Tag Archives: Atlanta

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You’re Out!

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What a shame that one of America’s favorite past times is going by the way of the NFL. Millionaires haggling over salaries while playing a game while its fans pay the bill. Not me! I don’t watch either.

MLB’s Alternate Universe

By: G. Maresca

As the Russians deployed tens of thousands of troops for an invasion of Ukraine, Major League Baseball’s (MLB) owners and the players’ union agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement.

MLB’s latest contract ended a lockout that lasted more than three months and barely registered a blip on the news’ radar. Their lockout impacted not just the spring training stadiums, but the local bars, restaurants, and hotels throughout Arizona and Florida. According to Seidman Research, these venues lost nearly half of their revenue when spring training was cut short in 2020.

Once upon a time in America, the national pastime was baseball. The once coast-to-coast sporting diversion is long past its time and prime. Baseball is the Pony Express in the era of the iPhone.

A work stoppage should be the last thing any professional league facing declining numbers needs. Billionaires argue with millionaires who disagree on how to divvy up a dumpster full of cash with the remaining fans paying the freight. Players and owners are heading down the Niagara River fighting over who gets to steer. Such unhinged business practices do not bode well for future growth.

When the MLB minimum salary is well over half a million, it is difficult to convince anyone with a pulse that the players are undergoing financial hardships, while the league’s anti-trust exemption remains. Making it to the “show” as players refer to the majors means the last guy on the bench can afford a wine cellar in their self-driving Bentley, while your average fan is fighting growing inflation that will price many out.

The issue is always the almighty dollar and if MLB’s goal is to drive their fans out, they are clearing the bases. Most could care less about salary caps, player minimums, arbitration, and baseball’s luxury tax structure, which parallels the federal tax code. The more they muddle with it, the more incomprehensible it becomes that has even seasoned tax attorneys bamboozled.

As Jason Gay in the Wall Street Journal put it recently, “the nation’s most self-sabotaging sport is once more setting its own shoelaces aflame” and they have been at it for the last half century.

The league’s television ratings and attendance are proof the game remains in a serious funk. MLB is its own worst enemy and cannot afford to keep their fans away. Commissioner Rob Manfred makes his NFL counterpart Roger Goodell seem like a once in a lifetime lottery pick. MLB attendance last year was down to a 37-year low. The final game of the 2020 World Series had the lowest television ratings ever, while last year’s All-Star game was the second lowest. The league saw 45.3 million fans attend regular season games in 2021, a drop of 33.9% from 2019 – the lowest figure in 35-years.

There remains no joy in Mudville as COVID’s ominous clouds still cast a long shadow as unvaccinated players will be barred from Canada to play the Toronto Blue Jays. MLB’s slow suicide picked up steam when the league stenciled BLM on mounds and outfields, while moving their All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver to appease Leftists – an insufferable and impossible task.

For many, MLB could terminate the season and it would have the same impact if the American Ceramic Society cancelled their annual convention. Even a game as superbly conceived as baseball can be so mismanaged that its fan base is doing a MacArthur and fading away. Those who still find the game worth the time and the expense, MLB’s opening day was Thursday, April 7, one week later than initially scheduled with its 162-regular season games in place.

Greed and envy are just two more nails in MLB’s coffin. In the free marketplace, businesses are at liberty to choose and live with the consequences.

Baseball will survive as it is great entertainment at many levels from the minors to college, high school, and youth leagues, where games don’t last three and a half hours and a hot dog and a beer won’t cost you a small fortune.

MLB’s hubris cares little about their fans just like Hollywood. Fans, however, can be heard by using their pastime money to support the millions of displaced Ukrainians – a grand slam in the humanity game.

 

Current Events

All-Star Strikeout

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Greg hits another Home Run!

By: G. Maresca

As Major League Baseball (MLB) opened its season to sunny skies with every team playing on the same day since 1937, the game’s executives seem intent on beheading the golden goose with the woke ax of the Cancel Culture.

