Of all the four seasons (earth’s perfect quatrain), to me it is autumn that once gave the poem of life its vibrancy. For autumn was the “harvest festival” of professional playoff baseball.
Spring’s revitalized sun wakens winter’s sloth and entertains its children well, spring’s warming breath casting the lovers’ spell; professional baseball once gave rhythm to these rites. But it was in autumn, when baseball stuck around to warm the numb, and the cold bodies still craved the dogs and sudsies and pinstripes, that baseball became ethereal.
This is how baseball was in America. And also how it was in me.
But no longer does this game — that is, Major League Baseball’s (MLB’s) version of it — invigorate me. No longer does it resonate.
MLB’s alienation, its infringement on trust, began for me in 1994, the year players went on strike to protest team owner plans to initiate a player salary cap, withhold $7 million in allotted player pension contributions, and prohibit players from having a say on which teams to play for. Within a month of the walkout, MLB’s commissioner cancelled remaining games, including the World Series.
Devastated (as a former baseball player and current youth coach, I loved the game), I found myself suddenly barely clinging to Big League baseball, and this only because of the game’s assets: its elegant form and function, eminent social and celebratory caliber, and profound gift of providing pleasure and reminiscence for innocents fortunate to have been born to the game’s graces ever since its own birth in the 1840s, in the time of my great-great-great grandparents.
Stunningly conspicuous about the 1994 players’ strike was the breathless deceit of the owners and their favorite mascot, Corporate America, both doing their best to strangle the fun out of baseball and solidify the game as a business extravaganza more about payoff and purse than pastime and pride. But to fans, the strike’s rude aftermath was already prescient: That winter, many started rising en mass against MLB; the 1995 season’s attendance declines (and those that have come since) furnish the proof.
MLB’s decline actually started in 1969, when St. Louis Cardinal Curt Flood ignited an ethical wildfire by challenging a MLB rule that prohibited players from negotiating trades with other teams; and the decline gained momentum in the 1980s, and continues today, with the “Steroids Era,” during which more than 100 MLB players have tested positive for illegal performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Steroid use has spawned widespread player penalties and disgrace, fan disgust, MLB rules changes, even a federal congressional inquiry.
Too often during the last 50 years, of its relentless arrogance — and underlying front-office weakness, stupidity, and wretchedness — MLB has swung badly, outside and low.
I miss MLB’s once Elysian version of America’s pastime. But I do not mourn what MLB has become: the former good buddy who stole my girlfriend.