An Open Letter to Lords of Baseball, And A Warning

Dear Lords of Baseball,

You need to listen carefully now, to understand the nation that supports you, the communities that have sacrificed for your stadiums, the youth that has fed your success.

When we speak of the past with nostalgia, we choose to ignore a great many things that were not as good as they are now, not what they should have been. The culture, the law and the collective awareness have progressed to a point where few of us would be comfortable navigating the 1950’s, and many of us would be appalled. Nostalgia is a foggy window through which the snow outside isn’t cold and wet, just pretty.

What we do miss about the past is the sense — however naive, however misplaced — that the world was a simpler, more civil place. There is a perception that once upon a time, we all rooted for the same things, all trusted and admired the same people, and that we all looked up to our major institutions. In the rearview mirrors of our hearts, red and blue were just two of the three colours of the American flag, not the tribal markings of a divided people.

One by one, we have lost most of those beliefs.

The ’60s cost us our faith in government and our trust in what they told us. During that era, we painfully forgot that our soldiers have always been heroes; thankfully, we’ve begun to remember, but too late for too many. In resisting the overdue recognition of inequity in our culture and our laws, we lost some parts of generational respect and civility, finding confrontation the more effective tool than debate and conversion.

The ’80s saw the media morph from “the most trusted man in the world” to a weaponized, partisan driven noisemaker, hell-bent on maximizing profits and promoting agendas at the expense of reporting on the news. Our faith in faith began to waver, as money became the new religion, its values replacing our houses of worship, celebrated and embraced. The rise of the televangelist merged the two, and a coarsening of what was once seen as pastoral took shape.

The 00 begins with a moment of hope in the fires of tragedy, as we grabbed onto our institutions once more. Sadly, that flicker gave way to the birth of the extremes of partisanship in media, in culture and political gamesmanship. Unspeakable revelations have rocked the cloth, ripping millions from their ability to believe in the church as a sanctuary. A rolling series of economic crises, from the dot com bubble to the economic crisis of ‘08, to the current pandemic driven to collapse, have destroyed what was left of our faith in our financial institutions, and in some ways, the institutions of science and education.

Through it all, in ways large and small, there has been baseball.

We have always had baseball.

In the ’60s, we chewed powdery gum while trading Topp’s cards of Koufax and Mays, of Clemente and Aaron. Our heroes were multi-coloured, our teams island in a stormy sea. The impossible Mets, with birds flying from Stengel’s cap and Stone Hands boxing baseballs at first base amazingly won the championship, and we all rooted for the underdogs with gusto.

In the ’80s, we found a refuge from the money madness in the lunch pail work ethic of Cal Ripken, Jr. showing up every day, and doing it with a quiet brilliance that brought honour to our daily efforts. Our counterpoint to the growing isolation of video games was a patch of bright green and 30,000 new friends reaching for the same foul ball. We skipped the front page and flipped to the box scores with a sigh of relief.

At the start of the ’00s, in the shadows of a smouldering Manhattan, President George Bush threw out the first pitch in Yankee Stadium, and a nation began the long road to healing. No moment in sports, other than perhaps Gehrig’s speech on the very same field, has been as unifying or as poignant.

We have had baseball throughout everything, through the wars and strife, through prosperity and hard times. We have found our heroes there, multi-coloured, flawed, native and adopted. We have had the generational continuity and collective memories that have become almost unfindable elsewhere. Some of us have hated everything, protested everything, found blame in everything… but all of us, in some way or on some level, have always loved baseball.

You, the Lords of Baseball, have done your darnedest to test that love. The finances of baseball have been thrust into the front pages even as box scores have disappeared. Your public focus of marketing has been to rush the game, proclaiming that the heartbeat of baseball no longer fits the current times. The costly competitiveness of youth baseball threatens to exclude a generation of kids from their dreams of the Show.

In your axing of a quarter of the minor league teams, you have tipped a domino that will end with the shrinking of the game. A hundred thousand of the game’s most real fans will no longer have a place to see their future heroes develop, to grab an autograph on a baseball that is held on hope in a plastic bag, waiting for that 18-year-old’s signature to become an all-star.

Now, amid yet another national calamity, baseball has yet another chance to be relevant to the nation. There are perhaps no brighter signs of a move towards normalcy, the beginning of our American recovery than an umpire yelling “Play Ball!” on that brilliant patch of green. That day will be a celebration and a blessed pause, regardless of how many are in the stands to start with.

Do not ruin this.

Do not make us hate you for making it dirty.

In a time of unparalleled economic distress, do not allow this to become a test of wills between your billionaire’s owners and your millionaire players. This is just one valuable part of one season; do not make your short term profit more important than our national healing.

Do not remind us one more time that this is “just a business” to you. Make it your public trust again, and do what you need to. Sacrifice a few dollars for the safety of your patrons, and do what is necessary to find the best (not the most profitable) answers. Open the airwaves, and find the way to broadcast games everywhere, and worry about the contracts next year.

We have built your stadiums. We have bought your merchandise, made your television contracts ridiculously profitable. We have come back from strikes and scandals, and always in higher numbers than before. Do not test us one more time, not this time.

Bring us baseball back, as pure (or as seemingly so) as you can make it. Bring us back our heroes and don’t force us to see them as greedy, to know them by their contracts and not their uniforms. Be the patriots that your wealth and authority empower you to be, and give us baseball to help us heal, to bring us together, as only it can.

Do not ruin this.

We will not forgive and forget if you do.