Given the issues with two recent Georgian elections, the state’s legislature passed a bill that would strengthen the integrity and fairness of their voting laws.  The MLB suits and their Democrat allies including President Biden disagreed labeling the legislation “an atrocity” and “Jim Crow.”  As a result, MLB’s midseason summer classic – its annual All-Star game and amateur draft that were to take place in Atlanta – will be relocated to Colorado that has similar voting laws.

The president’s distortion of the Georgia law is intentionally divisive since he promised to unite the nation at his inauguration.  Even the left leaning Washington Post awarded Biden four Pinocchio’s.

MLB’s certitude is business as usual.  During last year’s abbreviated season, MLB stenciled a Marxist organization’s initials on pitching mounds leaguewide.  Despite their All-Star boycott of Georgia, MLB announced an expanded television deal with China.  MLB must not realize that in China they eat their bats rather than swing them.

MLB should showcase their All-Star game in Wuhan.  Surely, the Uighurs in their Xinjiang province “re-education” camps would tune in. Even Secretary of State Antony Binken said China is committing genocide against the Uighurs.

The media needs to question Biden on how a law committed to voter integrity in a state that he won warrants a boycott, while communist China gets a pass.

The Georgia law will require absentee voters to provide identification when requesting and mailing in their ballot.  Likewise, ballot drop boxes that were temporary during the pandemic will continue but be reduced.  There were no drop boxes prior to COVID, ever.

What will MLB do when other states pass similar voter integrity laws? Stop playing games in those states?  Why are any of the 81 regular season games being played in Atlanta if this law is so egregious?

Politics injecting itself into professional sports is vogue.  In July 2016, the NBA pulled its All-Star Game from Charlotte, N.C. because a state law mandated that transgenders use bathrooms according to their birth gender. After the law was repealed, the NBA rewarded Charlotte their 2019 All-Star game.

Political division is nothing new, but the ridiculous and despotic reactions are.  Perhaps MLB is auditioning for their future masters – the Chinese Communist Party?  No need to concern yourself with voter suppression when there are no elections.

Georgia is in no way suppressing legitimate voters, but their law does make it harder for illegitimate voters – and that is the crux – for Democrats.  MLB has smeared Georgia’s elected majority as racist and anti-democratic.

State officials should sue for defamation.

Here is MLB lecturing on election integrity when nothing is more fraudulent than an MLB All-Star ballot, where voting early and often is creed.

Drive to the park, buy a beer at the game and you will need identification.  Producing identification is not voter suppression; it is voter certification.  And you better have your immunization card updated to enter because that is next.

Sports should be apolitical, but it is the weak and craven who fail to step up to the plate and make it so.  Georgia showed uncharacteristic courage for politicians something MLB and the crony and woke CEOs at Atlanta based Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola severely lack.

If other legislatures and organizations would exhibit such resolve perhaps, a real examination, without the name calling about why one group has lagged behind in most metrics despite decades of unconstitutional subsidies and preferences.  Then we could address some real causes: 70% children born out of wedlock, 52% of murders, 37% of abortions among a culture that is only 13% of the population where entitlement and victimization handcuff advancement while atrophying young minds.

Bureaucratic elites are in lockstep with the anti-liberty, totalitarian, Constitution-hating zealots who occupy Washington.  This decision by MLB is just the latest example.

Sports is entertainment, not a political movement.

Until conservatives can boycott as effectively as leftists, expect more of the same.

Conservatives need to take a final homerun trot around the MLB bases of going, going… gone.

Good luck with your new friends, MLB.

 

Recent Posts

An Intentional Balk

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LOL, I love it when these leaders of the sports world make decisions that they believe will save their beloved sport. Good luck! It’s Economics folks, pure and simple, which is a “social” science, so again good luck figuring out what your fan base will do when you enact something. Since I have never been an avid MLB fan, I could care less, but I will enjoy watching what happens. 

By Greg Maresca

In 1968, Simon and Garfunkel wanted to know where the Yankee Clipper Joe DiMaggio had gone. Over half a century later, the suits of Major League Baseball (MLB) have to be wondering the same for their younger fan base.

