But today baseball is an old man's game. It isn't their passion or their pastime. The children think watching baseball is like watching the grass grow. They see baseball's contemplativeness as ennui. It doesn't help baseball's appeal to the young when its best games like the World Series are broadcast at night when many are asleep.
Prime time brings in prime dollars.
Greed can be slick and Major League Baseball owners and players are nothing if not slick. From a practical point of view Major League Baseball needs to formally appoint a Commissioner who can at least symbolically lead the sport into the next century. It needs to see if the disenfranchised young are capable of being marketed back into the sport. And finally, the owners and the players need to be brainwashed into recognizing that baseball in America is a national cultural treasure that needs some protection from the more greedy aspects of the environment. As always, we predict that the Boston Red Sox will win the World Series this year.