My interest in baseball has waned this year, and that should concern Major League Baseball. I am someone who traveled the country chasing this game, who found meaning in its ballparks, its communities, and the people sitting beside me in the stands. Baseball became part of how I understood America and my place in it. When someone with that kind of attachment starts drifting away, you would think the people responsible for the sport might want to understand why.
But I honestly don’t think they give a shit, provided the money keeps coming in.
I wonder how much their understanding of fans extends beyond what they can sell us. They can measure what we spend, what we watch, and which promotions get us through the gate. But do they understand what makes us care in the first place? Do they understand how that attachment weakens? A gambling partnership might open another revenue stream, but does it build the kind of relationship that makes someone love baseball for fifty years? How much of their supposed fan engagement is simply finding another way to extract money from the attention they already have?
What has surprised me this year is how little I have missed it. I haven’t made some grand decision to boycott baseball. I have simply found myself spending my time elsewhere, and the space it occupied hasn’t felt nearly as empty as I expected. I am not claiming my declining interest proves the sport is dying. I am saying that people who present themselves as stewards of the game should care about the difference between a profitable customer and an attached fan.
That difference runs through everything that frustrates me about Major League Baseball, including its antitrust exemption. The league wants the privileges associated with being a cherished American institution while governing itself according to the financial interests of its owners. I want that exemption gone. Whatever special treatment those owners think they deserve, they have exhausted my willingness to give it to them.
You want to operate like a ruthless business? Fine. Live under the laws that govern one.
The exemption did not come from baseball proving its integrity, protecting its communities, or demonstrating some extraordinary commitment to the public. It grew out of a 1922 Supreme Court decision that treated the business of professional baseball as outside interstate commerce. By 1972, the Court itself called baseball’s privileged position an “exception and an anomaly” and an “aberration confined to baseball.” Yet it left the correction to Congress. More than half a century later, we are still accommodating the consequences of that decision. The Supreme Court’s opinion in Flood v. Kuhn
Meanwhile, the business protected by that reasoning sells national broadcasts, streaming subscriptions, sponsorships, merchandise, licensing agreements, and access to valuable entertainment properties. There is nothing quaint about it. Nothing that justifies allowing its owners to shelter certain business arrangements from the scrutiny other businesses face.
And now investment firms are inside the gates.
People talk about venture capital coming into sports, but private equity is the more precise term for much of what concerns me here. These are different forms of investment. In baseball, the issue is investors buying into established businesses whose value includes generations of loyalty they had no part in creating. Fenway Sports Group, the parent company of the Red Sox, announced a significant investment from RedBird Capital Partners in 2021. Its announcement described a business spanning sports, marketing, media, entertainment, and real estate. That is the scope of what is being purchased. Fenway Sports Group’s investment announcement
An investor can see a baseball team as an interest in an appreciating asset, with media rights attached, real estate opportunities nearby, and generations of customers already emotionally committed to the product. Those customers often inherit their loyalty before they understand what ownership even means. Your grandfather did the customer acquisition. Your father reinforced the relationship. You are now bringing your children.
I want to know what happens when the people pricing that loyalty fail to understand how it was built. When every part of the relationship becomes another opportunity to charge, advertise, upsell, or attach a betting promotion, something changes. You can increase the money you collect from a fan while diminishing the affection that brought that fan to you. A financial report might celebrate the first part long before anyone notices the second.
That is why my own indifference bothers me. I know how deeply I cared. I also know that ownership cannot assume that attachment renews itself forever.
Then we are supposed to applaud when the commissioner talks about expansion.
Rob Manfred said he wanted the process for expanding to 32 teams in place and operating before his planned departure in January 2029. He did not promise that two new clubs would be playing by then, but advancing expansion was clearly something he wanted accomplished before leaving office. Associated Press reporting on Manfred’s remarks
I would love to see more communities experience major league baseball. But selling two more memberships in the owners’ club does not automatically qualify as public service. Expansion gives existing owners an opportunity to charge for admission to a business whose entrance they control. There are legitimate questions about markets, scheduling, talent, and infrastructure. There are also enormous financial interests behind those decisions.
Before we celebrate the commissioner’s legacy, I want to know what the new communities receive and what they are expected to surrender. How much will depend on the stadium package, the surrounding development rights, and the willingness of elected officials to write checks? What obligations will the league accept in exchange?
A commissioner’s retirement calendar is no reason for a city to hurry into a bad deal.
And then comes the bullshit salary-cap sermon.
Owners have proposed a payroll cap alongside a payroll floor and changes to revenue sharing, arguing that the package would improve competitive balance. A meaningful floor could force some clubs to spend more, and differences in team resources are real. Those details deserve examination. They do not require us to accept ownership’s preferred solution as a selfless rescue mission. Associated Press reporting on the owners’ proposal
A cap limits what teams can spend on players. That benefits owners seeking more predictable labor costs, and they should have to defend that benefit honestly. Explain how revenue is counted, how it is divided, and what happens when it grows. Explain what ownership is willing to commit in return.
