Who can possibly afford to go see a baseball game these days? Don’t even bother trying to answer that, because now, even those who can are complaining:
Fans are now calculating how expensive it will be for many of them to attend games at the new stadiums. Tickets for the best seats at the 85-year-old Yankee Stadium, which sold for $1,000 a seat this season, will jump at the new ballpark to $2,500; in other areas of the stadium, they will range from $135 to $500 for season tickets. Prices for single-game tickets, which ranged from $14 to $400 this season, will be released later.
The current business model for baseball is seriously out of whack, especially as casual fans are concerned (I among them). Players’ salaries are incomprehensibly high, requiring teams to generate enormous revenue. Shiny new stadiums (and all teams must have one to “compete”) are economically extravagant affairs, built often at great expense to taxpayers and not always with local communities’ interest in mind. And ticket prices are out of reach of most everyone but the very wealthy, while scalping has been legalized and encouraged. All of which has repositioned baseball as a market, rather than a game – hometown team as international commodity.
Baseball is a historically populist game. Any kid can play with just a stick and a ball. It’s simple and poetic, that’s its charm: “mom and apple pie”, and all that. I remember as a kid going with my grandpa to watch the pathetic Cleveland Indians (ugh, Indians, can we please change the name already?) at old, drafty, peeling, Cleveland Municipal Stadium. They were a terrible team, and the stadium was a nightmare, but being at the game was magical. A day at the ballpark for a 9 year old kid had the sanctity of an epic and rhythmic benediction.
Phillip Roth wrote this in a Times op-ed on opening day 1973:
…baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.
…
It seems to me that through baseball I was put in touch with a more humane and tender brand of patriotism, lyrical rather than martial or righteous in spirit, and without the reek of saintly zeal, a patriotism that could not so easily be sloganized, or contained in a high-sounding formula to which you had to pledge something vague but all-encompassing called your “allegiance.”
That’s baseball at its best – America at its best. But at a time when the President asks citizens to sacrifice for their country by shopping, I suppose it’s fitting that the patriotism described above has been replaced by a pseudo-patriotic-capitalist-fandom. Show allegiance to your team (to your country): Buy season tickets! Buy merchandise! Shopping is the new American pastime.
Later in the op-ed, Roth adds this:
…baseball – with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategies, its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefullness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its “characters,” its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate – was the literature of my boyhood.
That’s a lyrical and poignant sentiment, written more than a quarter century ago. And it begs the question: does anyone even read literature anymore?
