Greetings from Scott Turner: What Does Baseball Do?

Once again we have the pleasure of one of Scott Turner's missives. Ostensibly an opportunity to promote his Thursday night pub quiz at Rocky Sullivan's in Red Hook, Turner always manages to communicate so much more. As always, Greetings from Scott Turner is brought to you by Miss Wit, Red Hook's t-shirt queen.

It's very early Wednesday morning, and once again the American League has defeated the National League in baseball's All-Star Game.  Its alternate moniker, charmingly filched from Shakespeare, used to be The Midsummer Night's Classic -- back when it actually was.

Since the '70s, though, baseball's mismanagement of most things baseball has reduced the game to a desperate, shrill, uninspired mess of mismatched uniforms (cool) and misconstrued priorities (exceedingly uncool).

The All-Star Game was born in Chicago, in 1933. When baseball had two truly separate leagues, the All-Star Game was a fierce affair -- league pride actually a) existed and b) fueled the energy of the yearly contest.  Players played to win.  But under current commissioner and former Milwaukee used-car salesman Bud Selig, the All-Star Game has lost its way.  So bad had it become that Selig was forced to halt the game with the score tied a few years ago. 

Selig's solution for the recent All-Star morass was to award home-field advantage to the league whose team won the game.  The American League's no-longer-just-recent dominance means that AL teams always have an edge in the World Series.  The last time they lost the All-Star Game was in 1996, halfway through the Clinton administration.  In a recent poll, fans let Selig know it's a dopey idea.  Bud Selig has never met a contrivance he's confused for innovation, fans' powerless tolerance for genuine excitement.

Last night's game, though, went much further into the frenetic pursuit of relevancy..  Baseball's in a tough spot -- steroid scandals, new stadiums with empty expensive seats beamed everywhere on television, and continued competition from thousands of other pastimes besides the National one.

What does baseball do?  They hype a campaign linking baseball with community service called "This Is Beyond Baseball."  By urging fans to go "beyond baseball" and do good deeds, they're insisting that baseball is the pass-Go/Collect $200 starting point of all good deeds.

According to MLB.com, "it began with the thunderous hooves of the famous Budweiser Clydesdales roaring around the full perimeter warning track starting at the right-field foul pole. Then came the introduction of the All-Stars Among Us, the individuals who drew more than 750,000 votes by fans as those most deserving of representing their local MLB clubs due to a singular act of public service and generosity."

Drink to the Heroes!

In other words, a blatant Budweiser plug in a stadium named for the Anheiser-Busch company featuring people representing not themselves, their campaigns or communities, but the baseball teams they live closest too.  Driving home the point, they took the field not in their own clothing or shirts and jackets of the organizations their hard work has created -- but officially-licensed team jerseys.

A video showing the five living U.S. presidents and a few plucky Americans doing things like driving cancer kids to far away chemo sessions said it loud and clear: charity, kindness and community are uniquely American. 

"As a sport," President Obama opines in the pre-game video, "baseball has always embodied the values that make America great. ... Together, let's strive to make America a model for other nations. And in the meantime, enjoy the game."

Model American tosses one in the dirt...

Jingoism has a new face -- we no longer police the world.  Now, we moralize it.  Well, we did that before, in grand geopolitical broadsides.  Now, though, even random acts of kindness have been franchised by the stars-and-stripes.

What did baseball itself think of its hugfest?  "Over the top. Unbelievable," said Tim Brosnan, Major League Baseball's executive vice president of business. "It was overwhelming. You saw history.

"No major sport has ever taken its biggest marketing platform and dedicated it to the 30 people in local communities. This is the first major sport to do it, and we did it with the cooperation of the president of the United States."

If a little humility goes a long way, we probably pull up short of the goal on an absolutely zero dollop.

During last night's interminable pre-game ceremonies, baseball might as well have channelled Sally Field and screamed "you like me, you really like me!!"

Which are community heroes, and which are simply baseball heroes.  If the lines are blurred, baseball has you right where it wants you.

Look...it's great that there are so many people in this country putting others before themselves.  They knit caps for cancer patients...raise money for cerebral palsy research...customize care packages for soldiers far away.  That's great, wonderful.

What's not so wonderful is Major League Baseball exploiting these good people to sell its product.  It's not enough to simply honor them.  They have to constantly, insistently, crassly tie them to synergistic orgies of beer sponsors, weekly magazines, military flyovers, and the money-printing merchandise of each and every MLB team.

In fact, how much easier would these 30 peoples lives be if their cities hadn't collectively squandered tens of billions of dollars on the teams' stadiums over the years.  Or if people had money to donate instead of spending hundreds of dollars each time their family makes it to a major-league game?

Baseball teams -- and certainly other sports' clubs (see Ratner, Nets, p.r. expenditures, Brooklyn) have learned to spend a little to rip-off a lot.  In this case, an on-line contest, thirty baseball jerseys, some local donations and contributions -- that's all it takes to open the public coffers whenever Bud Selig's people need a helping hand.

It's The New Midsummer Night's Classic, custom-designed and logo-adorned for the age we live in.