Strike three, MLB!

As sad as I am to say it, I might be done with Major League Baseball.

I’ve been a fan pretty much my whole life. I well remember being an excited 9-year-old when the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series in 1982. They were my Dad’s team, so they were my team. I remember dancing in front of my parents’ “huge” 25-inch cabinet TV to the tune of “We Are Family” in 1983 when the Pirates won the series, and I remember the Atlanta Braves (my team since around 1986) winning it all in 1995, just a few weeks after my daughter passed away, and allowing myself to feel some kind of joy for the first time in a long time.

In fact, it was her death that got me back into baseball. I had quit watching in 1994 when the strike happened about two-thirds of the way through the season.

Millionaire players and billionaire owners squabbling over how to divide up the billions and billions of dollars they were raking in was enough to turn me off of the game completely. But in the fall of ‘95, it gave me something to do to take my mind off of everything for a few hours each night.

And so I became a fan again. Like many of you, I got really caught up in the Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa home run record chase in 1998. I wasn’t quite the hardcore watch-every-game sort of fan anymore, at least until Sept. 11, 2001. After the terrorist attack, it was baseball, the American Pastime, that seemed to be a rallying point

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that we could all sort of turn to and agree on, regardless of political leanings or our standing in society.

But then, the steroid controversy ignited, blowing up larger than Barry Bonds’ biceps, and I again got a little turned off of the game. I only followed the Braves (still my team) loosely and watched a game every now and then.

It just wasn’t the same, watching these roided up goons smash home runs. It might have appealed to the casual fan, but those who want the game to be played as purely as possible (like me) hated it.

I got back into it around 2012. By that time, the Braves were awful, but I was interested in watching them rebuild. And they did… eventually. Yes, it took a while, but in 2018, they won their division.

Then they did it again in 2019. In the weird COVID19 empty arena season in 2020, they even got within a game of going to the World Series for the first time this century. And finally, in 2021, they won it all, 26 years after they did it back in 1995, and for the first time in the lives of my other three children.

It was great. I was proud of my team and proud to be a baseball fan. But then…

It wasn’t long after the World Series ended in November that we first began hearing serious talk about the upcoming end to the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the deal the owners and players have that determines how all those billions of dollars are split up between them.

This was no good…

But it was early November. Plenty of time to work out a deal, right? But then the days went on and there was no agreement in sight. And then, on December 1st, the owners pulled the trigger and started a lockout with no deal and no hint of one.

But that still left three months before the beginning of Spring Training 2022. Surely these people understood that this was a terrible time for billionaires and millionaired to be fighting over their piece of a trillion-dollar pie, right?

Right?

Apparently not. On March 1st, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred officially announced that at best the 2022 season would start late, cancelling the first week of games that were scheduled to start at the end of the month.

Yes, I might be done.

I typically watch about 120-130 games a season these days. That’s about 360 hours, or 12 days of my life. I’m sure I can find something else to do with my time.

With the exception of the 2020 COVID-19 season, my family and I have gone to at least one live game either in Atlanta or St.

Louis each year since 2005 or so. That’s an easy $500 trip once tickets, food, gas, hotel, etc. are factored in.

In these trying times, I bet I can spend that money on something else quite easily.

Now I’ll be honest, if I hear tomorrow that a new deal has been reached, I might break out in a Tomahawk Chop and dig my Freddy Freeman jersey out of the closet, ready to cheer the Braves on once again. But I might not…

And there are millions of baseball fans out there who also might not. Baseball is already struggling to find its audience in a world where football and basketball might be just as popular if not more popular among U.S. sports fans.

As for me, I’ll always love baseball, but I might just join my Dad. These days, he doesn’t care for the pros and devotes his time to the University of Arkansas. I could just root for the Diamond Hogs with him.

Or maybe I’ll just stick to cheering for my daughter’s team. She plays softball for the West Memphis Blue Devils.

At least I know they won’t go on strike…