Fight between baseball owners and players ruins the game for the sport’s loyal fans

In the end, it looks like Major League Baseball players admitted it’s better to play a season and make some money than it is to make no money.

But I don’t know if it’s the excruciating financial haggling, the fact that fans aren’t likely to be able to attend games in person, the watering down and cheapening of the rules or the fact that it seems like there is a lot more important stuff going on in the world right now. I just can’t seem to make myself care whether the players and owners can come to an agreement or if we just all take a pass on the 2020 season.

Maybe that will change when the games grow near. It means way more than it should to me to watch ballgames in the evening after a long day of work or to take my son to a weekend game to see the St. Louis Cardinals from the bleachers at Busch Stadium. After all, there are a lot of other irons in the fire and, if I was smart, I’d probably use that three hours a day to find something constructive to do instead of sitting on my rear watching someone else play a game. But it’s what makes me happy.

It’s hard to feel that way, though, when I resent the players for whining about having to struggle to get by on $7 million this year instead of the $25 million they were expecting. And, when Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt Jr. said owning a baseball team isn’t a very profitable business, well, that was just a slap in the face to those of us who spend thousands of dollars a year to support his business. For all the smoke the team blows at us for being the best fans in baseball, ownership seems to take it for granted that we’re all pretty dumb.

Take away the cash grab that is Ballpark Village, which has monopolized the entertainment business in downtown St. Louis, making sure that nobody else makes a living selling beer, pizza and burgers and putting on musical acts in downtown St. Louis, the team has been a lottery winner for its owners. Do they think we don’t remember that they bought the club, old Busch Stadium and the two parking garages that flanked it for $150 million and then sold the garages for $60 million? Now Forbes says the team is worth more than $2 billion. I would take that money divided over 25 years of ownership and call myself pretty satisfied with my profit margin even if I spent every dime I made on game days paying salaries.

I can’t believe, after the beating baseball took following its labor disputes that stained its reputation in the 1990s, that owners and players would ever again be so dumb to alienate their fans and bite the hand that feeds them again. Yet here we are.

Season should have been canceled in March

It would have been one thing if owners announced in March that it was too dangerous to play games in front of fans and, if the fans couldn’t be there, what’s the point of playing games. So, we’ll see you in 2021, everybody! But they tried to snow the public by saying the season would be most likely delayed until mid-April when no one in the world who was watching what was going on with COVID-19 could have thought that was realistic. Meanwhile, they held fans’ ticket money, collecting interest on it while people whose livelihoods are somehow even less lucrative than being a billionaire baseball team owner lost their jobs to shut downs and layoffs. Then, the real bickering over dollar bills hunkered down. There’s a 100 percent chance we’re playing, said the commissioner one week. Now we’re not playing, the commissioner said the next. Now the two sides can’t even agree on whether they have a deal in principle.

If the games are played, National League fans have been sold out with the designated hitter being jammed down our throats. I would love to see a poll of how many Cardinals fans to see how many of them think the universal DH is a good thing for the product we’re being asked to pay for. I bet less than 25 percent of season ticket holders would be on board. Of course, if there was a poll, it would probably go a lot like the whole red cap/blue cap fiasco when the Cardinals tried to create support for eliminating the traditional road blue caps. They surveyed fans twice and both times fans said keep the blue but the team all but completely got rid of the classy lids, allowing them to be worn only on the road against other teams with red caps. Great. Why bother?

I ought to be seriously hankering some baseball right now. But I honestly don’t care, with all that’s gone on, if they cancel this poor excuse for a season or not. And, as I’ve said before, if the Cardinals and Major League Baseball have turned me off, they really need to think about what they’re doing. Because I’m about the most stupidly loyal fan they’ve ever had, spending every penny I can scrape up to buy tickets, jerseys, caps and other assorted junk. They may have finally convinced me that I really can live without all those things.

Scott Wuerz

Belleville News-Democrat

Scott Wuerz has written “Cheap Seats,” a St. Louis Cardinals fan blog for the Belleville News-Democrat, since 2007. He is a former BND reporter who covered breaking news and education.