Baseball returns, to heal us again | Marcus Hayes

Come Sunday, mitts will be poppin’.

Hallelujah.

Major League Baseball owners ended their 99-day lockout Thursday when they acceded to a host of concessions to players who spent the last five seasons toiling under the yoke of an onerous collective bargaining agreement. It was the second-longest work stoppage in the game’s history, and it was the last thing the country needed.

Nothing heals America like its national pastime, and, after nearly seven years of division, of protest, of pandemic, insurrection, and, now, war, America needs healing like seldom before.

» READ MORE: MLB lockout ends; free agent frenzy to come

Most Americans under 55, and that’s about 80 percent of Americans, have no solid memories of the country in trauma other than the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Baseball helped to heal us then; in a career of golden moments, it was the finest hour of the late Harry Kalas.

It helped in the healing process of 400 years of discrimination and oppression, when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier; with four series already canceled by commissioner Rob Manfred (they’ve now been reinstated), the 75th anniversary of that day, April 15, was in peril of being lost.

It helped heal then. It will help heal us now.

The last two years weren’t the same. Baseball’s truncated 60-game season as COVID-19 raged through the country, and its socially distanced, social-justice adjusted season in 2021, served more of a reminder of our challenges and our differences than of our bonds. But, as COVID cases diminish and as we strive to better understand each other, this summer promises to be a better story. Not a perfect tale, but, again, this is America.

» READ MORE: Baseball is back ... ‘where am I signing?’ Former and current players react to the end of the lockout

At any rate, the game is back, and it’s going to be better than ever. An immediate flurry of offseason acquisitions and player movement will frame the opening of spring training on Sunday, which sets up an opening-day date of April 7 that will begin a full, 162-game season.

Whew.

Don’t be too angry at the actors who cost us a month of spring training. The arrogance and the hubris of the 30 billionaire owners cannot be overstated. They are the unworthy stewards of a lovely, dying game — a game whose very bones contradict the trend of attention-span shrinkage, cable-cutting, and wealth disparity in the United States. But billionaires cannot help acting with arrogance and hubris. It’s the American way.

As thrilling as the weekly holiday the NFL gives major cities, and as interesting as basketball can become when its supernovas collide, America remains tethered to a ridiculous venture: a timeless, clock-less game that cannot be played in precipitation. A game made ever more unappealing by Ivy League accountants in caps who have so distilled the game to an unnatural calculus problem that analytics have literally been litigated out of the game.

Immediately, more playoffs and higher wages. By 2023, shifts will be modified, pitch clocks started, and bases enlarged. All of these improvements might even make a universal designated hitter bearable (but I doubt it). The changes are, generally, brilliant. The players used the proposed changes as leverage, which was as clever as it was disingenuous, since the changes are the only hope for baseball’s future.

The average nine-inning, regular-season game in the major leagues last year was played in an all-time high of 3 hours and 10 minutes, three minutes longer than the previous year and 19 minutes longer than in 2011. The changes should both speed the game along and produce more action than the all-or-nothing proposition it has become, in which batters either hit a home run, walk, strike out, or smack a ball at one of the seven players positioned to the pitcher’s left or right.

Minimum wages will increase, and so will median wages, and, therefore, so will the quality of the game. This will resonate loudly, because the owners and their soulless Ivy lieutenants had figured out how to suppress the most powerful labor market in sports by devaluing the average player. This strategy produced a game played by unprepared youths and/or underpaid veterans who were desperate to clobber homers to ensure one more season of not having to go play in Japan.

You did this. You let the owners know this was not acceptable.

Viewership was down 12% overall in 2021. You’d grown ever less satisfied with a poor product that featured indifferent stars employed by indifferent oligarchs who employ dinosaur executives largely stuck in the 1980s mindset that baseball still reigns supreme. Baseball might be the most American of sports, but these executives clearly have never heard of Patrick Mahomes, Tom Brady, and LeBron James.

» READ MORE: Sen. Durbin wants to have hearing on baseball's antitrust exemption

This latest testament to greed is that owners made ever more money until the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted that steady growth, grossing a record $10.7 billion in 2019 (a 2020 partial shutdown and limited attendance protocols the last two years skewed those receipts). Further, according to forbes.com, they have seen the valuation of their franchises balloon by more than 600% since 2004, to an average of $1.9 billion in 2021, led by the Yankees, at $5.25 billion. The Phillies were worth about 2.05 billion.

Meanwhile, payrolls have fallen, by about 5% since 2016, when the players agreed to a catastrophically bad deal, which left them with no choice but to try and claw back losses this winter.

The new deal eases the pain of baseball’s younger players, who suffer an indentured servitude unlike that of any other major sport. It provides hope for less grotesque corruption in the wild-west process of acquiring international players, discourages the rampant tanking for top picks, and generally pulls baseball closer to a 21st Century template of employee treatment.

But, more than anything, the game on the field will be better.

It was an infuriating and saddening and worrisome 99 days; entirely unnecessary, completely overdramatic, and, in the end, typically American.

Hallelujah.