In an effort to remain relevant and keep its fan base, I believe Major League Baseball is losing the appeal that, at one time, made it America’s game.
The movie “A Field of Dreams” captured the essence of the sport in the lines spoken by James Earl Jones as he played Terence Mann:
“Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.”
Perhaps it is unavoidable, like progress. Our society changes, attitudes change, and in pursuit of that change, time compresses, while the technology of change inundates us.
We no longer play the game by feel, it is all about analytics, as captured in the movie Money Ball, about the Oakland Athletics and their GM Billy Bean. At the end of the movie John Henry, the (then) new owner, of the Boston Red Sox offers Bean a job as GM with the Red Sox by pointing out the A’s came one win short of getting to the World Series when they lost to the New York Yankees, but they (the A’s) spent about $200K per win while the Yankees spent about $10M. The hard-fiscal fact of a new approach did not escape John Henry and is probably directly responsible for the Sox breaking the curse of the Bambino in 2004.
Today, we see teams shifting players from their historical fielding positions to where analytics tell them the batter will most likely hit the ball. As far as I can tell, so far batters have not figured out how to change to counter this move. The solutions seem obvious to a fan but apparently are not to the players or coaches.
We are moving away from the pastoral game lionized in “A Field of Dreams” into the Xs and Os of football. With that note, I will leave you with this video by the late George Carlin.