I am tired of being encouraged to resent the people on the field while treating the people who own the teams as helpless victims of economics. Nobody buys a ticket to watch an ownership group preserve its margins. Nobody takes a child to the ballpark to explain the beauty of an investor’s exit strategy. The players give the business its product, and their careers can end with one damaged elbow, one collision, or one season when their bodies stop cooperating. Yet their compensation is where we are repeatedly told discipline must begin.
Where is the corresponding promise to the fan? Does a salary cap guarantee a cheaper ticket? Affordable parking? An easier way to watch the home team? If those benefits are part of the sales pitch, put them in writing. A limit on payroll, by itself, promises me none of them.
If owners want to argue that their economics are unsustainable, show the evidence. Show how team operations relate to associated businesses, what ownership takes out, and where shared revenue goes. Let those claims be examined instead of asking fans to take another billionaire’s financial distress on faith.
Living in Milwaukee makes me even less willing to swallow the salary-cap argument. I watch the Brewers consistently compete against teams with much larger payrolls. Money matters, but so do scouting, player development, smart decisions, and competent leadership. Before owners demand limits on what players can earn, they should answer for what they do with the resources they already have. A salary cap cannot make an owner competent or committed to winning. It can, however, limit what that owner has to spend competing for talent. I am tired of being told to assume those are the same thing.
There is a legal distinction here. Congress already narrowed baseball’s exemption for major league player employment through the Curt Flood Act, and collective bargaining has separate legal protections. Repealing baseball’s remaining exemption would not automatically prohibit a negotiated salary cap. My objection connects these issues through the way MLB governs itself. Ownership’s demands for protection receive endless attention. Everyone else is expected to trust that protecting ownership will eventually benefit them. The Curt Flood Act’s statutory provisions
You can see that expectation most clearly when the stadium bill arrives.
MLB can act collectively when deciding who may enter the league, where franchises may operate, and which moves require approval. But when a ballpark needs replacing, we are suddenly presented with a local emergency that the surrounding taxpayers are expected to solve. If modern stadiums are essential to the league’s business, the league and its owners should finance that need. Establish a league construction fund. Arrange private financing. Put more ownership capital at risk. Apply some of that financial ingenuity before showing up at city hall.
If the public does participate, it should demand an enforceable return. Revenue participation, strong repayment provisions, binding commitments to stay, public access, and transparent accounting should be on the table. The terms should recognize a public contribution as something more than a ceremonial expression of hometown pride.
A commemorative plaque is a pathetic return on a public investment.
What infuriates me is how effectively baseball can turn love into bargaining pressure. A team becomes part of a city’s vocabulary. Families organize summers around it. People remember where they sat with parents who are now dead. Ownership understands how painful losing that connection would be. Then the possibility of relocation enters the conversation, and the community has to prove its commitment all over again.
The fans have to show up more. The politicians have to find more money. The city has to compete with another city offering a better package. Decades of loyalty become the opening bid in another negotiation. How many times does a community have to buy the same relationship?
This is where MLB’s apparent understanding of fan acquisition feels especially hollow to me. You cannot claim to value the lifelong fan while treating the relationships that create lifelong fans as expendable. You cannot keep selling the importance of tradition while reserving the right to discard it whenever the financial terms improve somewhere else.
The same question reaches into the minor leagues. Affiliated baseball connects smaller communities to the larger game, and MLB’s control over that system carries consequences beyond player development. A decision in a league office can reshape a town’s summers, its ballpark finances, and its sense of belonging. These are places where children can experience professional baseball up close and families can build the habits that turn a game into a lifelong interest.
Of course affiliation requires standards. Of course a development system needs organization. But restrictions on access should be open to meaningful scrutiny. When a community has committed ownership, a suitable ballpark, and people willing to support professional baseball, “the owners prefer it this way” should not end the discussion.
Getting rid of the exemption would not hand every town a franchise. It would not invalidate every territorial rule or force MLB to approve every proposed relocation. It would not make necessary league cooperation illegal. It would expose more of baseball’s business arrangements to the ordinary legal scrutiny they should have faced all along.
MLB should have to explain why a challenged restriction is necessary, show what it accomplishes, and defend it on its merits. Congress should stop confusing affection for the sport with deference to the people who currently own its franchises. They purchased businesses. They did not purchase an entitlement to federal protection in perpetuity.
I still care about baseball. I care about the conversations in the stands, the strange little ballparks, the families who return every summer, and the people who keep score because paying attention means something to them. I care about whether a kid can afford to get into a game and whether the team that kid grows up loving will still be there when that kid becomes a parent.
But caring about those things has become harder to reconcile with supporting the business built around them. This year, I have felt that distance grow. Baseball has occupied less of my time, and I have been surprised by how comfortable I am with that.
MLB should want to understand that feeling. By the time enough people quietly drift away for it to become a financial problem, another sponsorship deal may not repair what has been lost.
I do not owe an investment fund my loyalty. I do not owe a commissioner a flattering legacy. I do not owe an owner a publicly financed stadium or a more comfortable profit margin. And none of them is owed an antitrust exemption.
Congress should end it. Make MLB defend its business practices under the law. Make the people demanding financial discipline explain what discipline they are willing to accept themselves. Give communities reason to believe their commitment means more than another opportunity to collect.
Baseball has spent generations asking the public to believe the game belongs to all of us.
Then fucking act like it.
