The Bringer of Rain: GB/FB Ratio Revisited

No apologies necessary - and you’ll probably like this too then...

https://www.splicetoday.com/sports/when ... eason-jobs

But why are baseball salaries so much higher now? There are two main reasons, I think.The Dow Jones average was about 800 in 1978 and it is about 25,000 now. There is a lot more money available now that corporations can funnel into buying tickets. Corporations buy about 30 percent of season tickets sold and that does not include other ticket purchases from ticket brokers and single ticket sales. That allows teams to charge a lot more for tickets. It also means that the average joe can hardly afford to see a game anymore, so no wonder fans are not as in to the game. And of course with the skyrocketing costs of college tuition getting a baseball scholarship looks mighty attractive, hence the investment in strength coaches,batting coaches, etc.

Secondly, there are the monopolistic practices in the cable industry that allows cable companies to pay large amounts of money for content. The Dodgers have a 25 year 8.35 billion cable deal with Time Warner.

We basicall have a game that is overflowing with corporate money. All that being said when my nephew played high school baseball several years back and I went to a number of games, those games were fun to watch. And the caliber of play was pretty darn good.

I think we're all basically saying the same thing. The ratio of the Dow in '78 to today is almost exactly that of the ratio of players' salaries in '78 to today. We used to deplore the atmosphere at playoff baseball games because the corporations had snagged up the good seats -- people with no connection to the teams were there to be seen not to be heard. That is the atmosphere at many major league games today, precisely because of that corporate money. Ticket prices for the best seats at most MLB stadiums in 1978 was about $5.00; today....obscene (maybe not $150 obscene if we follow the 30/1 ratio). Thank heavens for Stubhub (which comes mostly from corporate season tickets I would think). Your point about cable tv is well taken, but again I would argue that it cuts off many people from the day to day enjoyment of fandom by imposing yet another financial burden.

One point I forgot to make in my last post was the nostalgic quality of baseball for some kind of rural roots (the pasture-like quality, the slow pace of the game reflecting small town time...). And yet, major league baseball has always been played exclusively in large cities. The early teams may have had rural "hicks" and "rubes" filling their lineups, but they also had incredibly large numbers of first and second generation immigrants from the cities (baseball as source of integration). One of the first major shifts in baseball occurs around 1920 (ironically just after the 1919 scandal in which big city gamblers were seen as the root of the cancer) when the lively ball was introduced. I think that it is not for nothing that 1920 marks the first time in American history that more than 50% of the population lived in big cities. The slow pace of the game was already being eroded by the splash and glitter of the big bopper, the glamor of the home run. What we are witnessing today perhaps is the suburbanization of the game: parents who have the means to give their children the access to the best materials to play the game, at the cost of losing the "soul" (whatever that may be) of the game.

I'm not arguing for a return to a by-gone era (as much as I would love to); the genie is out of the bottle. The instant gratification demanded by today's audiences imposes the BB/SO/HR scenario. We see this everywhere: I see it in the cut-and-paste attitude of "writing" papers amongst my students or the glazed look in their eyes when I ask them to read, "really read" a text or "really look at" an image. We need to fill time, we are afraid of time...something that baseball never was.