I’m not thrilled with the lockout. But I’ll take MLB over the NFL any day of the week

A week ago, following the conclusion of the event football game about which the less is said the better, should have been one of the corniest and yet most enjoyable nights on the baseball calendar.

For as long as there have been social media platforms on which to make a declaration, the same has been made at the conclusion of every NFL season — now, finally, it’s time for baseball.

And in fact, this year, that remains true. It is indeed time for baseball, even if baseball is missing at the Major League level. As the lockout extends through its third month, anxious fans are looking ahead to pages on the calendar with trepidation regarding whether or not they’ll have games ahead to brighten up their spring days. Published schedules are starting to read more like guidelines than actual plans, and the business of the game continues to interfere with the playing of the game.

For some, ownership is well within its rights to pull out all stops in an attempt to maximize profits. Professional baseball franchises are, of course, businesses, and the American reluctance to begrudge a business owner maximum profits is strong. If you wouldn’t castigate the owner of the widget factory, why condemn those whose money runs the St. Louis Cardinals?

To concede that, though, is to fundamentally misinterpret the role the game once held in culture and society, and to lower baseball to that level is to say it can never return to those heights again.

Very few — if any — businesses hold public attention in the way of professional sports. The amount of attention paid to each sport varies widely by each market; Toronto is a Maple Leafs town, Dallas is for the Cowboys, Los Angeles doesn’t care about any of their teams in the same way they do the Lakers.

St. Louis is baseball town

St. Louis, of course, is a baseball town. It’s to the credit of the franchise and its stewards that the institutions are so wrapped up in each other, and there’s proof of that concept in the way that love for the local nine extends well across a body of water and through the metro-east. A friend, when I was very young, suggested the only logical thing for anyone in Belleville to do was to be a Cubs fan, being that they made their home in the same state. That point of view was decidedly unpopular.

Public trusts, however, come with obligations. The Cardinals, under current ownership, have arguably met those obligations as well as any franchise owners could be expected to do so. The team is consistently competitive and has twice brought home championships, the money which was squeezed from public coffers has at least served to provide entertainment and spruce up some blocks of downtown, and the team’s extensive involvement in charitable endeavors is laudable.

Those obligations, then, separate the DeWitt group from the Kroenke group. Aside from one toothless and transparent feint toward building the new stadium in Madison County, the Cardinals have remained committed to the city and put their stamp on civic progress. Should the Redbirds ever go shopping for a roost in Portland or Nashville or London, the outcry would be deafening and the resistance overwhelming. It could never happen. The Cardinals without St. Louis would cease to be an entity tethered to reality.

Harsh glare of NFL game

Perhaps Major League Baseball’s marriages in Tampa or Oakland or Miami aren’t quite so existentially essential, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be. For all of the game’s flaws and for all of its struggles to connect to a next generation, baseball is broadly understood to be an expression of identity in a way that the purely and nakedly transactional NFL could never hope to be.

To watch an NFL game is to squint through the harsh glare of bad circumstances and convince yourself that you appreciate the spots. To watch MLB should never have that same effect, no matter how many ads for Korean construction equipment manufacturers are bizarrely splashed across the screen.

All of that romance which largely frees baseball from that creeping moralism could be risked by a group of owners which treats the game only as a business and sees their own short term cash flow as more important than the indelible qualities which tie their fans to those seats every summer. Owners are blamed less than players during labor negotiations because everyone loves to cheer for their team’s laundry; it’s incumbent on owners, then, to make sure the laundry is in good condition.

Position of public trust

The dragging lockout has never been about equal negotiating positions and never will be. The owners have refused to include in their proposals — when they’ve deigned to offer any — the core tenets which underline the concerns of their players. For all of their public posturing, players have at least made some key concessions and are taking the needs of the owners into account when returning their draft ideas.

It’s no longer enough for management to simply look out for themselves. Buying a team means signing up for a position of public trust, and it is time now for those who write the checks to rise to that occasion.

There are already more than enough painful sports to watch on television.