- Unwinding the Thread
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- MLB History is Being Wasted
This is shaping up to be one of the most impactful seasons in baseball history.
Aaron Judge is bashing jaw-dropping homerun totals — he has 59 as of writing and is within spitting distance of Roger Maris' American League record.
Meanwhile, the 64-year-old Albert Pujols is two homeruns away from joining the rarified air of the 700-homerun club — a distinction currently held by only three players: Ruth, Aaron, and Bonds (we will get to him later).
During an era in which America's Pastime is declining before our eyes, not even these generational moments have been able to stabilize the league's attendance numbers.
The Yankees and Cardinals are both averaging decreased 2022 attendance numbers of over 5% since 2019.
These two historic homerun chases, which haven't been seen in decades, are unable to stop the bleeding. One would hope ratings may mirror those of the turn of the millennia, the anabolic-fueled renaissance that ruined, saved, and disgraced baseball once and for all.
Baseball purists speak of the steroid era in hushed tones. An embarrassing family secret that better not be brought up at the dinner table. This gaggle of sportswriters and broadcasters also happens to have a death grip on access to the Pearly Gates of baseball immortality, otherwise known as the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
That's why we will never see the MLB's all-time leading homerun hitter, Barry Bonds, or many of his contemporaries, inducted into the museum of baseball greats — asterisk or not.
Whether they should be inducted or not (they should) and whether the entire institution is undermined without the inclusion of its greatest players (it is), that's an argument for another time.
What is indisputable is the fact that without the steroid era of the late '90s, baseball may never have recovered. In '94, the league faced a strike (the worker's rights kind not the baseball kind). That strike left a bitter taste in the mouths of fans.
"When play resumed in a shortened 1995 season, attendance, as compared to the full 1993 season, dropped by some 12% on a per-game basis across the league. And that was even while clubs kept ticket prices down. Fans still weren't showing up in 1996, when attendance was about 9% off the 1993 mark."
Suddenly, players were hitting dingers left and right. And no matter how hard they tried, fans couldn't stay mad at a fireworks display of moon-shots.
"That's a compound annual growth rate of 16.3%. That didn't quite match the growth of boom-era Microsoft, which grew at a rate of 24.4% over that stretch. But it wasn't bad for an enterprise that was well more than 100 years old.
What's more, the average value of an MLB franchise went from $115 million in 1995 to $286 million in 2001 -- an annual growth rate of 15.3%."
But it may be too little too late this time around, roids or not. With the MLB's recently announced Mickey Mouse Measures to pump up the size of the bases to bouncy castle proportions and the ban of defensive shifts, it's clear they're taking a page out of the '90s playbook in desperation.
Full size mattress for altuve 🤣
— LEAFAR {🐺} (@chacabola74)
6:42 AM • Mar 9, 2022
If steroids are no longer an option to keep the ship afloat, changing the rules drastically in the favor of batters should have the same outcome. At least that's the idea — though with attention spans at an all-time low and declining, baseball seems destined to crater in a niche somewhere above Major League Lacrosse and below F1 in the next few decades.