MLB franchise owners and players are figuring out how to divide a very large pot of money. There doesn’t seem to be much discussion about improving the product. Growing baseball revenue has become disconnected from growing the game. The former obviously depends on the latter, but making baseball better requires vision and a long-term strategy.

Those never have been strengths for MLB’s franchise owners and leaders. It’s worse now that their ranks have been infected by the extremist capitalist mindset of squeezing every penny out of an enterprise now with little care for potential repercussions later. Players spend more time talking about the good of the game. No doubt they care, but notice their advocacy mostly happens when the proposed remedies just so happen to align with their financial interests.

The worst part about the ongoing labor dispute isn’t the possibility of missed games. It’s knowing that while an agreement means games will be played, it won’t do much to make baseball better and more popular. You know the list of problems by now.

Games have gotten longer despite rule changes designed to make them shorter. There is less action because fewer balls are put in play. Those developments probably are related to the increase in the average age of MLB fans. It also doesn’t help that MLB has plenty of young stars but is terrible at promoting them.

MLB and its players still will have to confront those issues once they agree on a labor deal. There’s little hope that they’ll do both at the same time. Lots of media leaks from negotiations are about the economics of the game. There’s been little talk about the actual playing of the games and how that’s connected to MLB’s growth.

That’s usually characterized as an “ancillary issue” to be worked out after the financials. But the games are the point of it all, even if some franchise owners would rather baseball be incidental to their business. A universal designated hitter is the only game-play topic that seems to be at the forefront of labor talks. That’s hardly the kind of progressive thinking that’s needed.

I get why baseball traditionalists tend to dismiss criticisms of the game as coming from those who don’t really like it, anyway. Keep changing the rules and, eventually, baseball will no longer be baseball. Some people like the game, some don’t. Take it or leave it.

But people who already love baseball should want it to be more popular. They should especially support ways to make it more popular for young people. The more kids who play and watch baseball, the better for MLB’s future. Right now, it seems fewer and fewer kids care much about baseball.

Baseball set new average attendance records in 2006, ‘07 and ‘08, but crowds dipped below 30,000 in 2017, ‘18 and ‘19. The average attendance in 2019 (28,203) wasn’t much better than the post-strike season of 1995. Average attendance for games last season was 18,651, with the caveat of COVID-19 restrictions. Previous trends mean MLB can’t count on people coming back during normal times.
Baseball had labor peace between 1995 and now, so that’s not the issue. People have become less interested in attending games for other reasons. More eyeballs on screens can make up for fewer behinds in seats, but that’s not happening with MLB.

It’s not clear that baseball is alarmed. It’s certainly not reflected by the content and tenor of negotiations. The money issue is important, of course. MLB is a business. Team owners want to maximize profits. Players want to be paid their full value. There always will be tension between those competing interests.

Once the two sides figure out how to split the money, they should be able to find common ground with making baseball better and more popular. I’m not hopeful that MLB and its players will get to that part before the games start again.

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