Requiem for the Summer Game

By Charles Krauthammer

Is this the year they canceled spring training? It might be going on somewhere, but to read the papers or watch the sportscasts, you wouldn't know it. Just a decade ago, it was almost obligatory for a writer to pad down in March to some funky Florida field and wax poetic about the summer game. Today you're lucky if you can find a single line of baseball coverage. Spring once meant the crack of the bat, the smell of the grass. Today it means college hoops, March Madness.

The barons of the game say baseball is back. "The game is more popular today than ever before," boasted commissioner Bud Selig after the '98 McGwire-Sosa home-run chase. That burst of excitement gave the widespread impression that baseball was on the rebound.

It ain't so. Baseball is in deep decline. Attendance never recovered from the catastrophic 1994 strike. Preseason NFL games routinely outdraw regular-season baseball. Why, small market teams like Montreal and Kansas City draw fewer fans than Washington's women's basketball team.

Then there is TV, where baseball is dying. NBC paid $400 million for baseball-broadcast rights through 2000. Yet in 1997, the World Series was such a ratings bust that the network's Don Ohlmeyer publicly prayed for a four-game sweep. He wanted baseball--the World Series!--off the air so he could get his viewers back.

If baseball is back, why did it sue ESPN for bumping late-September Sunday-night games--pennant-race baseball, the most exciting there is--in favor of early season NFL games? It says something about a sport that it has to use the courts to force TV to show it.

But that is not the worst of it. Baseball's deepest problem is not attendance or ratings but silence. There is no talk. No interest. No buzz. On talk-radio sports, football and basketball are more talked about in their off-seasons than baseball is on-season. The ultimate humiliation is the sports networks' around-the-clock live coverage of the NFL and NBA drafts--right in the middle of the barely covered baseball season.

How far has baseball fallen? Consider this. The most dramatic event in baseball is the grand slam, an event so rare that the all-time grand-slam king, Lou Gehrig, hit only 23 in his entire career. There were 150,000 games played in the 20th century; in only nine did anyone hit two grand slams in a game. There were more than 1.3 million innings played; in not one did any player hit two in the same inning.

Until last season. On April 23, Fernando Tatis, batting behind Mark McGwire, did exactly that. Even more remarkable than the event, however, was how unremarked it went. Tatis' miracle inning hardly made it into the next day's newspapers. Americans know Brandi Chastain. Ask them who hit two grand slams in one inning.

Fifty years ago, when baseball was king, Tatis' feat would have been news, 36-point headline news. About similar baseball feats, songs have been written (Joltin' Joe DiMaggio), legends born (the shot heard 'round the world), adjectives coined (Ruthian). Ballplayers once had candy bars named after them. Today evening newscasts don't even bother to give the scores.

What happened? It started, as with everything modern, with television. Baseball, the quintessential radio game--discrete, deliberate, visualizable--has been overtaken by basketball and football, balletic spectacles perfectly suited for the television frame.

But the TV problem is now 50 years old. Baseball's precipitous decline is more recent. It is the result of two baleful new developments. First, star players don't stay with their teams. With free agency, the great players move around, making it impossible--indeed, almost foolish--for a fan to invest hopes and dreams and even interest in zillionaires who carpetbag at the drop of $20 million.

Even worse is the new caste system: half the teams are out of the running on opening day. They cannot compete financially. Minnesota and Montreal and Kansas City and Florida are minor league teams. They don't just play like minor league teams. They function like them. As soon as their young players develop into stardom, they get bought up and shipped out to the likes of New York and Boston.

As baseball fades, it turns to memory to keep itself alive. The game's main refuge is its glorious receding past, to which it repairs with ever increasing frequency and desperation. Vintage cards, vintage players, vintage memories. What was the only memorable moment of last year's All-Star game? Ted Williams coming to the mound to throw out the first pitch. His last at bat was 40 years ago. Nostalgia is the last thing that sells--before the shop gets shuttered.