Play Ball, I Guess?

Image courtesy of Jose Francisco Morales @franciscomorales

Personally, I’m waiting patiently for Buster Olney to confirm it’s within covid protocols to slap some cream pie in a guy’s face when he hits a walk-off home-run. In the wake of the labour dispute and its (phew) resolution, I’ve been asking myself what I love so much about baseball — why it’s the one sport I spare the rod for any moral shortcomings (PEDs, Red Sox fans I guess, etc); and one of the big reasons is walk-off home runs, and the pie dudes used to get in their face for hitting them. But baseball’s labour dispute is the first telling sign that even she, alas, doesn’t quite fart roses. 

For gilding it so in romance, I can still only spectate and speak on baseball aesthetically — so I’m not in a position to tell you what exactly the dispute was about, other than how large sums of money would be split going forward. At the mere mention of a lockout, however, certain things finally began to strike me as unusual — if not genuinely unfair. 

I came up watching the game’s next big things sign massive, cap-free contracts with clubs, and I’d think to myself baseball players get it good, don’t they? But, now that you mention it, if you can lock anyone in any industry in any deal that lengthy, you’re probably paying them way under market value by the time conditions inflate just a notch. Then there’s the minor league, and the amount of time prospects spend on farm systems not quite knowing whether they’re destined to go major or not — nominally existing, it would appear, as professional baseball players. 

For too long it seems baseball has sort of connived and machinated in the dazzle of its champions. Pay a couple guys, pay a few more a few million less, and thus sustain the conceit: if you can keep your numbers up and stay away from interesting substances, maybe just maybe you’ll be somebody history remembers. Sound familiar? Pro sports, all of them, run on the same stick sold to us ordinary labourers by capitalism — there’s just less proximity, a wider threshold, between the dugout in our jobs and the board room. If a couple people make it out the loop, turn a startup into a headline and post about it on LinkedIn, that’s more than enough to keep the cogs a-running. 

Baseball was supposed to be different. The pageantry of it — from the old MLB fixture ads on ESPN, to the salutations players send fans when they colour an inning with their efforts — is some of the reason I fell in love with the idea of the United States as a teenager. With a place that made regular enough attempts to correct history, to learn from it, and where you could be yourself if yourself was just a teensy bit weird. Baseball refuses to change, to adapt to the demands of a Tik-Tokked attention span, because when it looks in the mirror it sees a version of itself it struggles but nevertheless manages to convey to other people. Conservative but progressive; traditional but tolerant; kind of exclusive for being so unique and coded a pastime, and yet boundlessly inclusive — like America itself. 

Which brings me to the free-spending New York Mets, who it’s more apparent than ever are now run by a very successful individual from the hedge fund world. 

Mr. Cohen is currently operating on the goodwill of entering an entrenched industry, where the old-timers refuse to give up more of the bone; and where he can purport to fix the ailments of a chronically bad franchise. Even if the Mets don’t wind up within a sniff of the playoffs again, that he can chequebook them across the offseason, and thus generate renewed excitement for spring training, will do very well for the faithful in Queens. In a PR sense, he also gets to escape the labour dispute as the one owner who will gladly pay top dollar for baseball talent. Long before Jacob DeGrom even hurls a fastball at some unfortunate hitter, the Mets have a sheen about them that — indeed — money can buy. I write, very much excited for baseball, because I wonder where all of this stuff leaves an organisation like the Mets as an idea; a concept. 

I got into the sport 15 odd years ago, when Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, and Derek Jeter were handing the keys to the Yankees franchise to luxury acquisitions like Mark Texeira and CC Sabathia. I was a little late, but I’m forever grateful I got to see a little bit of what made Jeter so special: the patience, the discipline, the winningness. The World Series they won gifted them what I thought a peculiar trophy, with spires shooting to heaven from the surface of a shiny and expensive tray. I was supposed to hate the goddamn Yankees, and (to me) the anti-competitive manner in which they prized the best players off the worst teams. But capitalism telegraphs its essential meaning in the same vernacular, whatever the arena; Yankee Stadium was what you graduated to, if you worked hard enough, if you believed, if you wanted to win. If I’m kind I’d say that’s why people gravitate towards such institutions instead of underdog ones: maybe life doesn’t kick you as hard in the balls if your sports team says you can take it. 

It’s 2022, and the Yankees have passed on damn near every big free agent imaginable. They needed a shortstop (the soccer equivalent would be a central attacking midfielder) and a first baseman. Carlos Correa is on his way to the Twins; Freddie Freeman is signing with the Dodgers; and Matt Olson is on the Braves. Even if the Yankees had signed Trevor Story, a decent hitter and baserunner who makes shit happen, that would have been modest by their standards. The Mets, meanwhile, seem to sign everyone they’re linked to in the rumour mill. It’s a fascinating headline shift from when George Steinbrenner, the late great patriarch of the Yankee franchise, growled in actionable displeasure whenever the team failed to win a championship. Suddenly the upstarts from Queens are the ones throwing all the punches, spending all the money, doing ‘everything it takes’ to win. 

My curiosity is as to what this looks and feels and sounds like in New York, to neutrals (if any) and somewhat casual baseball fans like myself. Whether it now makes sense to root for old money over new, whether it even means anything actually to side with one pack of millionaires over another, and which team retains its soul as an epicenter of that city’s diehard fandom.

So far this year New York sports have consumed at least 55% of my days, or just mental resources, and an emerging concern for me — the more athletes and owners fight about money, the more the Mets spend, the more the Yankees relent — is whose money is that anyway? Did you ever hear the joke about the priest, the rabbi, and the Black Rock executive who walk into a bar, and how the myths of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and sporting parity helped keep the global proletariat at bay?

I can’t wait for baseball. I’m just not sure that, in any sport, there are any good guys left to root for.