\n\tIf Billboard\u2019s No. 1 hits of 1974 are anything to go by, the America of 52 years ago was going through some stuff. By and large, the most popular songs can be arranged by one of two categories; there were the minor-key, soft-rock bumouts, of which Terry Jacks\u2019 Seasons in the Sun remains the feel-bad exemplar, and then there were the upbeat bangers about mass-killing (The Night Chicago Died, Billy, Don\u2019t Be a Hero and\u2014presumably, given that everybody was engaged in the titular activity\u2014Kung Fu Fighting.<\/p>\n
If not for the advertising agency Campbell Ewald, \u201974 would be remembered as a pop-culture buzzkill. But in giving us the \u201cBaseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Chevrolet\u201d campaign<\/a>, the Detroit-based firm lit up our collective right-brain pleasure centers with an anthem that celebrated the irreducibly American spirit while also getting TV watchers a jones for the bench-seated splendor of the Impala station wagon. The jingle was a triumph of earworming, and nobody balked at putting baseball at the head of the conga line of signifiers.<\/p>\n A few months after Chevy\u2019s campaign bowed, Catfish Hunter won his arbitration hearing against the Oakland Athletics, thereby freeing him to sign a then unheard-of five-year, $3.35 million contract with the New York Yankees. In becoming baseball\u2019s first free agent, Hunter (with an assist from Curt Flood) changed the sport forever\u2014so much so that the automaker\u2019s anthem now seems comically outdated.<\/p>\n Football long ago displaced baseball as the national sport (with its connotations of gentle diversionary pursuits, \u201cpastime\u201d no longer fits the bill), and in the last quarter-century the gap between MLB<\/a> and the NFL has widened to the point where even peak Evel Knievel wouldn\u2019t attempt to transverse it while astraddle his Skycycle X-2.<\/p>\n There are reasons for this, just as there are reasons why you almost never have to plan your evening around the possibility of a cataclysmic outbreak of Kung Fu fighting. For one thing, those cats are no longer fast as lightning\u2014a lot of them are in their 80s now.<\/p>\n \n\tAnother reason is that the NFL largely has managed to sidestep the labor<\/a> issues that blighted the other Big Four leagues in the 1990s. (While the 130-day lockout in 2011 threatened to derail the entire NFL season, the only game that was canceled was that summer\u2019s Pro Football Hall of Fame scrimmage.) In some respects, it may be argued that baseball effectively surrendered the crown to its more aggro counterpart on Aug. 12, 1994, when a strike that erased 948 games poisoned the well for otherwise loyal fans. The work-stoppage resulted in the cancellation of that fall\u2019s World Series\u2014a high-profile erasure the likes of which had happened only once before \u2026 in 1904.<\/p>\n \n\tWhile baseball was already on the downhill slide well before the \u201994 strike\u2014the audience for the Fall Classic peaked in 1978, when the six-game Yankees-Dodgers series averaged a staggering 44.3 million viewers\u2014the mid-\u201990s interruption couldn\u2019t have come at a more disadvantageous time. When MLB closed up shop, the NFL was on an almighty tear, as the Dallas Cowboys had returned to their winning ways while the San Francisco 49ers had stuck the landing on the Montana\/Walsh succession with a Young\/Seifert title. And while the sun would soon set on the Eddie DeBartolo dynasty and the dominance of America\u2019s Team, the league would soon be gifted with a worthy successor to all that eyeball-grabbing greatness with the story of a man named Brady.<\/p>\n \n\tMLB rallied a few years later with the steroidally overinflated McGwire-Sosa home run race in 1998, which also happened to coincide with the Yankees\u2019 barnstorming 114-48 campaign and the Evil Empire\u2019s 24th World Series title. But baseball\u2019s outsized importance was still largely diminished as the NFL began sucking all the air out of the metaphorical room. Plagued by a streak of short series featuring reps from some of the smaller media markets, the average audience for the Fall Classic began landing well short of the 20 million-viewer mark, and by the time the Giants and Royals tangled in October 2014, that seven-game set managed just 13.8 million viewers per game. Four months after San Francisco clinched its third title in five years, NBC\u2019s coverage of Super Bowl XLIX scared up 114.4 million viewers.<\/p>\n \n\tIf it\u2019s no longer permissible to compare Roger Goodell\u2019s fiefdom with, well, anything\u2014as was once said of Francis Albert Sinatra, it\u2019s the NFL\u2019s world and the rest of us just live in it\u2014it certainly seems as if the missteps of the past are about to revisit themselves upon baseball next year. <\/p>\n \n\tOnly instead of the flood of a players\u2019 strike, this time the disaster will come cloaked in the fire of an owners\u2019 lockout. And sure, hope springs eternal and all that, but the talk in baseball circles is all \u201cwhen\u201d rather than \u201cif.