The Last Page
Mills, Nicolaus
If you have grown up as a baseball fan, you know that one of the cardinal rules of the game is that you root for your home team. It doesn't matter if they are lousy and another team is better....
...But even more important is legislation that would acknowledge the degree to which baseball operates as a quasipublic trust, depending on taxes to build most of its stadiums and local government to operate the roads and police that make safe access to the game possible...
...It was hard to believe that the owners, who have never talked about putting a cap on their gate receipts or television revenues, imagined their offer would be taken seriously, but the falseness of their position got even worse when I thought of how baseball operates: as a business in which the firms (teams) in the same industry (league) are allowed to meet as a cartel and make agreements on everything from rules to the awarding of franchises...
...One step is to end baseball's antitrust exemption...
...Bad trades, mental illness that ruined a star first basemen, a boating accident that killed two pitchers have made the Indians a marked team...
...But what bothers me most is that the baseball owners were able to force the players into a strike and then win public sympathy for themselves...
...After the age of ten, your home team is your team for life...
...The baseball strike ended all that...
...We need a federal agency to make sure that baseball franchises are granted with the same care that television stations are licensed...
...In a country where every businessman takes pride in earning whatever the market will bear, the owners were able to portray the players as greedy because they refused to accept a team salary cap that would limit what they could be collectively paid...
...In 1994, however, everything seemed different...
...Even moving doesn't change the tie...
...Since 1922, when the Supreme Court ruled that baseball was immune from the Sherman Antitrust Act, the game has operated with a freedom no other sport or industry enjoys...
...The Indians had a lineup filled with power hitters, and over the winter they acquired a decent pitching staff...
...I'm still disappointed...
...Your home team is your team...
...As someone who grew up a Cleveland Indians fan, I have been tempted by baseball disloyalty for most of my adult life...
...The last time the Indians were in the World Series was 1954 (they lost in four straight games), and in the intervening years the Tribe has been a sorry lot...
...What is at stake in changing the way baseball is run is not as dramatic as what was at stake in 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier...
...144 • DISSENT...
...The team had a real shot at winning the pennant...
...Democratizing it would provide us with an important example of how to deal with an industry that is both public and private...
...The game is a $1.5 billion-a-year business that millions watch...
...But baseball reform isn't small potatoes either...
...What is to be done...
...And we need to make sure that the commissioner of baseball is an impartial figure, chosen not just by the owners—as is now the case—but by the player representatives of each team as well as by the mayors of each city in which baseball is played...
...I fear the Indians pitchers may have been around too long to be effective for the next season...
...A bill known as the Professional Baseball Antitrust Reform Act would have done just that and had both Republican and Democratic co-sponsors in the last Congress...
Vol. 42 • January 1995 • No. 1
