"The Rant" by Trav Flatt
By Trav Flatt
Summer is finally here. Pragmatically speaking, summer seems to have come early to New Mexico. It’s been baking hot, and wildfires have already been running amok. Not to mention the fact that the proverbial "Boys of Summer", baseball players, have been doing their thing in excess of sixty games.
That’s one of the things that severely hampers my ability to really maintain focus on Major League Baseball; The interminable season makes any one game really drop off in terms of importance. A baseball team has to severely slack off for roughly two weeks to have the same effect in terms of win-loss record as, for example, one fourth quarter fumble in Pro Football.
I recognize that there are plenty of benefits to more games in a season. The most obvious being ‘Ticket Revenue multiplied by 81 instead of by 8". No doubt hometown fans enjoy a greater number of opportunities to get out and see the game, I just can’t personally relate.
For one thing, my attention span is roughly equivalent to that of tree bark. I can’t keep track of 81 hometown games, much less 162 hometown team games. My hometown Albuquerque Isotopes play fewer games per season, but at this point I would have to go rooting through the newspaper sports page to even be able to tell you whether or not they are, technically, in Albuquerque at some point this week.
That’s the second thing. As a procrastinator of limited means, an extended season affords me the luxury of putting off attendance. To date (And, again, I had to go look this up), the local Isotopes have 33 home games remaining. By way of contrast, if I wanted to see 33 home games for the UNM Lobos football team, it would take me five or six years. Since I can’t afford to go see EACH and EVERY game, I would naturally want to wait until some meaningful games came along… Basically, when the team was on the verge of being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs and fighting for a spot in the post-season. This would have me either watching a real crappy team early in the season, or waiting until August or so to see a game.
I haven’t actually looked into it (As a journalist, I have the innate personality characteristic of being too lazy to look up ‘facts’), but I would assume that "Length of Season" is one of the factors cited by the MLB Player’s Association to justify absurd baseball player salaries. It’s a shame I can’t use that logic on my boss, considering that I go to work all YEAR.
I just don’t find length of season particularly relevant in terms of salary negotiation. Let’s face it, baseball is not as physically demanding as football. Or hockey. Or basketball… Come on, any sport in which Sidney Ponson can be considered a Finely Tuned Athlete cannot be that grueling from an aerobic point of view.
I’m not denying that there are definitely skills involved, but I have played a great deal of organized baseball in my time. When I wasn’t pitching, I was generally behind the plate catching. Both of these positions involve participation on each and every pitch, obviously. On the occasions where I fielded another position, the majority of my ‘Playing Time’ involved enough free time with which to leisurely munch on sunflower seeds and oogle the redhead by the third base dugout. Then, before the pitch, I had to utilize the physically intensive skill of being Very Alert, in case I had to do something, until the guy at the plate would foul one off and I could resume munching and oogling.
Now, I have absolutely nothing against either of those activities. Most of the time, I’m doing one or the other or both whether or not I’m anywhere near a baseball field. The point is that it never would have occurred to me that I should be earning a few million dollars a year to do so.
Truth be told, from a player’s perspective I would be all over a 162-game season because I always played because I enjoyed doing so. If a salary were thrown on top of the deal, I’d be in heaven. These days, though, I’m a consumer instead of a player, and in the process of purchasing tickets, I’m subsidizing these guys’ salary.
Interleague Disparity
This is just a quick gripe, as I’m a bit surprised that I haven’t seen much mention of it. More frequently, I’ve seen writers touting the flip side of the same coin and prattling on about how Regional Rivalries are a great thing. The less commonly mentioned side effect of this sort of scheduling is that some regional rivals aren’t facing the same quality of teams as others. This would be all well and good in theory, but the interleague games in question still do count when the win-loss columns are counted up in divisional standings. This sort of selective scheduling can mean the difference between a playoff spot and going home when one takes competitive imbalance back into account.
