“Baseball is great,” a friend said years ago as we pushed away from the kitchen table and grabbed our mitts. “It’s the only game you can play right after lunch.”
And what a lunch it is if you’re a major league ballplayer. “Three chefs worked on the Nationals’ pregame meal,” records Barry Svrluga, who covered the team for the Washington Post. “Healthy options—a chicken and a fish, sandwiches, cereal, salad—are offered every day.” Not to mention the services of “a team nutritionist, a massage therapist, a barber, and a car washer available at least once a home stand.” The moment a player just up from the minors—the equivalent of Tom the Chauffeur’s sudden ascent from downstairs to upstairs on Downton Abbey—was foolish enough to “fiddle with a handheld steamer in hopes of smoothing out his plaid shirt,” a clubhouse assistant rushed over to do the job for him.
“When players bring their luggage to spring training,” Svrluga observes, “they shouldn’t have to pick it up again until the fall, after the last game.”
Svrluga’s short account of the Nationals’ 2014 season is called The Grind and features a desperately weary ballplayer on the cover. But as former Yale first baseman George H.W. Bush might say, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina.” To be sure, baseball is seriously hard work for many of the characters Svrluga features: the player’s wife and children who are uprooted every time he is traded; the scout who drives from one small town to another in the unlikely hope that a relief pitcher he wants to evaluate will actually get into the game; the minor leaguer “doing exactly what he wanted to do far from where he wanted to be”; and the travel and clubhouse guys who have “got to deal with twenty-five prima donnas that get paid a lot of money that want everything they want.” (That last quote from 1 of the 25, Ryan Zimmerman.)
But life for the ballplayers themselves? “[Jayson] Werth needs a microwave in his hotel room? Check . . . Someone needs a button sewn on the shirt he intends to wear on the road trip? . . . Done.” In fairness, Svrluga rightly points out that, during the long season, major leaguers seldom get two days off in a row. Their careers are perpetually at risk from injury, poor play, or being judged old at an age most people consider young.
Still, “grind”? I don’t think so.
Svrluga implies that because baseball schedules twice as many games as hockey and basketball it’s twice as hard on the players. Really? Don’t try playing hockey or basketball after lunch. He also suggests that working out with a trainer during the winter is part of the ordeal, even as he’s honest enough to note that, until recently, players had to spend the offseason laboring “in mines and on ranches . . . Yogi Berra worked at a Sears, Roebuck”—just to keep food on the table.
The main reason fans should withhold their tears is that modern players make so much money, a development that is thoroughly documented in former ESPN the Magazine editor Jon Pessah’s The Game. But just as Svrluga overstates the strenuousness of the major league ballplayer’s existence, so does Pessah miss a different point in his own book.
Pessah’s theme is that, during his long tenure as baseball commissioner, Bud Selig generally outmaneuvered Players Association executive director Donald Fehr on issues such as the “luxury tax,” which is imposed on teams whose payroll rises above a certain level (yes, I’m mostly talking about you, Yankees and Dodgers, but the Nationals’ payroll currently ranks sixth among the 30 big league franchises). Now, granted, that would be awful for the players if the ceiling on team salaries were low. But it isn’t. It’s $189 million, up from $117 million in 2003, when the luxury tax—formally the “competitive balance tax”—was first implemented.
During the past three decades—roughly the era covered by The Game—the average salary for an individual major league player rose from $371,000 in 1985 to $1.2 million in 1994 to $2.4 million in 2002 and more than $4 million in the current season. The minimum player salary increased from $60,000 in 1985 to $300,000 in 2002 and $508,000 today. Free agency for players after six years in the league as well as their right to salary arbitration after three years have survived every effort to curb them.
In all, Selig and the owners prospered, but so did Fehr and the players. And although Selig won the public relations war over who deserves credit for steroid testing of players, the truth is that he was only a little less reluctant than Fehr to get serious about juicing, a matter that both the union (which didn’t want its members caught) and the owners (who loved the home-run-sparked increase in attendance and television revenue) wished would just go away.
It’s odd that the title of Svrluga’s book about the game makes it sound like a business and that Pessah’s book about the business is called The Game. My favorite story from The Game begins with Washington’s deputy mayor telling Major League Baseball that his city was ready to pay two-thirds of the estimated $300 million cost of a new stadium if the Montreal Expos agreed to move to the District of Columbia. Baseball’s answer: “We were thinking of three-thirds.” In the end, Nationals Park cost $701 million, of which the financially strapped city government paid $670 million.
All that money flowing to players’ salaries and owners’ profits comes from somewhere—namely from us, in our capacity as fans, cable subscribers, and taxpayers.
Criticisms aside, these books’ outstanding virtue, really, is the absence of a vice endemic to much baseball writing: All too often, academics, poets, and writerly writers feel compelled to wax rhapsodic when the subject is baseball. “Baseball is about going home,” wheezed the late literary scholar and, for five months, commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, the worst offender. “Its wisdom says you can go home again but that you cannot stay.” More blather—“wilderness and garden . . . Elysium . . . Platonic ideas . . . preexistent inevitabilities”—follows. Happily for the reader, neither Svrluga nor Pessah succumbs to this bloviating tendency in the course of telling his imperfect, but always plainspoken and interesting, stories.
Michael Nelson, Fulmer professor of political science at Rhodes College, is the author of Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government, which won the American Political Science Association’s Richard E. Neustadt award for best book on the presidency and executive politics published in 2014.
