The Season for Seasons

Derek Zumsteg

I don't want to sound like Neddy Negative, but despite all the woo-ha-ha and group-hugging over this season which healed the nation and excited the world, the game of baseball is really in the same state it was in 1994, when the strike ended the season. Sorry.

There is little or no competitive balance in the game. Teams with immense, reliable revenue sources dominate the game. While it's entirely possible for a near-genius GM like Houston's Gary Hunsicker to put together a contender for $40M, and we also get to see an idiot GM like Baltimore's late Pat Gillick (Joe Carter? Sign 'em! Norm Charlton? Sign 'em!) blow $70M to no effect. But this doesn't mean that payroll doesn't generally translate into wins, because it has all decade and will continue to.

Any team that hikes its payroll by $20M this offseason by signing Bernie Williams and Mike Piazza (or, better yet, Brown and Leiter and save four mil) is an instant contender. But only a few teams can belly up to that exclusive bar. Furthermore, teams with massive cash flows can outbid the world for international players who aren't subject to a draft, and pour money into international scouting. The rules for acquiring players from other countries are never bent for the likes of the Twins, but they are bent for the Yankees.

What's more, teams with the huge revenue streams still dominate the politics of baseball, and the owners who have the most to gain from change seem unable to mount a challenge. There's an excellent idea that all teams should own the rights to their home games, so that if the Yankees come to play the Twins in the Inflatodome, they would have to buy the media rights to those games from the Twins. This makes perfect sense -- the Yankees have to play other teams, and those teams should share in the revenue. Big teams get hurt a little; small teams get a big boost in revenues.

There are many other public proposals to help competive balance without instituting a salary cap, all equally unlikely to be implemented. We also haven't seen a real labor deal, and we haven't seen anything to indicate that there will be one.

And our fine leaders. Bud Selig's been a poor commissioner, choosing his moments poorly, presenting a poor, corrupt face of baseball to the public. Gene Budig is, well, he's crazy. His suspensions are just dumb and often arbitrary. And Len Coleman? He's not that good either.

Baseball still has a fair contingent of really bad umpires. You know who we're talking about. And they can't get rid of them. Until baseball starts a real program of evaluating and promoting or demoting umpires based on their ability, the quality of umpires in the league will remain far below what it could -- and should -- be.

His terrible affliction aside, Daryl Strawberry gave baseball some of its worst televised moments this season, repeatedly inciting and keeping alive vicious brawls. Now that he's got cancer, everyone's talking about his inner strength. You know what? He's got no inner strength. Daryl Strawberry is a sucker-punching coward, a borderline scrub like Steve Howe kept alive on George Steinbrenner's left nipple. And having colon cancer does nothing to erase the black eyes he gave the sport this year.

I want to point out that I enjoyed baseball this year. Not the baseball I often saw, since I'm in Seattle and that involved watching Lou Piniella work his brain cell pointlessly as he lost game after game in monstrous fashion, but I found that I liked watching the Braves play (um, not that I like the Braves, because I don't), I discovered that there's a team called the Astros that's run with intellegence and cleverness, and I cut work early one day and got home in time to watch #62 and I teared up.

The enjoyment we derived from this season shouldn't make us forget that the game needs to change, and it needs to change soon. When Peter Angelos advocates disbanding franchises instead of taking up some of the better revenue-sharing plans (and he's a labor lawyer), there's something fundamentally wrong with the way those who control our sport look towards the future.

I can only hope that in the offseason the successes of this year inspire the ownership to look towards capitalizing on that goodwill to create a Renaissance for baseball, instead of ignoring the problems that afflict it and risk wasting it all.

about the author

Derek Zumsteg has almost reached the front of the concession line at the KingDome. Don't tell him yet that the game ended weeks ago at dmz@strikethree.com.