Baseball season finally has arrived. By this time next year you might be able to place legal bets on its games.
That will make baseball even better, according to one big name in the biz.
The President of the St. Louis Cardinals, Bill DeWitt III, has told two legislative committees (he’s read the same script twice for one of them) that the Cardinals, Blues, Royals, Chiefs, and soccer teams in St. Louis and Kansas City, “first and foremost…support sports wagering as a way to increase engagement with our fans and provide a fun, exciting new way to enjoy sports.”
Your correspondent does not oppose casinos; voters approved them thirty years ago and it is unlikely they will have a major change of heart. Sports wagering is inevitable although the proposed legislation guts gambling tax laws that serve the public.
What caught the ear in those hearings was DeWitt’s assertion that sports wagering “will increase engagement with our fans.”
I love baseball. Some of my earliest memories are of playing the game in the yard of our home in a little Illinois town and hitting a ball that wound up in our living room, the picture window notwithstanding. I played center field with a catcher’s mitt in my first organized game. I was about seven, and I was scared to death at the plate where I had to face a fourth grader (the town was so small that fourth graders and second graders were on the same teams) throwing smoke, or the fourth grade equivalent. I remember that in the last game I decided I was going to swing the bat and I did, with my eyes closed, and I felt the ball hit the bat and I opened my eyes in time to see the ball scoot between the legs of the startled pitcher. It was my first official hit.
My first regular fielder’s glove was an Eddie Joost model. Joost was a long-time shortstop for the (then) Philadelphia Athletics, one of the first players to wear glasses in the field.
I played baseball or whatever permutation of it was available to me for as long as there was a game I could play. I was 65 when I played my most recent game, a slow-pitch co-ed softball game. I took a two-hopper down the third base line and threw a strike over the shoulder of the runner trying to score, right to the catcher for an easy tag. I say “most recent” because if Jefferson City had a league for fat old men over 75, I’d get my glove and buy some new spikes and I’d be out there smelling the dust mixed with lime, feeling and hearing the ball hit my glove, hearing more than feeling a solid contact with the bat, and going home sweaty with dust-gray socks except for the areas covered by my shoes which was still white.
I love the game. And thank you, Mr. DeWitt, I will not be more “engaged” in the game because I can bet on it.
I tell you what would “engage” me more, sir—–
You need to call the casino company whose brand carries the television broadcasts of the Cardinals and Royals and tell that company to get the games back on Dish TV. This will be the third season Nancy and I have had to fill our evenings binge-watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy instead of watching men play the boy’s game I’ve never outgrown.
What also would “engage” me more would be if The Game was made better. Columnist George F. Will, whose writings I enjoy although he is a dyed-in-the-wool Cubs fan, wrote a column on March 16th, skewering what the game has become—-and frankly, what it has become can’t be fixed by letting somebody bet on whether one of our teams gets more than six hits tonight.
Will complained that games have gotten longer “but with fewer balls in play.” He noted that more than one-third of all at-bats “result in strikeouts, walks or home runs, which are four seconds of flying ball followed by the batter’s jog.”
“Longer games with less action,” he says, are an atrocious recipe for an entertainment business.
He is correct. Too much of the game involves only three players. The pitcher and catcher and the hitter.
Sometimes as I listen to my protégé John Rooney’s radio broadcasts of Cardinals games, I think there are only three players involved—the pitcher, catcher, and the batter who often doesn’t try to beat the shift by going the other way or laying down a bunt.
Will points out there were 1,070 fewer stolen bases last year than a decade earlier and suggests, “If the MLB’s attendance is going to get back to its peak of 80 million fans in 2007, it must restore the energy of the game as it was….”
I once watched the Cardinals and the Phillies play a doubleheader. The two games lasted a TOTAL of four hours, two minutes. Bob Gibson and Ray Culp plus two relievers in first game won by the Cardinals 5-1 in 2:08. Ray Washburn and Jim Bunning plus a reliever in game two, won by the Cardinals 1-0 in 1:54.
Will cites what arguably was the greatest World Series game ever played, Pittsburgh’s 10-9 win over the Yankees in World Series game 7, in 1960. That’s the Bill Mazerowski walk-off homer game played in 2:36. Nobody struck out. By contrast, he says, the SHORTEST game in last year’s World Series, won by the Astros over the Braves 7-2, lasted three hours-11 minutes. The game had 23 strikeouts, “45 percent of all outs,” he noted.
Betting might increase involvement but if engagement is a goal, give the audience something more than seven guys standing around holding their gloves while two multi-millionaires play catch and a third one takes mighty swings or looks at pitches go by while waiting to see if he can hit the ball over the fence.
It’s The Game—not the bet—that will increase the engagement with fans. And those who love The Game as I do might be excused for worrying that DeWitt’s condescending attitude ignores the apparent hypocrisy of Hall of Fame bans for Pete Rose and Joe Jackson as baseball crawls deeper under the covers with gamblers.
Legal sports wagering is coming to Missouri. But pretentions of it making The Game in some way better are nothing more than misplaced, self-serving platitudes.