The Athlete’s View - Fall 1995

Joel Kirsch, Ph.D.
American Sports Institute

It would be hard to argue against the fact that Major League Baseball is completing one of its most difficult and troubling years.

As if it wasn't bad enough that the strike that brought the 1994 season to a short-lived and abrupt ending carried into the beginning of this year, necessitating an abbreviated 144-game regular season in 1995, something more disturbing, a haunting presence that is provoking a knot-like feeling in baseball's and America's collective stomach, is hovering over the game and country—America's game, the USA.

There is still no agreement between the player's union and the owners. Both sides agreed to play the 1995 regular season after each side saw that the other wasn't going to blink. They had to play. A lot of money had already been lost. Unbelievable sums were going to be lost.

But the inability of the two sides to finally settle this thing, the lack of their ability to agree on an agreement touched a nerve with the public, the fans.

In a recent study conducted by ICR Survey Research Group, 60 percent of baseball fans have less interest in the sport than before the strike. And this was quite evident at the turnstiles. Except for several teams that contended for division titles and wild-card berths during the regular season, attendance was down sharply. Drops in attendance ranged from 19% to 40%. It seems the fans were so disgusted by it all, they voted with their feet moving in other directions than into ballparks, or they just stayed home.

The fans wanted something to happen. They wanted harmony and the security that money wouldn't interfere with the game for a while. Instead, they got an agreement to disagree and the possibility of another stoppage. Baseball's foundation was being laid on a fiscal fault line.

The problems of 1994-95 with Major League Baseball are not new. Early in the 1980's, 20 of the 26 teams were losing money. The owners thought their problems were financial. So they brought in Peter Ueberroth as commissioner to fix things. He had taken an ailing travel agency and turned it into a financial thunderbolt. The owners hoped that Ueberroth could make his lightning strike twice.

Over the short run, things improved. But baseball's problems weren't financial. Baseball's money problems were a symptom of something else, something more profound. Under Ueberroth's reign, the marketing of the game proliferated, generating excitement for all the wrong reasons. Giveaways, merchandise licensing, and other promotional campaigns was like putting a band aid over a growing cancerous sore. What needing fixing was baseball and America got Madison Avenue.

It appears that Americans are just plain tired of money reaching its nasty tentacles into their cherished game. Further, they are not alone with their feelings, for the situation with baseball over the past 15 years is nothing new. The fans' disgust and its impact on baseball is no different than what the ancient Greeks experienced with all of sport when it reigned supreme in ancient Greece for several centuries before falling from its place of honor.

During the 7th and 6th centuries B.C., the athlete was the most revered person in ancient Greece, and sport was a part of the arts and humanities. Continuously striving for excellence in an integrated and balanced physical, mental, and spiritual way was the highest calling for any person. And those who did this best—the athletes—held the highest of positions in Greek culture. Further, the athletes' honesty and their sense of fair play were uncompromising.

However, by the 4th century B.C., all this had change. Sport and athletes had fallen from their place of honor because of an overemphasis on winning where cheating became victory's way, and because of an overemphasis on money. Financial rewards became more of the focus than striving for excellence, than honesty, than fairness. The people lost faith in sport, in the athletes as mythical figures. If the athletes and the games weren't pure, then what could be? The people were being deceived by their human gods. The spirit of the games had been lost to winning-at-all-costs and money rather than being part of the elements that touched people at their core—excellence, honesty, fairness.

Whether in ancient Greece or modern-day America, sport is an art, a humanity, a science that brings forth the human spirit and, thus, plays a vital role in the evolutionary development of humankind toward a higher state of consciousness. Sport takes us to places we've never been before, mentally, physically, spiritually. We go to a baseball game looking for what we seek in our own lives—excellence, honesty, fairness. And we go to see the athletes do what we cannot. We go to experience transcendence right before our very eyes, not for meaningless merchandise handouts.

But the money haggles alone were not the crowning blow that led to the fans feeling duped and their resulting disgust. The money problems were there before and the fans got through it. The crowning blow was when Major League Baseball tried to give the fans gods not from the heavens but from the underworld just so games could be played and money gained. Major League Baseball said the replacement gods were just as good as the heavenly ones. But the fans knew the truth: They wouldn't be getting excellence. Major League Baseball was being dishonest. It wasn't fair.

The replacement players—some of whom were gods in their own time but who could no longer take us where we wanted to go—were being offered as those from the heavens; and heavenly they were not. The essence of sport and everything it meant to be an athlete and everything that sport provided humankind was ultimately compromised in an unconscionable, unforgivable way.

All people react the same way when the spirit of the games is overshadowed by an overemphasis on money. Baseball wouldn't have its depleting, never-seeming-to-end problems if it would get back to why people go see the game in the first place—excellence, honesty, fairness and to watch the real gods take us to places we cannot take ourselves by hitting a round ball squarely with a round bat, powering the white spheres into space in an arching motion that forever links us to celestial travel.

It is this sense of integrity and the spiritual, transcendent experience the fans want. They will not come back en masse until they are reassured that this is also what Major League Baseball's powers-that-be value first and foremost.