The Top Picks from BP: Can Baseball Be Considered a Sustainable Source?

The question “does baseball need to be saved” is very much a loaded one—it insinuates that baseball even ought to be saved, that the sport is a net good in our world at all. There are plenty of people who would point to the subsidization of major-league ballparks, taking away investment in education, transportation, and social programs, as a pretty obvious answer that it isn’t. But that requires another distinction, between the capitalized Baseball that makes up the final third of MLB and the lowercase baseball that comprises the vast majority of the sport around the world. Despite the steady growth of worldwide interest, not to mention professional team valuations, there’s a sense that baseball, if not Baseball, is in decline, or is at least headed that way.

A modern school of philosophical thought, gaining momentum through the power of its most ardent supporters, centers around a concept regrettably titled “longtermism.” Unlike most modern philosophy, the summary is simple: A good or bad thing that takes place in the future is just as important as one that takes place in the present or past. Extended to its logical conclusion, this means that the rights of the unborn are equal in weight to those currently in existence. (Extend that to its own logical conclusion, that since there’ll be more people in the future than in the present, their needs outweigh our own, and thus it’s okay to ignore the suffering of people to create a future utopia, and you start to see why a lot of people aren’t crazy about the whole idea.)

Most philosophies fail, however, when they’re rolled out all the way. Derek Parfit, the moral philosopher whose teachings served as the foundation of longtermism, understood this; he died knowing his work was unfinished, hoping for a Theory X that would bind his brand of future-facing utilitarianism with a restrictor plate for population growth. But his ideas aren’t so easily cast aside: Consider a variant on his famous hypothetical situation where you were to drop a bottle on the ground, causing it to shatter. For the sake of simplicity (and to avoid the annoying probabilistic math of expected value), you know that if you leave the shards there, a little girl is going to cut up her feet. 

You should clean up the glass. Nobody’s debating this. The utilitarians will say that the pain of the act of cleaning is significantly lower than the pain of the girl’s bloody feet. Kant and the Christian theologians will say you don’t want to spend your whole day checking the floor for glass, so do unto others. Your friends and family will say you shouldn’t be an asshole and leave broken glass all over the floor. The calculus, whichever variant you prefer, doesn’t change if the girl hurts herself tomorrow, or a month from now, or a decade from now. It also doesn’t change if she does it a decade from now at the age of nine. 

That such an idea is relatively new, in the realm of philosophy, is because until very recently, the future was fairly hard to ruin. For millennia, it was nearly impossible to get anything to last long enough to worry about its impact on humanity; the Egyptian pharaohs devoted massive effort and whip-manufacturing toward the goal of creating something that lived beyond them, and what lived was making people say “man, get a load of that massive pile of rocks.” To be clear, the idea isn’t that new: James Renald Martin warned, among many others, about the dangers of ignoring the importance of conservation and deforestation in the 19th century, and scientists understood our capability of causing mass animal extinction. But now, suddenly, we have all sorts of glass we can throw everywhere: nuclear weapons and waste, bioengineered pathogens, the depletion of fossil fuels, and the melting of the icecaps. For the first time, we have to face the moral implications of living or failing to live in a renewable fashion, and it isn’t particularly fun.

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People spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the death of baseball, which is funny in that baseball is older than modern conservationism itself, older than the national parks, older than tree farms and fishing restrictions. The Elysian fields stretched on to infinity. Sports, unlike animals and civilizations, rarely go extinct, and when they do it’s usually because the athletes died rather than moved on. Certainly, some wax and wane—horse racing and boxing have entered their twilight eras—and occasionally a sport will run into overwhelming opposition out of concerns for safety or morality, like auto polo and cockfighting. But sports rarely die from old age. It’s really only in youth that they do, and that’s in the process of variants fighting over supremacy. Like Rome struggling to control the Italian peninsula in the fourth century BC, baseball had to overcome its genetic cousins, cricket and town ball, in the 1850s to claim the dominance it has yet to rescind. 

But on the subject of Rome, regardless of its power, regardless of its history, a thing only has to collapse once. Longtermism devotes most of its practical philosophy toward this concern: When nuclear war can wipe out humans in a matter of hours, it creates a sort of Pascal’s wager for ethics. The cost of extinction makes long-term survivability more important than any other concern. This is true of baseball as well: The chances of it dying are incredibly small, and within its universe, even more costly. 

