The end is nigh!
The unaccountably optimistic Jonah Keri takes exception to my post below on why I fear baseball in the teens is going to be awful, or at least less interesting than we're accustomed to, and wins a cosign from Rob Neyer as well. I'm tempted to just quote Daniel Larison here ('Optimism is one of the worst mental and spiritual afflictions, because it feeds desire and attachment more than almost anything else, and so necessarily leads to the misery that comes from the dashing of unrealistic hopes'), but Jonah brings up some quite legitimate objections.
My first point was about the effects of technology, which I think are going to lead toward monoculture in baseball front offices and thus make the game less lively. Jonah rightly points out that there are always inefficiencies in any system and smart people looking to exploit them, and thus argues that progress will continue its inexorable march. To a point, I agree with that—as I noted in my original item, I tend to think that the better statistical evaluation gets the more valuable the ability to read personalities will be, so that at some point the new moneyball will involve paying grizzled old scouts to sit down with 17-year-old ballplayers and their parents trying to get a read on their character, and everything old will be new again.
My concern isn't about people working within the system, though, it's the shape of the system itself. As information technology becomes more sophisticated, a bureaucracy devoted to serving and interpreting it inevitably arises, and as all bureaucracies do, it becomes self-perpetuating. You can already see the beginnings of this sort of thing in baseball right now, with young Ivy League grads and former bankers gaining power rapidly at the expense of old school baseball men. This isn't at all a bad thing, and it's largely just correcting an earlier tendency, but it carries its own dangers. As we learned a bit more than a year ago, very bright young men with great faith in routinized data can be startlingly blind to large structural faults in the system within which they work. We have a quite healthy diversity in baseball right now; my concern is that as statistical collection gets more complex it's going to lessen that diversity, and that the game will develop some of the same problems that monocropped fields do. This isn't a doomsaying prediction, though—if this happens (and maybe it won't!), the game will eventually right itself.
My second point was about the decline of baseball writing, and as much as I'd like to say otherwise, Jonah's flat assertion that 'great writing will always exist' isn't really very convincing. Print is a durable, extremely sophisticated technology, and while there are a lot of benefits to getting rid of it, there are some enormous costs. It's well known that people simply don't like to read texts above a certain length on screens, and while it's possible that technological advances will make the screen an adequate replacement for the printed page, it's also possible that they may not. (It isn't as if smart engineers haven't been trying to solve the problem.) It's also possible—I think it's likely—that there may just not be enough people interested in longer form writing to sustain a recognizable publishing industry. In that case we'll probably have a patronage model run through universities and foundations. I'm quite sure that will sustain fiction, serious historical research, magazines like The New Yorker, etc.; I have my doubts about whether it will sustain baseball writing, which is a pretty trivial field. It's not as if the good writing flowing out of a particular sport has never dried up before—you may have heard of boxing.
My third point, about the death of television, is a really complicated issue. On the one hand, baseball has done a better job of preparing for it than any other major sport, and when the day comes when cable goes the way of the landline they're going to make a lot of money by just charging people directly to watch baseball. On the other hand, the reason they make so much money on television rights is that there's a lot of ad money in televised baseball, and the basic lesson of newspapers' disastrous last few years is that an ad impression online is just not worth as much to advertisers as one in a form of legacy media. That will eventually resolve itself, and baseball will make up a lot of the revenue just by cutting out middlemen. Still, to just assume that the sport is going to make as much money in the new order as it did in the old strikes me as pretty perilous. The recording and publishing industries were pretty well established themselves and they haven't arrived at much of an answer to similar problems. Maybe baseball will, but there's probably going to be a scary transition period at the least.
On the fourth point, the economy, we don't much disagree. Who knows what things will look like a decade from now? Still, the correlation between shitty economic conditions and labor stoppages is pretty tight, and there's no reason at all to think that baseball will be able to handle it if a town like Detroit or Cleveland just loses its viability as a major league market. This isn't a point of huge concern—baseball has prospered in far worse conditions than we face now. But it will lead to unpleasantness.
As to the last point, that there is going to be some ugliness when pundits and the public realize that players are still taking drugs, this is just a matter of optimism and pessimism. I'd like to think that when Famous Player X who everyone thinks is clean is outed as a user it will inspire a broad reevaluation of the role of drugs in competition, but I see no reason at all to think it will happen. This won't be all that bad for baseball—certainly there's no proof whatever that various players being exposed as users hurt the game at all over the last decade. But it will almost certainly inspire an immense amount of tedious pseudo-controversy.
Even if all my dire predictions come true, baseball is going to be more than fine and will remain a great way to waste a lot of time. I even have an equal number of reasons to think the game will be still better in the coming decade than it has in the last, which I'll get to in another post. But the broadest forces at work are more bad for baseball than good for it. Things are always good until they aren't.
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Reader Comments (2)
Tim, regarding the future of baseball in comparison to publishing, recording, newspapers... the analogy is inapt. The main problem being faced by those industries is not that we don't like to read, or listen, or watch, or catch up on the news. The problem is that in a practical sense we no longer need those industries in order to do so; the rights-holders (no matter how hard they try) cannot restrict our access to their product.
Baseball, of course, can. Oh, sure, I suppose people can find a pirated copy of tonight's game on the internet tomorrow, but with sport -- unlike print or music or the latest episode of Two and a Half Men -- most of us have a pathological need for immediacy. If we're unable to watch a regular season game in real time, once we know that the Royals have beaten the Angels then we're really just interested in the highlights, for the most part. I'll concede this isn't exactly the same when it comes to our favorite team winning the World Series or something -- but in that instance, we're usually even more likely to be sure that we're watching it live on TV or in person. Any interest in "owning a copy" becomes solely a case of reliving the experience.
So there's still an inherent market value to the rights to MLB games, a value which has been degraded and plowed under with the other industries you mention. (And, of course, one can't discard the value of attending the games in person; the teams control that market 100%. It's the same as with the music industry; while some acts are strident about it, a lot of other bands don't give a flying fig about illegal downloading because it drives concert revenue, and you can't download the experience of being at a concert.)
Regarding the drug issue, all I have to say is this: cheating is rampant in cycling, and everyone knows it, but you sure couldn't tell by watching coverage of the Tour de France and counting the spectators. Yeah, some people give up on the sport, but most people either don't care or suffer from hoping that maybe this new star player is clean. Does that make us victims of Battered Fan Syndrome? Yeah, probably, but it's the reality.
Still, though I have a couple of quibbles, good thought-provoking stuff. Glad I clicked.
The really exciting thing about the death of cable and the move to internet will be that all revenue generated on the internet is evenly distributed. This means that the inherit media market advantage that allows New York to spend $200 million every year because of YES network will no longer be there. To me this is a good thing.