Opening day of the Major League Baseball season, which falls on Thursday after being delayed for a week by a labor dispute, is as good an occasion as any for fans of the game to come to terms with certain hard facts. I am talking, of course, about the inevitable future in which professional baseball is nationalized and put under the authority of some large federal entity — the Library of Congress, perhaps, or more romantically, the National Park Service.
Like the Delta blues or Yellowstone National Park, baseball is as indelibly American as it is painfully uncommercial. Left to fend for itself, the game will eventually disappear.
Attendance at games has declined steadily since 2008 and viewership figures are almost hilariously bleak. An ordinary national prime-time M.L.B. broadcast, such as ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball,” attracts some 1.5 million pairs of eyes each week, which is to say, roughly the number that are likely to be watching a heavily censored version of “Goodfellas” on a basic cable movie channel in the same time slot.
Even the World Series attracts smaller audiences than the average “Thursday Night Football” broadcast, the dregs of the National Football League’s weekly schedule. In 1975, the World Series had an average of 36 million viewers per game; in 2021, it barely attracted 12 million per game.
Casual observers may assume that despite this lack of popularity, baseball is still somehow insanely valuable. This is an illusion. Major League Baseball generated around $11 billion in revenue in 2019, but this figure does not accurately reflect the demand for its product. The astronomical salaries that continue to be enjoyed by the sport’s stars (if that is the mot juste) are a result not of the game’s nonexistent popularity but of the economics of cable television providers, who bundle regional sports networks alongside dozens of other channels so that anyone with cable TV is buying baseball whether he likes it or not.
Mike Trout’s $426 million contract is effectively being paid by millions of grandparents who just want to tune in to Anderson Cooper or “Antiques Roadshow.” As that audience dies off and younger generations of “cord cutters” take their place, baseball’s revenue will plummet.
Culturally, too, the game is increasingly irrelevant. The average age of a person watching a baseball game on television is 57, and one shudders to think what the comparable figure is for radio broadcasts. Typical American 10-year-olds are as likely to recognize Jorge Soler, who was named the most valuable player of last year’s World Series, as they are their local congressional representative. College athletes drafted by M.L.B. and N.F.L. teams choose the latter without hesitation.
In some parts of the country, participation in Little League has decreased by nearly 50 percent in the past decade and a half. When my wife and I signed up our 5- and 6-year-old daughters for T-ball a few weeks ago, we did so partly out of a grim sense of obligation. We might have been Irish parents enrolling our children in step dancing classes: This is your heritage and you are going to learn to appreciate it!
So much for the unignorable facts of baseball’s decline. What is to be done?
It is worth being honest upfront about what nationalizing baseball would entail. While I like to think that the Biden administration could seize all 30 teams and dissolve the league by executive fiat, citing language buried somewhere in the text of the Patriot Act, it is more realistic to assume that Congress would have to be involved. Legislation would authorize purchasing the teams at their current (and absurdly inflated) market valuation. Players, coaches and other staff members would become federal employees. The general manager would be appointed by the governor of the state in which the team plays its home games; manager would be a statewide office for which citizens vote every six years. There would be no term limits.
Salaries would be lower, perhaps drastically so, but so would ticket prices. And watching games on television or via online streaming would be much simpler, as broadcasts would be carried exclusively by C-SPAN.
Revenues, though diminished, would be more fairly distributed. I imagine gate receipts and merchandise sales being block-granted to the local authorities in the cities in which teams play, shoring up the coffers of many an ailing municipality. Public funding of stadiums would continue, but instead of being a cynical cash grab by penurious owners, it would be a noble undertaking, accepted by the indifferent citizenry as one of those worthwhile cultural ventures like the Smithsonian Institution that governments are compelled to support.
Do not confuse my intentions. I would gladly see Justin Verlander — once a star pitcher for my Detroit Tigers before being lured away by the Houston Astros — make $25 million a year for playing a boys’ game, just as I would happily pay Simone Young, our greatest living conductor, three times that amount for a single yearly engagement at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. But the world’s classical musicians long ago realized that the lifestyle of figures like the conductor Herbert von Karajan, with his yachts and custom Porsches, was a product of a vanished age in which the aspirational middle classes felt that buying classical recordings was a duty; so too must baseball players accept that nine-figure contracts are a vestige of an older and nobler civilization.
We need to stop pretending that baseball has a broad-based enthusiastic following and begin to see the game for what it is: the sports equivalent of collecting 78 r.p.m. records. Baseball is America’s game only in the sense that jazz is America’s music or that Henry James is America’s literature. It is time that we acknowledged this truth by affording baseball the same approbation we reserve for those other neglected cultural treasures.
It might be a hard sell for some fans, but ultimately a world in which the game not only continues but also does so free of commercial pressures would be a merrier one. Among other things, the league could abandon its doomed attempts to attract more viewers by mucking with the rules for extra innings and introducing impure practices like pitch clocks, signal transmitters for catchers and the universal designated hitter. A strict salary cap could be imposed to help ensure competitive parity among teams.
And who knows? Just as tourists who would never think of themselves as interested in art visit the National Gallery or the Metropolitan Museum because doing so seems suitably highbrow, perhaps one day they might go to baseball games out of some inchoate sense that it will be educational and enriching.
Lest there be any doubts, I should make it clear that I stand to gain nothing should my scheme be taken up by the relevant authorities. I argue from a disinterested position of love, in sober recognition of baseball’s undeniable obsolescence.
Matthew Walther (@matthewwalther) is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal. He is writing a biography of John Henry Newman.
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