How Major League Baseball Lost Its Way

In the wake of the "Steroid Era," the challenge for MLB is not in overcoming the perception of cheating, it's in recreating what—at that time—was the ultimate product. Athletes (albeit, chemically altered ones) evolved 100 years from '88-'98. We can discredit '90's era baseball in hindsight, but the product was inarguably better than it is today. Instead of a barrel-chested Mark McGwire crushing 500-foot hanging curve balls off of the St. Louis Arch, we have a 5'5" Jose Altuve swing bunting and entire rosters that are created using sabermetrics.

Like an absentee father who showers his kids with an onslaught of Apple products for Christmas, the "Steroid Era" was a sham, but an awesome lie. Monster contracts were paid to Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and Jason Giambi; whose exaggerated market values were based on their shoving syringes in their asses and crushing home run balls. Those contracts opened the flood gates for Albert Pujols, Mark Texiera, and Johan Santana who (to no fault of their own) cashed in on baseball's corrupt era.

The costs of those contracts are passed on to the fans who now watch a worse product at an inflated price. Instead of Ken Caminiti firing a ball at the speed of sound across the infield and beasting an inside fastball 550 feet, we have Alfonso Soriano making $18M per year to whiff on outside sliders.

It's sad to watch a hometown product develop from the minors to major league star, only to lose him to a big market whose fans will boo him for going 0-4 in his first game. As the only major American sport without a salary cap, it’s time to impose some sort of ceiling. We all enjoy seeing an underdog take out a Goliath in October, but explain that to fans in Pittsburgh who haven’t seen a .500 team in two decades.

Revenue sharing and MLB's luxury tax do nothing to level the playing field and, if anything, have made the baseball's competitive balance worse. Perpetually losing, small market teams have no incentive to win because they're bankrolled by the league's best teams to get their brains beat in. For the Pirates, Astros, and Padres, investing in high-priced talent is a bad business decision. The Royals and Mariners exist to cultivate prospects, turn them into stars, and hand them over to the Phillies or Yankees. As a result, the correlation between revenue and winning is more direct in baseball than in any other sport.

Sports were created and built as means of escape from the soul-sucking burden of the rat races. Now, you need to put your 40 hours a week in the cubicle for a ticket and a souvenir beer. Oh, and another five hours overtime to park your used Chevy Cruze in the stadium parking lot.

It costs $200 to put another grown man's name on your back with an officially licensed jersey, another couple hundred to sit your ass in Yankee Stadium, and $7.50 for a beer at Fenway Park. Many Major League Baseball stadiums are funded with taxpayer dollars, which makes the fleecing even more insulting. Fans, fools that we are, have driven the value of watching a relief pitcher flip around a rosin bag or Adam Dunn foul out so high, that the every-man has been priced out of the stadium.

One thing that MLB holds in higher esteem than other sports is the Hall of Fame. Instead of responding with flippancy, just about every ballplayer is desperate to enter Cooperstown. You want an example? Pete Rose. He has turned his life's mission into being immortalized in that museum.

The problem is that baseball writers use their ballots as a way to exact personal revenge over players they didn't like. It’s incredibly hypocritical for these guys to grandstand about the "Steroid Era" by blackballing Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Mark McGwire. This kind of moral stand would be a lot more admirable if they didn't spend the '90s buried in puff pieces about the "return of baseball." While these guys pat themselves on the back to leaving their ballots blank, there's very little said of how badly the same independent press missed the opportunity to cover steroid usage while it was rampant in the game.

Yeah, we sound like grumpy old men by the headline but hear us out. If you're a Kansas City fan and, rather miraculously, your team makes the playoffs, MLB will broadcast your games around noon on a Tuesday. Good luck getting the live stream to work on your shitty Dell work computer/office firewall.

If, even more miraculously, your team makes the ALDS against the Yankees, your three-and-a-half hour game will start around 9PM Eastern Time. Throw in a few pitching changes and an extra inning or two, and you'll be lucky to get to bed before 1 a.m.

The only sport where replay is expedient is baseball. Calling a runner safe or out on a bang-bang play at first base takes, literally, 10 seconds to decide definitively. To see a team catch a bad call or Armando Galarraga lose a perfect game because of stubborn hardheadedness, perceived baseball purity and total lack of common sense is infuriating. Baseball is one of the few sports where rules aren’t left to interpretation. There are clear lines between safe and out or fair and foul. It’s about time baseball embraced the opportunity to get their calls right.

MLB isn’t just stubborn; it’s also tone deaf. The league is more aggressive on YouTube than any other private enterprise. As fans, we can’t share a diving catch or walk-off home run like we do “Workout Fails” compilations because the league strong-arms us into dealing with their clunky interface.

It’s simple. Instant replay doesn't basterdize the game anymore than putting seats on top of the Green Monster or removing the troughs from Wrigley Field. We have the ability to, quite simply, make the game better. Likewise, the ability to share the few bright moments in baseball (between guys spitting in the dirt and scratching themselves) allows fans to do the league’s marketing independently.

Kids these days are on a steady diet of Red Bull, X-Box, and WorldStar, which is bad for a sport that features the intentional walk and Big Papi rearranging his batting gloves for 30 seconds between every pitch. Baseball needs to speed up, at least if it wants to build domestic market share. Like there's a shot clock in the NBA, there needs to be an enforced time limit on pitchers. Hitters should not be allowed to step out of the box while at bat. Make the strike zone larger and those divas will swing the damn stick.

Since the remote was invented, no one has watched an entire baseball game all the way through. It's four hours, 18 commercial breaks, and a whole lot of Joba Chamberlain aimlessly pacing around the mound. Put these dudes on a clock and penalize them a ball if they dick around for more than 15 seconds between pitches.

Major League Baseball makes most of its money from television contracts with cable companies. Some of these deals are so astronomical that they sound made up, like the Angles’ $3B contract with Fox Sports or the Dodgers’ $7B deal with Time Warner. These enormous contracts often times translate to higher costs for subscribers (read: half of your cable bill) and, worst of all, they needlessly black out games all over the country. So if you want to buy MLB.tv so you can watch your favorite team on a tablet during your work commute, you’re totally out of luck.

This is especially bad for, say, a person living in Iowa who also happens to be a Chicago Cubs fan (common because their AAA affiliate plays in Des Moines). These people live outside a reasonable commute to Wrigley Field but inside the broadcast territory. MLB has a monopoly on out-of-market games while, simultaneously, constraining fans to use their products to watch them.

In the mid-‘90’s more than 20 percent of Major League Baseball players were African-American. Now, it’s down to eight percent. The days of Willie Mays, Reggie Jackson, Hank Aaron, and Bob Gibson are a memory. And it’s only getting worse.

When it comes to front office positions, there are only two African-American general managers and a pair of black team managers. And when you look at the recent hire of bozos like Bobby Valentine and Ned Yost, the league’s lack of diversity becomes even more curious. Unless MLB can make their marketing strategy to the inner city more sincere or—at the very least—cooler (we see you, RBI), baseball will continue to squander generation’s worth of talent and fans.