Baseball Whiffs on Two Counts: Labor Peace and Speeding Up Games

(Bloomberg) -- Major League Baseball's three-month lockout is no longer a theoretical threat to the coming season. The league has begun canceling games and is risking the loyalty of even die-hard fans.

“I've never turned my back on baseball -- I love it too much,” said James Digini, 42, an insurance salesman and longtime San Francisco Giants fan who lives in Northern California. “But I probably won't go to any games. I probably won't watch any games.”

Baseball has had labor disputes and scandals before but has always managed to bounce back. Now, though, it's operating in a climate where attention spans are short and sports fans crave fast-paced action. Yet baseball games are getting longer and the play slower.

“You need more action and it needs to come not only in a shorter period of time overall, but there needs to be a better pace,” said Bob Costas, the longtime sports announcer. “People who love the game recognize it as a problem.”

Major League Baseball's owners locked out the players in early December after their existing labor agreement expired. The Major League Baseball Players Association has said salaries aren't keeping up with revenue. It's also seeking changes to a system that the union says offers big paydays to a handful of free-agent stars but doesn't benefit many others.

1994 Strike

Baseball's 1994 strike was particularly damaging. It led to cancellation of the World Series and hurt the league's image. Joe Smaltz, a Philadelphia Phillies fan from York, Pennsylvania, stayed away for two years. More than half of his friends simply moved on.

But the game bounced back. In 1998, sluggers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa went on historic home-run blitzes. Their pursuit of the all-time single-season record captured national attention, drawing back casual fans.

But then McGwire and Sosa were accused of doping -- and baseball battled a years-long steroids scandal.

Now, the sport has another problem: The games have gotten too long -- running a record three hours-plus these days.

It's become a ritual across baseball -- a player enters the batter's box, takes a pitch, steps out, adjusts his gloves, takes another pitch and steps out again.

“Retired players I know just don't watch the game,” said Jeff Pearlman, a former baseball writer and author of several sports books. “Baseball players find baseball too slow to watch.”

Recent national TV contracts underscore baseball's standing. Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN is reportedly paying about $550 million a year for MLB rights. The ESPN-ABC contract for pro football is worth about $2.7 billion annually. Fox Corp. pays about $729 million a year for MLB rights, including postseason.

In a March 1 letter to fans, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said the league has sought “timely implementation of sorely needed rules like the pitch timer and elimination of shifts to improve the entertainment value of the game on the field.”

Fan Base

A prolonged shutdown carries risks for a league with a more fragile fan base than existed in the 1990s. Marginal fans may drop off, according to Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College who has consulted in sports industries.

“The question is how many such people will there be?” Zimbalist asked. “A thousand? A hundred thousand? A couple million? We don't know yet.”

Attendance fell to 68.5 million fans in 2019, the lowest since at least 2006. The last two years, of course, have been a struggle for all live events. In 2021, with ticket sales limited by Covid-19, baseball drew an in-person audience of 45.3 million. TV viewership rebounded last year, with the World Series on Fox up 20% to almost 12 million viewers. Still, that was well below the recent peak of 23.4 million in 2016.

In Manfred's letter to fans, the commissioner called the 1994 strike “a painful chapter in our game's history.” Play began that season with contract talks underway and ended with a strike shutting the game down.

“We cannot risk such an outcome again for our fans and our sport,” Manfred wrote. “The clubs and our owners fully understand just how important it is to our millions of fans that we get the game on the field as soon as possible.”

Costas, the longtime sports anchor, thinks a lockout that lasts just a week or two into the season won't be as disastrous as the one that canceled the World Series in 1994.

“The last time they missed games, they missed the most important games,” he said.

But Smaltz, the Phillies fan, said the Covid shutdown taught him something.

“What I realized is not watching sports didn't affect me as much as I thought,” he said. “Now, it's ‘I'll check the box scores and the highlights.' I don't have to see every pitch.”