Baseball in need of zaniness

By Paul Dickson

McClatchy-Tribune

GARRETT PARK, Md.

As the 2012 Major League Baseball season opens, the game appears to be in good shape. The last eight seasons have produced the eight highest attendance totals in major league history despite the economic downturn, which began in 2008. Forbes magazine reported that because of local television contracts the average value of 30 clubs increased 16 percent over the winter and reached a record $605 million per team. And yet, despite the financial records, there is plenty of evidence that, while financially successful, baseball is no longer America’s favorite sport.

Baseball no longer tugs at America’s heartstrings as it once did. Young people play the game less and less; and Major League Baseball has done little to encourage the young, beginning with the fact that most World Series games begin when smaller kids are in bed. Baseball’s management and owners have become entirely corporate — lulled by their financial success into believing they are connecting with fans.

Lackluster lot

For their part, while the players may be great performers on the field, they are for the most part a lackluster lot off the diamond, either in their commitment to spreading the gospel of their sport or in their ability to connect to fans via their own personalities. Even spring training has become big business, rather than the informal prelude to the season of years past.

Baseball is sorely missing an element of fun and spontaneity, without which its appeal — despite its bulging revenues — treads on shaky ground. Today’s baseball badly needs what the great iconoclast Bill Veeck once brought to the game on a daily basis, the ability to connect deeply and personally with those who make the game possible — the players and the fans.

In the annals of baseball history, nobody was more creative, charismatic and controversial than Veeck. He was born into baseball in 1914. His sportswriter father became president of the Chicago Cubs when Bill was 4, and America’s pastime quickly became his lifelong passion.

In his first job, with the Cubs, he revamped Wrigley Field and, among other things, planted the ivy on the brick outfield walls. As a four-time Major League team owner Veeck was truly a transformational figure. He was a prime mover in the racial integration of the game, both on the field and in the front office — the first to integrate the American League when he signed Larry Doby to the Cleveland Indians in 1947, just weeks after Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers. (Veeck owned the Indians from 1946 to 1949, a three-year period that included the team’s 1948 World Series victory.)

His innate understanding of what was right extended to his treatment of fans. Veeck made a habit of sitting in the cheap seats with his patrons; acting on their gripes, spontaneously picking a fan at random and dedicating a special night to him or her, he made coming to the ballpark pure fun.

Verbal challenges

And Veeck thought nothing of lobbing verbal challenges at baseball’s establishment, often looking cross-eyed at his fellow owners and at the commissioner, in essence demanding that they embrace the sport as both a game and a business.

Nonconformist, visionary and showman extraordinaire, Veeck delighted in being everyman’s owner and demonstrated this with simple acts of piety, like standing outside the ballpark and thanking fans for coming to the game. How stunning — and how appealing — would it be to find any baseball owner, or any player for that matter, doing this today.

Veeck’s combination of financial creativity and marketing genius was unlike anything else in the history of sports and drew in so many fans that he set records for ballpark attendance. When he died in 1986, former Detroit Tiger slugger Hank Greenberg, Veeck’s close friend and business partner, eulogized him, saying: “Bill brought baseball into the 20th century. Before Bill, baseball was just winning or losing. But he made it fun to be at the ballpark.”

But that was then, this is now and Veeck’s whimsical “exploding scoreboard” has been replaced with Jumbotrons bellowing commercials and over-amped recorded music between innings that try, and dismally fail, to be entertaining.

Baseball needs a maverick for the 21st century. Baseball needs another Bill Veeck.

Paul Dickson is author of “Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick.” Distributed by MCT Information Services.