Baseball Is Dying. The Government Should Take It Over.

 

 

[Now is] as good an occasion as any for fans of the game to come to terms with certain hard facts. I am talking, of course, about the inevitable future in which professional baseball is nationalized and put under the authority of some large federal entity — the Library of Congress, perhaps, or more romantically, the National Park Service.

 Like the Delta blues or Yellowstone National Park, baseball is as indelibly American as it is painfully uncommercial. Left to fend for itself, the game will eventually disappear.

 

 

 

Attendance at games has declined steadily since 2008 and viewership figures are almost hilariously bleak.
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Culturally, too, the game is increasingly irrelevant. 

So much for the unignorable facts of baseball’s decline. What is to be done?

 ...Congress would have to be involved. Legislation would authorize purchasing the teams at their current (and absurdly inflated) market valuation. Players, coaches and other staff members would become federal employees. The general manager would be appointed by the governor of the state in which the team plays its home games; manager would be a statewide office for which citizens vote every six years. There would be no term limits.

Public funding of stadiums would continue, but instead of being a cynical cash grab by penurious owners, it would be a noble undertaking, accepted by the indifferent citizenry as one of those worthwhile cultural ventures like the Smithsonian Institution that governments are compelled to support.

 We need to stop pretending that baseball has a broad-based enthusiastic following and begin to see the game for what it is: the sports equivalent of collecting 78 r.p.m. records. Baseball is America’s game only in the sense that jazz is America’s music or that Henry James is America’s literature. It is time that we acknowledged this truth by affording baseball the same approbation we reserve for those other neglected cultural treasures.

...a world in which the game not only continues but also does so free of commercial pressures would be a merrier one.
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I argue from a disinterested position of love, in sober recognition of baseball’s undeniable obsolescence.

A "disinterested position of love". Boy, every position of love I have been in has been interested lol. Worst op-ed, excuse me, "guest essay", ever published in the Times.