Economists say demographics are king, and if true, then MLB is in more trouble than the British Royal Family. A survey by Street and Smith’s Sports Business Journal reported the average MLB fan is 57 years old. By comparison, the average age of an NBA fan is 42.

 Baseball like the culture it entertains has its share of problems.

 The game is still popular but is rapidly aging. Declining attendance has also plagued MLB having lost 6.3 million in attendance over the last eight regular seasons.

Those who play the game are shrinking as well from Little League up through the minor leagues.

It is no secret that participation in Little League has declined greatly through the years. All one has to do is look around. The one youth baseball entity that is doing well is travel baseball. Travel ball provides a chance to play year-round with exposure to college coaches and professional scouts. The problem is the costs are out of reach for many families pitting the baseball haves against the have-nots.

Stickball and stoopball were both central components of the urban youth streetscape experience that have now joined Ringolevio, Hopscotch, and Double Dutch as just more relics of the past. What does any of this have to do with MLB?

Plenty.

All came of age like MLB during the first half of the 20th century. We are now in the first half of the 21st century and like anything else, change is in vogue and baseball is an agrarian game from another century.

MLB is trying to adjust, but at what cost?

The homerun is baseball’s signature and in 2019 BC (Before COVID), the regular season homerun record was broken. The strike-out record also fell that year turning baseball into a prolonged version of Gillette’s Home Run Derby. MLB’s response: the 2021 baseball will be slightly “deadened” meaning a 375-foot stroke will be a few feet shorter – enough to keep more balls in play.

 The changes that remain post-COVID include doubleheaders lasting seven-innings each. Positive coronavirus tests saw teams play 55 doubleheaders. These abridged seven-inning games took an average of just over two and a half hours. This change should help address today’s compromised attention spans that can be juxtaposed to a barn cat in June. And with the average baseball game lasting three hours and seven minutes – Houston we have a problem and it is much more than the Astros cheating.

One change suggested was that all television and radio broadcasts would only be able to air just one 30-second advertisement at the half-inning. Greed overruled and the idea was dropped as quick as conducting more Joe Biden press conferences.

After allowing the designated hitter (DH) during last year’s pandemic-shortened season, the National League (NL) will again have pitchers batting. However, this season could very well be the last time pitchers’ bat. The consensus is the DH is the future of the NL, as it has been in the American League since 1973.

 Moreover, all extra innings with start with a runner on second base. This has been successfully done throughout the minor leagues in recent years, but to the purists of the game it’s nothing short of baseball heresy.

The MLB playoffs will return to their previous format with three division winners and two wild cards per league. But when MLB’s collective bargaining agreement ends December 1 expect the playoff field to permanently expand.

There has never been a time where competition for the entertainment dollar is as fierce, so what does MLB do? Propose eliminating 42 of its 160 minor league teams.

The games abiding fabric can be found within the minors, where the prices are affordable and the players accessible. Kids can get on the field during promotions. The minors are not just for player development, but for fan development, too.

Eliminating many grassroots minor league teams which, in and of themselves, carry a longstanding history is baseball’s version of euthanasia.

This is no 7th inning stretch.

 

UPDATE:

As though all these woes are not enough, the MLB Commissars  have decided the MLB should enter the political arena. Since GA has enacted, or are about to, election laws requiring an ID to cast your ballot, they have decided to move the All-Star game and the MLB drafts from Atlanta to who knows where. Reason? They say enacting a requirement for an ID to vote restricts people of color from voting. WHAT? That is asinine. How many actions today require an ID? So people of color can not do anything today that requires an ID because, what — they do not have one? Why? Someone of color please explain that to me.

MLB is dying, as is NFL and NBA. And as far as I am concerned they can all go the way of the Dinosaur. I’ll continue to watch certain  NCAA sports, but it appears there could be some drastic changes coming about from that group of misfits as well e.g.,  some literal college grants a transgender a scholarship to play women’s basketball.. Don’t believe me, watch and see, I guarantee there is a university out there thinking about it and many transgender basketball players filling out their applications as I write.