Baseball is a Business, is Bullshit

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” - Harry Frankfurt

The phrase “baseball is a business” gets thrown around like it ends the conversation, like it settles the argument, like it excuses everything. It doesn’t. It exposes everything. Because when ownership and Major League Baseball lean on that line, what they are really saying is that profit takes precedence over responsibility, efficiency over meaning, control over connection, and they expect everyone else to accept it without question.

Baseball is not a business. It is a business wrapped around something that was never fucking meant to be one, and the people who own it have either forgotten that distinction or decided it no longer matters. That difference is not philosophical. It is structural. Because the moment you treat baseball as nothing more than a business, you begin stripping away the very things that gave it value in the first place.

And here is where the argument collapses under its own weight. You do not own a normal business. You operate under a federally protected antitrust exemption that has existed for over a century, an exemption that has allowed you to control structure, limit competition, dictate franchise movement, and maintain a system that would not survive in a true open market.

So, when you say, “it’s a business,” the obvious question becomes, which kind?

Because if you want to be treated like a business, then act like one. Give up the exemption. Open the market. Let competitors form leagues. Let cities build their own systems. Let the game exist without your centralized control. But do not pretend that doing so would suddenly create a level playing field. You have had a century-long head start, protected and reinforced by the very exemption you now ignore when it is convenient. You control the teams, the territories, the media rights, the farm systems, the infrastructure, and most importantly, the history. You own the timeline.

Yes, there are other leagues, but that does not make your system open. Those leagues exist outside your structure, not within it, and no new team can simply join yours. Entry into Major League Baseball is not determined by merit, demand, or market opportunity. It is controlled, restricted, and granted at your discretion. Entire cities can be locked out indefinitely, not because they lack fans or support, but because they are not invited. That is not how a real market works. In any true business environment, if there is demand, supply can respond. New entrants challenge incumbents. Competition forces evolution. In your world, access is permission-based.

That is not competition. That is control.

And any new league that tried to compete would not be stepping into a neutral environment. It would be competing against a century of protected dominance, entrenched loyalty, exclusive media ecosystems, and a cultural monopoly that was never forced to defend itself in an open system. That is not capitalism. That is a moat you did not build alone. It was fucking given to you, reinforced by law, and maintained without real competition.

With that comes something you keep trying to avoid. Responsibility.

The problem is not that baseball generates revenue. The problem is that ownership and the league have allowed the pursuit of revenue to redefine the purpose of the game. Every time you say “it’s a business,” you are asking fans to lower their expectations, to accept that loyalty is one-sided, that decisions will be made without regard to history, community, or connection, and that the things they care about most are secondary to the balance sheet.

You are asking people to care deeply about something you are treating superficially.

And nowhere is that more obvious than in your full embrace of gambling.

This is the same sport that built its mythology around integrity, that banned players for gambling, that positioned itself as something that had to be protected from even the appearance of compromised outcomes. Now you are partnered with sportsbooks, integrating betting into broadcasts, placing odds alongside the game itself, and turning every pitch into a potential wager.

And when anyone questions it, you fall back on the same line.

“It’s a business.”

No. It’s a contradiction.

You cannot sell integrity as part of the game’s identity while simultaneously monetizing the very thing that historically threatened it. You cannot lecture players about protecting the game while cashing checks tied directly to its risk. You cannot stand on tradition when it suits you and abandon it when it becomes inconvenient to revenue growth.

Because baseball was never just about watching players perform. It was about knowing them, not personally, but through presence, through repetition, through the slow accumulation of moments that turned players into something more than statistics. You knew their stance, their rhythm, how they carried themselves through failure and success, how they existed over the course of a long season that gave you time to understand them.

That required continuity. It required patience. It required a game that was not constantly being optimized for attention or monetization.

Under your version of “business,” players have become assets, roster turnover feels like inventory management, loyalty is replaced by optionality, and contracts define identity more than character. You are not building connection. You are managing portfolios. Fans feel that, whether they articulate it or not. They feel the distance, the lack of permanence, the shift from relationship to transaction, and once that connection erodes, everything else follows.

Fans do not attach to financial metrics. They attach to people. They attach to the player who struggles and finds his way back, to the veteran who hangs on a year too long, to the rookie who arrives without warning and becomes part of a summer. They attach to presence, and presence cannot be optimized, scaled, or reduced to a metric.

When you flatten baseball into a business model, you reduce those moments to content, something to consume, something to scroll past, something interchangeable with everything else competing for attention. Baseball was never supposed to be that. It was supposed to be something you lived with, something that unfolded slowly enough for meaning to take hold, something that did not demand your attention but earned it over time.

A business demands attention. Baseball used to earn it.

There is a difference, and you are erasing it.

Every rule change driven by pace over presence, every pricing decision that pushes families out, every gimmick designed to compete with short-form content, every moment where access to players is turned into media instead of mystery, all of it gets justified by the same line.

“It’s a business.”

No. It is a choice. A choice to trade depth for efficiency, connection for control, long-term meaning for short-term return and this same flawed thinking shows up in another place where it does not belong. Government.

“Run government like a business” sounds efficient and logical on the surface, but it fails for the same reason. A business serves shareholders. Government serves people. A business can cut what does not produce profit. Government cannot decide that certain people or communities are no longer worth serving because they do not generate enough return without abandoning its purpose.

When you apply a business framework to something that exists for public trust, you strip away its meaning. That is exactly what is happening here. You are applying a business model to something that exists as a public cultural asset, something built on shared memory, civic identity, and generational continuity, and in doing so, you are hollowing it out.

The irony is that you still rely on the very things your model is eroding. You rely on nostalgia to sell tickets, on tradition to justify pricing, on history to maintain relevance, while your decisions steadily undermine all of it. You want fans to feel something, but you do not want to be accountable to that feeling.

So, you fall back on the line, “It’s a business.” It is not; it is a fucking excuse.

Because if baseball were truly just a business, fans would treat it like one. They would walk away when the product declines, switch to something better, make rational decisions based on value. But they do not. They stay, they argue, they care, they pass it down, because they know, whether they say it or not, that baseball is not supposed to be just a business.

It is supposed to be something worth protecting from becoming one.

And you, as owners and as a league, are not just operators. You are caretakers of something you did not create, something you do not fully control, and something that will not survive if you continue to treat it as nothing more than a vehicle for return.

Because baseball does not disappear all at once. It erodes, quietly, decision by decision, each one justified the same way, until one day the numbers still look good, the revenue is still there, the business is thriving, and the game, the thing that made all of it matter in the first place, is gone.