The wounds from the labor troubles of 1994, which squeezed fans between rich, greedy owners and rich, greedy players, have not yet healed. So fans have staged their own version of a strike. Perhaps the old game, crippled and corrupted by money, has become too stately and deliberative for the jittery attention spans of the 1990s. Yet this all seems reassuringly familiar to me as a historian of major league sports. It has become a business with the boys, who play for the income.
Baseball is a prisoner of money.
Anybody toiling in the real world is liable to resent such privilege. And it is but a short step from resentment to carping suspicion. To this intractable discontent we also bring the baggage of our personal histories. As adult fans we remember the game the way we envisioned it when we were kids. After children discover baseball, they may embrace it as their first serious loyalty outside the home.