\u201d The owners are now all but resigned to an inevitable labor disruption, with many among the billionaire class having mentally written off at least half of the 2027 season.<\/p>\n \n\tWhile we\u2019re studiously avoiding anything that might result in peeing on the electrical fence that is the salary cap dispute, the most dispiriting aspect of a lockout is that it\u2019ll put baseball on the IL while the sport is riding the thermals of a high-flying surge in popularity. MLB is on a generational hot streak, closing out the 2025 campaign with significant viewership gains across its national TV partners, as ESPN\u2019s final at-bat with Sunday Night Baseball was up 21%<\/a>, while big-reach Fox boosted its deliveries 9%. What\u2019s more, TBS\u2019 non-exclusive coverage grew 29% last season\u2014and it\u2019s worth noting that the 2025 data wasn\u2019t juiced by the implementation of Nielsen\u2019s new currency\u2014while local ratings at the RSNs improved by 2%.<\/p>\n \n\tAway from the tube, MLB attendance hit 71.4 million in 2025, marking the third consecutive season of growth. Any way you choose to frame it, baseball\u2019s popularity is accelerating just as commissioner Rob Manfred<\/a> gets ready to transform the sport\u2019s entire delivery mechanism<\/a>. In short, the league is in the midst of a feel-good era, and it\u2019d be a shame (and a grave error) if the owners\u2019 cavalier acceptance of what they perceive as an unavoidable disturbance were to undo all the gains that have been made of late.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s not entirely clear how many owners are practicing Calvinists, but the predestination mindset is bad news of the first order, somewhere between finding out that your ace needs Tommy John surgery and stumbling across God\u2019s suicide note. And the prospect of everyone sort of accepting the loss of half a season or more is particularly unsettling, given how much baseball stands to lose in the wake of a lengthy power outage.<\/p>\n \n\tJust three seasons before MLB had to call off its first World Series in 90 years, the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves staged one of the greatest Fall Classics in living memory. Per Nielsen, 35.7 million viewers tuned in per game, with the deciding frame delivering 50.3 million viewers on CBS. And while the Superstation made Ted Turner\u2019s team all but ubiquitous and Minneapolis was no backwater, it\u2019s worth noting that those deliveries were achieved in the absence of the Yankees and the Dodgers.<\/p>\n \n\tSince the strike, no World Series has come anywhere near that 1991 mark. The last time a Series served up north of 20 million viewers was in 2016, when the Cubs ended their 108-year championship drought in a seven-game set that averaged 23.4 million. Before that, you\u2019d have to go back to 2004 to find a season that closed out with a bigger number. In exorcising their own 86-year-old demon with a sweep of the Cards, the Boston Red Sox helped Fox draw 25.4 million viewers over the course of those four nights.<\/p>\n \n\tIf baseball now requires the dissolution of an ancient curse to make its World Series deliveries really pop, it\u2019s running out of options. Cleveland\u2019s still waiting on its first title in 78 years, and the people in the bleachers in Milwaukee and San Diego have been holding out for 57 trips around the sun. But even if the Guardians and Brewers force a seventh game this October, the resulting jubilation in one of those markets may not be sufficient to sustain fan enthusiasm should neither club have an opportunity to suit up in 2027.<\/p>\n \n\tHistory may not repeat, but it sure as hell has a tendency to trigger the occasional sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. As a new baseball season gets underway, here\u2019s hoping that the owners\u2019 memories are jolted by the smell of Cracker Jack\u00ae and horsehide. They may not be as sentimental as the fans who support MLB\u2019s $13.1 billion enterprise<\/a>, but the people who sign the checks should keep baseball\u2019s inimitable magic trick in mind as the year unfolds.<\/p>\n \n\tThe beauty of the game is in how it can overwhelm the young and old alike with moments that strike a universal chord, but in a way that somehow seems intimate and almost sacred. (Also, it gives you something you can talk about with your dad.) There are some things you simply don\u2019t want to mess with; next thing you know, they\u2019ll be taking our hot dogs and pie \u2026 whereupon we\u2019ll have no choice but to resort to our most baleful forms of Kung Fu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Billboard\u2019s No. 1 hits of 1974 are anything to go by, the America of 52 years ago…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5,11972,57,4,330,13435],"class_list":{"0":"post-648290","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-labor","10":"tag-los-angeles-dodgers","11":"tag-mlb","12":"tag-rob-manfred","13":"tag-tv-ratings"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116305819357345437","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}