ATLANTA: Baseball’s last labor dispute was devastating, but the comeback had two big things going in its favor.
Cal Ripken Jr. and steroids.
The sport will not be so fortuitous if this lockout lingers in the spring.
To keep the national pastime alive with some semblance of its former glory, we had better talk about WAR and slashes instead of the ABCs and luxury tax rates by the end of the Super Bowl.
The hubbub that peaked this week with owner lockdowns is just a spectacle for now, overshadowed by the NFL playoff races and the biggest games of the college football season.
With the rise of basketball and hockey, there is plenty to distract sports fans for the next couple of months as both sides haggle over details that most of us don’t care about.
It’s college football high season, and the NFL has all kinds of cool stories, said Mike Lewis, professor of marketing at Emory University in Atlanta. It’s a good time from a negotiating point of view for the owners to play a little hard. “
All of that changes if an agreement is not reached by mid-February, when the dawn of spring training still serves as a symbolic end to the long, dark winter.
The situation is even more tenuous, with baseball still trying to bounce back from the COVID-shortened 2020 season, which largely played out in empty stadiums.
Losing two out of three opening days would be brutal, Lewis said.
Some would say the sport never fully recovered from its last labor dispute, which wiped out the 1994 World Series and lasted nearly eight months.
They’re probably right, but baseball took a huge hiatus when two gripping storylines drew many suspicious fans to the stadiums.
First, there was Ripken’s pursuit of one of the most sacred records in all sports.
In September 1995, just five months after the strike ended, Ripken beat Lou Gehrig’s mark in his 2,131st consecutive game. It was a moment that fascinated the nation and undoubtedly healed some of the game’s self-inflicted wounds.
Coming off the strike, baseball conveniently looked the other way as its hitters transformed into the Incredible Hulks.
The ball began to fly over the fence at staggering speed, culminating in the home run derby between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa that captivated the nation throughout the summer of 1998.
We now know it was nothing more than a chemically enhanced prank, forever undermining the reputation of McGwire, Sosa, and everyone who thrived in the age of steroids, including the home career leader. run Barry Bonds.
But at the time, the McGwire-Sosa duel was just what baseball needed to get even more fans.
It’s hard to imagine a similar scenario this time around.
On the one hand, the popularity of the game is even more diluted than it was a quarter of a century ago. Many young people have turned away from baseball, seeing it as stilted and old-fashioned in an increasingly fast-paced world filled with brighter entertainment options.
Anyone who has witnessed a game of over four hours filled largely with players going through meaningless gyrations instead of all real action would be hard pressed to counter that view.
Lewis recently conducted an investigation that examined the evolution of the state of sports fandom in America.
Every sport has taken a hit, he said, but baseball has essentially crashed among Gen Zs, those born since the last time off work.
It really is a mismatch on several levels, he said. This generation wants to watch content on their phone. They want to get their strengths on Instagram and TikTok. Baseball is built in local markets and people sit in a stadium for three or four hours. The technology, the marketing of the game, whatever it is, has really created a disconnect with young people, and especially young men, in baseball.
In addition, the baseball stars of the 1990s were more important figures than the players of today.
Ripken’s healthy image propelled him to almost mythical proportions as he chased the Iron Horse record. McGwire and Sosa appeared together as Greek gods on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
In today’s much more complex media landscape, the biggest names in baseball, whether it’s Mike Trout or reigning MVPs Shohei Ohtani and Bryce Harper, just don’t have the gravity of those in other sports. .
Lewis pointed out that NBA star LeBron James has 103 million followers on Instagram.
Trout, Ohtani and Harper have 4.8 million together.
“The 90s were another media era. The coverage was very concentrated, Lewis said. It was also a time when the personalities of Major League Baseball were still on par with the superstars of other leagues. In the age of social media, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire were as big as anyone in the NBA or NFL. This is no longer the case.
There is another hurdle that baseball faces, even without a labor dispute.
Unlike every other sport, baseball, with the possible exception of the NHL, is not as attractive to watch as it was decades ago.
Not only are the matches longer, but the analytically driven front offices have created 30 cloned franchise teams all playing essentially the same style, with an emphasis on homers and defensive changes and pitch changes. constant.
There’s no room in today’s homogenized MLB for a World Series like the one in 1982, which pitted a happy Milwaukee Brewers team known as Harvey’s Wallbangers against a St Cardinals team. Louis who emphasized speed and defense.
Led by hitters Gorman Thomas, Ben Oglivie and Cecil Cooper, the Brewers hit 216 home runs that season. The Cardinals were only 67, only two players even hit double the numbers, but they knocked out Milwaukee in a seven-game World Series.
Last season, 12 teams hit over 200 home runs; only two teams had less than 150.
Baseball has some advantages over other sports, Lewis said.
Of course, baseball has challenges with an older fan base, he said. But baseball also has more kids attending major league parks than any other professional league. There is more of a family bond in baseball. It is a game that is almost healthier than other sports. It has power.
If baseball is to maintain this bond, it needs to resolve this labor dispute before anyone really notices.
A deadline to keep in mind is February 14.
The day after the Super Bowl.
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Paul Newberry is a national sports columnist for the Associated Press. Write to him at pnewberry (at) ap.org or at https://twitter.com/pnewberry1963 and check out his work at https://apnews.com/search/paulnewberry
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