Major League Baseball: America's Pastime No More

Over the course of the last 25 years, baseball, once dubbed "America's Pastime," has fallen on hard times. 

The NFL has taken over as the No. 1 professional sports league in the country, and people are less prone to sitting down take in a game of baseball than they are to sitting down and watching overgrown oafs don pads and helmets and hit each other at full speed. 

There are a few factors, in my opinion, which have led to this loss of interest in professional baseball, and, to a lesser extent, baseball of any type. 

Salaries

Over the course of the last two decades, salaries for players in Major League Baseball have steadily risen, culminating in Alex Rodriguez receiving a $249 million contract from Tom Hicks, former owner of the Texas Rangers. 

This probably hasn't really affected the average fan, sitting on their couch at home. After all, if a player can convince an owner that he's worth a quarter billion dollars, why shouldn't he? The fact is that no matter how hard we try to justify paying someone $25 million a year to play a game, there really is no justification. 

What these $100 million-plus contracts have led to is this: the average fan who used to enjoy going to an occasional game can no longer afford to go, despite how much they would like to. Eight dollar beers and $7 hot dogs have taken away the ability for a family to just decide to go out and take in an evening game. 

As the rest of America wastes away in this recession, baseball players are thriving, making ridiculous amounts of money to play a game. People who are experiencing hard times aren't able to go out to a game. It's much easier to justify spending $50 to go out to catch a movie at the local theater than it is to justify paying $200-plus to catch a game. 

Steroids

As much as owners would like to put the so called "Steroid Era" in the past, the fact of the matter is that the problem remains at the forefront of Major League Baseball. People wonder if the great sluggers that they watched growing up were tainted by steroids or whether or not the new generation will have the same questions on their mind. 

People like to see high scoring offensive games. There's an old saying: "chicks dig the long ball," but despite everyone's best efforts to erase the history of the game that was tainted, the fact remains that everyone digs the long ball. 

If nobody cared about home runs and being able to collect an even fatter contract, steroids would probably not have been as rampant throughout the sport as they were. 

Despite all of this, steroids may have actually helped the sport more than they harmed it. People began to gain more interest in the game when there were giants hitting long ball after long ball. Nobody wants to watch Ichiro slap an infield single when you can watch Bonds hit a dinger into McCovey Cove. Nobody wants to watch Maddux induce ground ball after ground ball when they can watch Clemens strike out 20 batters.

The real problem lies in the fact that fans felt cheated when they found out what they were watching was fake. America's Pastime was tainted. 

Time

Time is money, and money is something that is in short supply in this day and age. Baseball games take a good chunk out of the day. Not always more than your average basketball or football game, but, at times, it seems to drag. 

But I'm not just talking about time in the sense of length of games. I'm also talking about how long it takes for prospects to make it to the big leagues. Players get drafted, and the majority of the ones that actually make it to the show don't do so for quite some time. People don't want to watch as a player's talent is developed or left to stagnate in the minor leagues. 

Recently some of my friends have wondered why nobody seems interest in the MLB Draft. The answer is simple: why care about who your team drafts when they draft over 30 players every year and maybe two of those guys actually will make it to the big leagues, and none of them before the next season at the very earliest. 

Solutions

So, how do you go about fixing this? How does someone fix a problem that has taken 25 years to make it to the public consciousness? 

How about taking a page out of the NFL's playbook? Institute a salary cap, a franchise tag, and expand the rosters so that a team can carry 40 players year round, with a practice squad of guys that hope they can make the team someday.

Instead of making people wait around for guys that may or may not make it to the big leagues, teams would be more inclined to put their prospects in right away. Interest in the draft would grow, interest in the teams would grow, and salaries would diminish because there would be a cap. 

There would no longer be a need to have 30 rounds of draft picks because teams wouldn't be able to put those draft picks anywhere except the active roster or the practice squad. 

Major League Baseball wouldn't be the only organization to benefit from this either. NCAA baseball would benefit as well because teams wouldn't have the luxury of drafting a player who isn't ready for the big leagues yet and have them develop in the minors. Teams would be picking the players who were the closest to big-league ready, and the rest would have to go and play college ball in order to get their shot. 

America's Pastime has fallen on hard times, but it hasn't fallen so far that it can't be fixed.