Why Are They Screwing Up My Favorite Sport (Again)?

I am part of, what seems to be, an ever-diminishing group of people.

I love baseball. It's my favorite sport and pretty much always has been. Oh, I like football ok. I like basketball ok, too. I can certainly watch and enjoy golf, tennis, NASCAR, hockey once in a while. But it's baseball that keeps my sports motor purring along.

When I was a kid, baseball was #1. And I was the biggest Minnesota Twins fan in the world. And I'm still in the argument for that fictional title. But it looks like my sport is screwing up...again.

Apparently, the owners and the players can't get it together. They can't agree on how many games to play, how the money will get distributed, who gets what and when.

Now, I'm just a fan. That's all, that's it. I don't pretend to know the business side of it all. I confess I don't know about the union, the owners, what agreements there are, what contracts there are, and blah, blah, blah. What I do know is this:

I'm old enough to remember strikes. I'm old enough to remember lockouts. I'm old enough to remember steroids. And it was all ugly and frustrating. And so is this.

COVID 19 and the Coronavirus has thrown us all for a loop, a loop like none of us has ever seen before. All the death, all the sickness, all the unemployment, and everything else that has gone with this damn bizarre period in our existence. And it seemed to me that baseball...BASEBALL..had a chance to be some kind of a bright shining light in it all this. Or at least, some sort of silver lining. I remember when that first game was played after 9/11. I don't remember much about the actual game, but I remember the pregame and I remember a kind of...normalcy...returned in a dark time.

I don't follow every nook and cranny of sports, but it sounds like the NBA has gotten things together and will return soon? NASCAR has figured out how to have races. Golf is close. Hockey? From what I've seen, they're coming and almost every team will be in the playoffs.

Baseball? Well, from a guy who (like I said) is just a super fan, it looks from the 'outside' that it's the old billionaires vs. the millionaires and the rest of us can just sit back and be frustrated...be angry. Oh, I know it's more complicated than that, but as they say...perception is reality. It's kind of hard to swallow when you see major stories over the past few years about $100 million dollar contracts, $200 million dollar contracts, $300 million dollar contracts. Now, it sounds like the minor leagues and minor league players are being decimated. And all the workers at all the ballparks? Tough luck.

Why can't baseball just get their multi-million dollar act together and play ball? You're losing us, you guys. You're losing us.