Take me out to the ball game, and we'll see a lot of empty bleacher seats. And graying heads.
Baseball is in trouble. Attendance is down again this year. And fans are aging.
If this keeps up, in a few years our national pastime will have passed.
If baseball were a competitive business, it would do several things right away:get better management, cut costs, make its product more attractive, and reduce ticket prices.
But National League Baseball is not a competitive business. It suffers from notoriously bad management. Its labor relations are worse than the airlines. Its costs continue to escalate -- especially players' salaries. Ticket prices are going up to the point where a lot of would-be fans can't afford to go to the game any more. And taxpayers are bearing a larger and larger share of the burden.
You see, Major League Baseball is a cartel. The number of clubs is fixed by theClub owners. Baseball has been exempted from America's antitrust laws since 1922. No entrepreneur in an enterprising city can just start a new club. You have to buy or attract one of the existing franchises.
That means Club owners routinely blackmail cities by theatening to leave unlessthe city comes up with a lot of money for a new stadium or other perks. Since 1989, 16 new stadiums have been built around the country at total cost of $5 billion -- two-thirds of which has come from taxpayers.
Well, if the Club owners think those kinds of subsidies are going to continue when states and cities can't even pay for the public schools, they're batty.
Club Managers say the number of franchises has to be limited. There's no way just any small city can raise enough money through ticket sales to buy players good enough to compete. But that's not necessarily true. The Oakland Athletics became American Leage divisional finalists last year and the year before. And last summer Anaheim took the Yankees in World Series playoffs. So far this season, Montreal and Minnesota are doing pretty well.
Besides, if a small city can't make the grade and it just keeps losing, that's the way the market's supposed to work. There's no need for a cartel to protect small cities and entrepreneurs from losing their shirts -- or their uniforms.
But the way things are going, Major League Baseball is going to lose a lot more ... unless it steps up to the plate and accepts real market competition.