How, then, would one envision the death of baseball? Probably the most popular opinion is that the sport will, in some generation or another, fail to be passed down from parent to child. The graying demographics of the average baseball fan are oft-quoted, and in this arena baseball is not only forced to compete with other sports but new ways to interact with the world. Baseball’s recent rules changes were targeted with tackling, or at least appearing to tackle, a pace that seemed discordant with the rapidity of modern life and overedited YouTube videos. But for a sport that forms its identity through history more than any other American alternative, the fear here is that knowledge, or at least a form of appreciation, will become lost. 

This strikes me as fairly unlikely. Baseball has invested a great amount of time and money into making itself accessible to youth, and has the resources to continue to do so. While baseball does lean toward older viewers, that too is a renewable resource: people are always getting older. Moreover, while much of our fears about collapse rise out of the increasingly tenuous environment outside the sport, in this case that environment might actually help it. In a world of algorithmically driven content, where everything is catered and, soon, artificially generated, the spontaneity of all sports will only become more attractive. The shared connectivity of social media also amplifies the experience of live broadcasts, making it scripted art and literature, like this article and its author, who really should be worried.

A second, and more realistic, concern ties back to horse racing. In the early years of America, horse-based sports were much more popular; many people had access to horses, and the ability to draw distinction for one’s skill at animal husbandry made the activity fairly populist. But as racing and equestrianism grew out of reach for an increasingly stratified and, vitally, urban population, it became a niche sport, primarily of interest to the upper class. We see signs of this trend in baseball as well: Not only are its major-league cathedrals designed to cater toward more and more expensive tastes and a smaller, more lucrative customer base, but the slow death of the minor leagues has torn professional baseball away from countless communities. The same applies at the youth level. Baseball is more expensive to watch, but it is also more expensive for many to play, putting serious athletic aspirations out of reach for many Americans. In such a world baseball would not die, but it would enter a cozy retirement.

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The final, and I believe most realistic threat facing the sport, isn’t extinction at all, but stagnation. How much of a threat this is, ultimately, lies within one’s self. The longtermists, thanks to the economic underpinnings of the movement, treat the risk of stagnancy as essentially equivalent, ethically, to a massive level of extinction. A reduced standard of living (again, economically; it’s always economically) to a greater number of future lives is tragic. Stagnation can also be cultural in nature as well, and history has proven that it can happen in a society well before the tap of flowing wealth gets squeezed shut. The money can still flow, but stop reaching the fingers of the artists.

The trouble with the concept of baseball’s potential stagnation is that we’re very much a part of it, wittingly or no. If our sport has a fossil fuel, it’s analytics. After a bit of a lull in the post-PITCHfx, pre-public-Statcast era, we’re in the midst of a third golden age of baseball analysis. It’s a wonderful time for an enterprising twentysomething with independent means to get employed by a baseball team, but the end product, for the casual viewer, is a sport scarcely better performed and far more homogenous. If baseball were to become stagnant, we would reach a point where there’s no more oil to drill, and for all our trouble the spontaneity of the game would be lost: 30 pitching factories teaching sweepers and deathballs, nine batters with identical stances and swings. 

Major League Baseball is intensely worried about growth. But just as there’s a difference between baseball and Baseball, there’s growth, and then there’s growth. People have grown savvy to the idea that growth, from an economic standpoint, isn’t necessarily linked to any personal sense of wellbeing. For corporations, whose idea of the long-term is often the quarter after next, the idea of sustainability is often an unjustifiable expense. But baseball, the pastime of parents and children, should be able to, or at least make an effort to, worry about both generations.

Living social constructs tend to slowly calcify and freeze. The US constitution, for example, has seen amendments slow with each passing century. The early years of MLB were, in the same way, nearly lawless in their experimentation and modification, hardly recognizable as the sport we know, almost too well, today. In that sense the rule amendments of last offseason were welcome, not just for the actual changes they enacted, but for the possibility of more to come. A changing game offers not just a new experience for viewers, but new conversations for fans and new challenges for teams and analysts. Modern sports require metaphysics, and like a shark, those conversations require movement to survive.

Baseball will almost certainly never completely die, at least until we do. But, much like the earth, there are a number of ways that it could become permanently diminished. The sport is currently shepherded, and increasingly, controlled, by economic interests that reject long-term thinking. To ensure the least possible chance of the worst possible outcome, the sport will need to be released from the Sherman Antitrust Act, once designed to save the sport, and now suffocating it. The minors would need to regain their independence. And the game would need to revert to a pastime available to as many children, yet unborn, of as many economic backgrounds as possible. If baseball is good, then we owe it to them.

None of this is easy. One could argue that it’s unrealistic to even consider. That’s true of the world’s greater long-term issues, as well. That’s why you have to worry about the future now; by then it could be too late.

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