C&C 40: Take Me All the Way Out

A short rant about baseball, which is actually about something bigger

An essential piece of housekeeping up top: friend, colleague, and bon vivant Ray Banks has pitched his tent here at Substack, and you are all encouraged to subscribe forthwith. Ray’s a brilliant crime novelist who wrote some of the best pieces I was privileged to run at Noir City magazine, and his new joint Under the Influence promises more of the same sharp insights as he casts an eye at films from 1966-1980. Go and tell him I sent you.

Now I’m going to blather about baseball for a moment. I’ll endeavor to keep it brief, and if it helps it’s not really about baseball at all.

I made it to my first game of the season this week, a 5-1 Seattle Mariners victory over the Cincinnati Reds. It was an afternoon affair, with brilliant sun and a driving wind that chased most fans out of my section. I stayed put, because there was nowhere else I’d rather have been.

Baseball lifts me out of myself. Not to get all George Will here, but that first glimpse of green grass as I enter the ballpark stirs something in me that I’m inclined to describe as spiritual. Or at least it used to. I’ve found it difficult to embrace the sport this year. And it’s not because the New York Mets, the team I have followed since my Queens childhood, stumbled out of the gate 0 and 5—they have, as of this writing, clawed their way over .500—or because the Mariners have gotten off to a sluggish start in a division that seems ripe for the taking.

No, it’s because baseball is mired in scandals, most of them self-inflicted. Some are penny ante but unpleasant, like reps from the Los Angeles Dodgers pressuring and possibly swindling the couple who caught Shohei Ohtani’s first home run ball for the team into giving it up. Yes, the Dodgers eventually admitted their mistake—after the story blew up on social media—and sweetened the deal, but it’s a bad look for a team that spent over one billion dollars in the off-season on two players to act like supporting characters from The Sopranos around their fans. Others are more existential, like an entire crop of the sport’s best pitchers being felled by injuries in a manner that calls into question both the current mania for velocity and the structure of how the game is played down to the high school level.

But what has soured me on the sport this season are the scandals that all seem strangely linked. There’s the most public one, involving Ohtani’s translator Ippei Mizuhara stealing roughly $16 million from his friend and employer to cover gambling debts, complicating MLB’s embrace of sports betting as a revenue source. Next is the ongoing fiasco with the new uniforms designed by Nike and produced by Fanatics. The pants are transparent, apparently rip easily, and often don’t match the jerseys. That is, when uniforms show up at all; some deliveries haven’t arrived on time. As Jason Diamond observed, “There is just something so demeaning about turning on a baseball game and watching the players run around in these cheap uniforms.” And I loved these thoughts from Detroit Tigers relief pitcher Andrew Chafin:

You picked that (old jersey) up and it was like, Son of a bitch, this is something. But now it’s just like, Eh, it’s just another jersey. There’s no special feel to it. You pick it up and you should feel like you’re putting on a freaking crown and a big-ass fluffy cape, you know what I mean? ... They’re not bad jerseys. Just, in my opinion, they’re not big-league jerseys.

Finally, we have the sheer disgrace of John Fisher, nepo baby owner of the Oakland A’s, moving the team to Las Vegas, and the bigger disgrace of Fisher’s fellow owners letting him get away with it. There isn’t a stadium in Las Vegas and won’t be for several years. Fisher’s solution to this problem was to shun the offer of an extension from Oakland and have the A’s play for the foreseeable future in Sacramento’s minor league park. It will be as if the entire team has been sent down, along with whoever they’re playing. (During this period, the club will be known as “the A’s” with no geographic designation, California’s capital seemingly being a liminal space.) You almost have to admire the delusional pride with which Fisher announced the decision.

I don’t even know what to make of this story about a private equity-backed outfit vacuuming up minor league clubs across the country. Hell, it even bothers me that in this piece I’ve linked repeatedly to The Athletic. I’ve had a subscription to the website almost since it began, because it pledged to have a dedicated beat reporter for every team in the league. That policy went by the wayside soon after the New York Times bought The Athletic—and then shut down the paper’s own sports department, outsourcing its coverage to its new purchase. The Athletic now has two reporters covering the Mets—which really shouldn’t bother me—but had no one assigned to the Houston Astros for the end of their 2022 World Series run. Last year’s champs, the Texas Rangers, also didn’t have someone covering their beat.

What links all this bad news? The ghost of Milton Fucking Friedman, that’s what. The constant reminders that those at the highest levels of the game are playing another game entirely. They’re not in the baseball business. Their aim isn’t necessarily to field the best team, to contend, to win a championship. It’s to optimize revenue. It’s to hit their target numbers. It’s to do more with less. And when that mindset crops up in every aspect of the sport, it starts to make me feel a little like a chump every time I buy a ticket. Even when Bryce Miller is on the hill for the Mariners.

It isn’t just baseball. Financialization continues to steadily eat away at every industry. I highly recommend Daniel Bessner’s article “The Life and Death of Hollywood” in Harper’s. Studios aren’t in the business of making film and TV anymore. They’re in the profit-maximization racket. Which means risk aversion, IP-driven “content,” and “the deepest and most existential crisis” these companies have ever faced, jeopardizing the livelihoods of writers and craftspeople. And now baseball isn’t up to the task of distracting me anymore.

Still, the Mets’ new City Connect uniforms look pretty tight, showing love to the subways and the 7 train out to Flushing in particular. I hope they’re ready in time for the team to wear them.

Next time, we will return to our regularly-scheduled programming.