The Dead Brain Era in Baseball

Greetings sports historians of the future! Prowling the web for baseball's past to give this time a name? Look no further. I've got it for you: The Dead Brain Era.

Sure, some might say it started back in the days of putting lights into stadiums for night games, but I think that is still a bit too early. I'd peg this historic low-point in baseball to the introduction of the television camera.

At first, it seemed like a pretty good idea. A lot more people could see major league baseball, the best baseball in the world, right? Combine old line baseball, with its distance pitchers, unjuiced batters, an independent commissioner's office, and golden-throated play-by-play guys who weren't all ex-jocks, and you had a pretty amazing decade or two.

During the early TV years, minor league and independent sports dropped off the radar like a meteorite burning up over the morning sky. Why watch the Podunk Phillies when you could tune in, sit there with your TV dinner and your Bud, and catch the 'real deal' in nearby Philly?

Television generated a lot of money for the sport, elevating it well beyond the others in the big three for many years. To that yin came the rather dark yang.

With the tube came monster revenue to the owners. The players revolt finally crested in free agency. Player salaries soared into the upper stratosphere, taking ticket, souvenir, and food prices along for the ride.

Like a sunny spot in a wet climate, the wealth and visibility of the players developed a fungus of agents and personal managers to cling to the outside edges of the raging torrent of cash flow. The independent commissioners office was turned over to the used car salesman, Bud Light, removing the checks and balances from the political side of baseball. The agents dug into the owners piggy banks each season for record setting salaries for deserving players. Then the semi-deserving started asking for more jack and got it. Then the really undeserving started getting it because, after all, they are major league players. Fans paid for every last penny of it, from the place where they parked their butt at the stadium to the increased prices of everything from their ACE Hardware to their American Airlines ticket for that last minute business trip.

In the Electronic Age of baseball everything started to speed up. Television exploded into 24 hour a day cable, and with it came E-SPIN, which chopped up, repackaged, and compressed sports into a melange of 10 second highlights: Digestible sports news. The relentless coverage, the constant pressure to top not memories, but a history of film and video clips, pushed everything in the system harder. Combine that with the sixties generation's solution to everything:  A pill, a puff, or a pick-me-up.

The juicing of ballplayers to serve the almighty Tube God had begun.

The other sports caught on to the TV revolution and caught up, or even, in the case of the NFL, passed the national pastime.

Needing to fill all those hours in a day with sports, a new generation of sports oracles, stupid sports talk programs, and the relentless bland banter of brash blowhards, a daily regurgitation of contract chatter and the police desk blotter began to reshape baseball.

Dreary doyens of E-SPIN nit picked their way through every moment, every character point and flaw, until every sport's athletes felt that raw nerve being scratched. Gone were the days of semi-respectful admiration. In TV-biz speak it was ABC Wide World of Sports Meets E! The True Hollywood Story Meets Cops.

In an effort to glom onto the luster of their sports careers, E-SPIN and its even darker nastier counterpart, Fox Sports, pumped a parade of athlete experts for that "inside scoop." Most of them, however, didn't have enough "outside" perspective or, quite frankly, an education in journalism, to take on the kinds of roles in which they found themselves.

Peter Gammons and Tony Kornheiser, who have been repackaged and reformatted so much that they would be sad substitutes in any other age of sport, were left as museum pieces of "journalism" in a sea of mindless talking heads and ruthless fill-the-space-between-commercials field men and women. The cult of the on-air personality came first and the sports news that they covered became more of a backdrop.

Then the talking head jock squad, either through hiring practices at these new sports towers of Babylon, or by some clever design of the NFL, became laden with football talking heads.

As E-SPIN started spending more and more of its time talking football in June and July, the control freaks at MLB got the brilliant idea of running their own news system: MLB.com. Complete spin control, without all that messy independent journalism nonsense. Think of it as Fox News for baseball.  All of the spin with none of those nasty Balco labs stories.

Yessir, the tube and its mighty cash cascade washed the game away.

Pitchers stopped pitching, at least beyond a certain number of controlled pitches to "protect the investment." Forget the fact that Satchel Paige or Gaylord Perry or Nolan Ryan pitched just fine without all that babying.

Runners stopped running. High value contracts meant a dim view of Ty Cobb and Pete Rose style base-running. No cleats first attacks. Catchers remain largely concussion-free. We wouldn't want to injury any of our million dollar babies.

Fielders stopped fielding. Why do a Bucky Dent and stop a freight train with your glove in May? It's a long summer. Worry about it in late July. If it counts, turn it on. Otherwise coast into a comfy three million pay-day healthy, and wait for free agency for a shot at playing competitively on a better club the next season.

The baseball strike almost crippled the business completely. Climbing out of it, the solution to the problem was handing over home runs to the hungry fans. They play well to TV, particularly to that SportsCenter daily dinger digest. To get those numbers, trainers sat stone silent as players on steroids pumped up faster than Popeye on a can of spinach.

716 and on will cap a generation of tainted achievements in a game that used to honor records above all else. Toss in a tied All-Star game, and giving permission to the Florida Marlins to seek greener pastures, when they operate badly in one of the most affluent metroplexes in the world: It's all just icing on the dumb cake.

MLB spin doctors started dropping the term "dilution" around until the modern corps of lemmings, er, journalists, without the sense to question the information being shoved into their mouth on the spoon regurgitated the idea gleefully.

"Gorging," not dilution, would be the correct term for too many players with fat wallets throwing their careers and the front office off balance.

No one is accountable. The money keeps coming, until one day, it stops. It will stop.

The game is changing again.

Follow the fans. Around the country, in those places tucked away between the TV rose line of New York City and LA, the fans started switching off the nasty tube and coming back to the ballparks, just not major league ballparks. They packed smaller nice new stadiums closer to their homes, where they could get closer to the game. They paid gleefully for more reasonably priced tickets and food and millions in souvenirs in places where the players sign their kids' balls without griping, on ball fields where players, who make millions less, produce a higher general daily quality of the game.

"But there's no superstars!" whined and moaned the tube squad who created these monsters. True. These fine young athletes hadn't been deified yet, but they all played balls-out ball which excited the fan base and brought people back to the game.

As the sign over political pundit James Carville's desk read (modified): It's the GAME, stupid. Yet, for the millions who came, the big-market big-thinkers didn't get it, and continued to grind baseball into the dust.

One night back in June of 2006, I heard some moron on E-SPIN radio blathering on about how the government had to get involved with the steroids crisis. Colin Cowpie, the E-SPIN grandiloquent grid-iron-obsessed morning radio guy, said that fans wouldn't care about amphetamine use by ballplayers.

Yep, it's the Dead Brain era all right.

Update on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 at 09:18AM by Blog Admin

There is a great site dedicated to shaming Major League Baseball into preserving the game and burying Barry, called BoycottBarry.com. Definitely check this out. - BMR.

Comments

[rj]

AMEN and
AMEN!