Cultural Regression

 

The corporate entity known as MLB has now had 23 years to fix the possibility that its all-star game could end in a tie, ever since Bud "Mr. Comb-over" Selig stood around like a lox in his own ballpark, shrugging helplessly as both teams ran out of pitchers and walked off the field.

The potential fixes were not difficult. The teams could have been ordered to bring along one or two or three or four "extra" pitchers, duly compensated for their time, and to be used only in case of extra innings. 

Or they could have had on hand three or four of the most promising minor-league pitchers in the game, or college pitchers, or "guest pitchers" from leagues around the world...all of whom, we can surmise, would have been delighted to appear.

Or the managers of both squads could have been ordered not to run out of pitchers, something they had managed to not do in all-star games for nearly 70 years before the Miller Park Meltdown.

But none of this was done, of course.

Instead, it was left to that elegant corporate suit, Rob Manfred, to come up with yet another "solution" that mangles the fundamental nature of the game. This was the Home Run Swing Off or Jerk Off, or whatever it was called, reducing what used to be the best all-star game in sports to the batting-practice whacks of Kyle Schwarber, a tubby little sultan of blubber—three inches shorter and 15 pounds heavier than Babe Ruth in his playing days—with 314 home runs and 1,442 strikeouts to his name.

Schwarber, without opposition, put three balls over the fence, and the National League went home a winner, ludicrously washing away the biggest comeback in the game's history by the AL.

This solution is typical of Manfred, in that it:

—Was taken from other sports

—Stinks

Manfred has already given us the Home Run Derby, a gimmick borrowed from the NBA, which made its own all-star game a shadow of the accompanying slam-dunk contest. The Swing Off was borrowed from FIFA, which has managed to reduce the most avidly watched sports spectacle in the world to a "shoot out," the soccer version of the Swing Off. 

Thrilled by France's amazing rally from two goals down against Argentina in 2022? Aching to see what would decide that battle for the most sought-after prize in world sports?

Well, forget it. Time for the equivalent of watching the best golfers in the world take three-foot putts, and seeing who misses one first.

But such ideas are typical of Manfred, who just this year suggested "the golden at-bat" as a late-innings gimmick in ballgames, and who has wrecked extra-inning games with his insipid "Manfred Man" rule.

Bear with me, please, as I note here again that the first, full baseball game I ever watched was the 1967 All-Star Game, which went 15 innings. 

It wasn't a very good game, played at the height of the late '60s pitching dominance. On top of that, the game was in Anaheim, and some idiot in the commissioner's office at the time, decided to maximize the East Coast audience by starting it at 4:15, PCT. The result, a whole game played in the gloaming, was a combined 30 strikeouts, with all the runs scored on three "Schwarbers"—solo home runs.

I loved it. It helped that my father let me stay up to see the whole thing on our fuzzy little, black-and-white TV, moved to the kitchen of our rented half-a-house in Tenafly, New Jersey, so it wouldn't disturb my sleeping, younger sisters. I was thrilled, nonetheless: what would happen? Who would win? How would it happen?

Sure, things didn't turn out the way I wanted them to. The AL lost, and The Mick struck out in his one appearance, and a hated Met—this unknown kid pitcher, one Tom Seaver—saved the win for the NL. But hey, it was fun, it was exhausting, and better luck next time. No Schwarbering around.

It got across to me, at least on some level, that baseball was an amazing, one-on-one game, wrapped inside a team game—and vice versa. There were all sorts of ways to win, all sorts of complications, and who knew what would happen? It was the very complexity of it all that made it so intriguing.

Rob Manfred, by contrast, appears to be interested mostly in boxing up the wonderful sport he runs into neat little media packages.

Gone are the old minor leagues, with their histories, and individual names and stories. Gone are extra innings that—never very often—might go on who-knows-how-far into the night. Gone is all strategy and individuality, sold off for advanced algorithms (It is no coincidence that this year's all-star game featured an experiment with automatic strike zones for the first time). 

Here is power over grace, corporate flim-flam over any real emotions. 

This all-star game also featured a tribute to Henry Aaron's record-breaking, 715th home run—complete with computerized, laser depictions of where that shot landed. Unmentioned by the MLB flacks posing as broadcasters was the fact that the Braves' current field, "Truist Park," is not one but two heavily subsidized stadiums removed from the one where "Hammerin' Hank" actually did hit that home run, Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium—a name that, if not exactly one to conjure with, at least gave credit to the people who built it. 

(Also, unmentioned, of course, was how Aaron's mark was long ago surpassed in the fraudulent record books by a cheating juicer—another scandal that Rob Manfred managed to bury, not to fix.)

Here, too, is corporate posturing over even human decency, with everyone in attendance bullied into writing down and displaying in public the names of those cancer victims they cherish the most. Our culture has become so depraved that we don't even recognize how nauseating this is, a show of caring that will do absolutely nothing to help those it is supposedly for; a "taking a stand" against a biological entity which our ballpark courage will in no way ameliorate.

(You'll remember that we just chucked out on his ass the president who so wanted an actual, well-funded, national campaign against cancer, because our eggs cost a little more.)

We've all heard the term, "technological regression," about societies that, through disaster, neglect, and indifference, lose the ability to do those things they once did routinely. I can't remember who it was who said, "Show me the games you play, and I will show you the society you have"—or something like that—but here we are. Our cultural regression is all but complete.