identifiable club owner, or how media comment makes them feel.

All we care about, really, is what happens in ballgames when they are played. The true function of spectator sports is to create memories in those who take an interest. Only what happens in games can do that--and produce the cascade of derivative interests: history, argument, statistics, strategy, personalities, joy and despair.

To have things happen in games, you have to play the games. When you do, the events blot out--for the fan--all other considerations.

Baseball’s supreme advantage is that there is a game every day for seven months a year. No other sport offers that.

Whatever happens in a football game, there are six days to gloat or moan. That’s football’s advantage: A fan who gives it little attention during the week hasn’t missed anything until the next game. It rewards minimum commitment of time and thought.

Basketball and hockey games are played three or four times a week by any one team, but by their nature involve much more repetitive action than baseball and football, whose individual plays are so distinct. They give the casual fans--who greatly outnumber passionate fans--less to contemplate between games, while providing more intense sustained excitement during most games.

But baseball creates new events every day, which is to say, fresh memory material. Baseball promoters discovered this 100 years ago, after a quarter-century of development that started with only three or four “regular” games a week. By 1898, they had the schedule up to 154 games, which is more than six a week in a 25-week season.

With a fresh result, and a change in league standings, every day, newspapers understood that the hooked follower had to look in the paper every day. And each day’s results were an automatic free ad for the next day’s game. Other sports promoters had to scrounge for “advance” stories or buy ads to reach their customers. Baseball had its continuity built in, self-sustaining, self-perpetuating.

And that’s all it takes: Play the games as scheduled.

We don’t care whose argument about finances is sounder. We don’t care what owners and players think of each other. We don’t care, really, if millionaire players smile, tip their caps or say something on television.

We don’t much care if they, or you, “like” us. We just want you to provide the ballgames that constitute an entertainment we pay for willingly.

Isn’t that your business?

So why don’t you just do it? And shut up.

Leonard Koppett has been covering major league baseball for 48 years for papers in New York and the San Francisco area and currently writes for the Oakland Tribune. He was elected to the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1993, and has written half a dozen baseball books.