Coming Apart at the Seams: How Baseball Owners, Players, and Television Executives Have Led Our National Pastime to the Brink of Disaster
by By Sands, Jack and Gammons, Peter
Category: Business & Economics , General

But can baseball survive? For years, it has.Yet now, as the national pastime aims toward the twenty-first century, the game is beset with monumental problems. Player salaries are out of sight. Television revenues are about to plummet. Several clubs are up for sale. Others claim they have great difficulty in making their team payroll. Newspaper columnists everywhere complain that the games run too long and that the World Series games start too late for the next generation of baseball fans to watch them.Baseball insiders argue that the talent pool at the major league level is extremely thin - and now, two new expansion teams come into existence in the spring of 1993. Poll after poll shows that not only has the National Football League long passed baseball as America's favorite, but that the National Basketball Association has already bypassed major league baseball as well. And of course, since the owners forced Fay Vincent to quit, there hasn't been a commissioner to grapple with all these knotty problems.And so the sport of baseball rumbles on, without any real direction nor any long-range plan to deal with its pressing concerns. Indeed, the future of what was once a leisurely pastime hangs in the balance.Like an old ball that has been smacked around once too often, major league baseball is quickly coming apart at the seams.