Kill the Squid

 

"...a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

Thus spake Matt Taibbi, describing Goldman Sachs, at the time of the 2008 financial smash-up.

Okay, granted, Taibbi's main baseball prediction—that the Yankees' acquisition of Sabathia, Teixeira, and Burnett would be a gigantic disaster in 2009—was about as wrong-headed as you can get.

But he wasn't wrong about Goldman Sachs. And what he wrote applies just as well to the faceless corporate entity known as MLB.

It's time to kill the squid.

No, not Andrew Velazquez, idiotically handed to the Angels. But the great-big, major-league, killer vampire squid.

For me, the last straw was MLB's brilliant decision to break up the old minor-league system—and cut loose 42 minor-league teams, along with it. 

One of these, of course, was our own, Staten Island Yankees, a.k.a., the Pizza Rats. I say "our own," not just because they were in the Yankees' farm system, but because we the taxpayers of New York City shelled out an estimated $29 million to build the team a splendid little park of its own.

It was the cherry on the top of literally billions in public subsidies that have gone out over the years from NYC to the insanely profitable entities that are your New York Yankees, and that other franchise over in Flushing.  

Yes, we did that: paid billions of dollars to entice major-league teams to stay in the most populous city and television market in the country.

Well, fool me once, etc., etc.  

Even worse than footing us with the bill is what MLB has done to towns like Oneonta, a longtime redoubt of the Yankees system, with one of the loveliest ballparks in creation.

Not to mention what MLB has done in renaming the great old minor leagues in general, ripping any romance or even sense from the whole enterprise.  

Or do you love designations such as, "Low-A Southeast," or the "Florida Complex League"? (I'm not making this up.)

Then there's MLB's brilliant decision to cut the number of amateur drafts down from 40 to 5. 

All aimed toward the owners' never-ending goal of getting their meat on the hoof as cheap as possible by exploiting a lot of Dominican teenagers and shifting the burden of bringing up ballplayers the right way, over to colleges and travel teams. 

All so we can get still more baseball played strictly by the numbers, a computer printout game of anonymous power throwers and juiced up power hitters, all carefully arranged to fit into as neat a TV package as possible, even if it means idiotic new rules such as extra-inning runners on second, or seven-inning doubleheaders.

Basta!

Say the owners and the players reach an agreement among themselves tomorrow. What's that going to mean for the rest of us, the fans and the taxpayers?

I'll tell you what it'll mean: 

Still higher prices, duller games, and less craft. More public subsidies to filthy rich corporations, more gambling corrupting the whole soul of the game, more PEDs leaving untold thousands of kids with lasting physical and mental impairments. More mind-numbing ads, smeared over the field and—soon—onto players' uniforms. 

More silly, meaningless rounds of playoffs, diluting the beauty of the long season and any true notion of what it means to be a champion.

Mostly at fault are the owners, of course, who have always been and always will be some of the most callous, grasping, thoroughly loathsome individuals ever to mismanage public and private funds.

But the players are no prize either, millionaires still pretending they're just plain workin' folks, right-wingers to a man who run the most militant union in the nation. (Not trying to start a political argument here. Just sayin' you shouldn't talk one way and act the other.)

What will a labor agreement mean for all of us?

More of everything we already hate most about today's game. Not to mention another 20 years of Brian Cashman, and who knows how many decades of one Steinbrenner or another, doing their best not to win, but to cut corners and save cash whenever they can.

Enough. 

I say, let the talks fail. I say it won't be the end of baseball, which will never die. I say it will be the end of MLB, and of louts who take a year to recover from a buttocks strain.  

Something will emerge. Some kind of new game, new leagues, new whatever will come along to fill up OUR stadium in Staten Island, and that gorgeous park in Oneonta, and who knows how many other places, big and small, out over the dark fields of the Republic.

Kill the squid. Free us all.