Pictured: A Dingus

It’s a perilous thing, being a sports fan.

There’s a lot of stupidity and danger in pushing your emotions onto something you can’t control any element of. Most often, we regret being a fan when our team loses. When the ball bounces a way it shouldn’t have, when the team we put our hopes into comes up short. We expect that regret. We understand it. It’s table stakes to being a fan. We accepted we would be happy when they won, so we have to accept to be sad when they lose.

But, recently (quite recently if you’re a Rockies fan), the regret has been unexpected. It’s regret on a deeper level, not for letting yourself be caught up in a game that has no material impact on your life, but for letting yourself feel things for a business that no longer cares about you.

Baseball has been a business for a very long time. When professional leagues and teams began to form in the late 1870s, writers bemoaned the loss of innocence as the sport began to be about making money instead of having fun. But the league marched on. It survived labor battles, corruption, and scandal as it moved itself from a pastime to a business and back again. Even though it was about making money, it was still fun. But now, as we stare at an era where baseball is losing American viewers to things like “dying of old age”, the sport is starting to feel like the dying days of a retail storefront. The league has even entertained the idea of private equity buying shares of organizations to drive that metaphor home further. The game has started to feel more businessy and I don’t mean like the business your parents or friends parents owned, more like the American corporations they make movies about for having a toxic work environment or pushing a stockholder scandal under the rug. The type of business that bankrupted the American housing market in 2008 and now goes around to local newspapers bleeding them dry. The type of business that says they can’t pay pensions that workers spent years banking because they promised multi-million dollar buyouts to executives that gave them the power to kill the company.

This used to come out in subtle ways, teams would raise ticket prices or remove a family zone to install corporate boxes, things of that nature. Now, it’s in your face. The Ricketts Family ended a decades long relationship with a beloved media station so they could start their own premium channel and sneak even more dollars out of fans, the Marlins traded three MVP caliber players for peanuts just so they could get their payroll down to a level that provided a clearer contribution margin, the league is considering ending 40+minor league teams just to get in front of the encroaching idea that they may have to pay MILB players a livable wage, and now the Rockies have ruined a relationship with a generational talent under the guise of “budgetary restrictions”.

The lie of “budgetary restrictions” is one that fans often buy at face value. Hell, I did for a long time. You trick yourself into believing that teams don’t have much capital to invest and have to prepare based on projected revenue. You begin to think that this operation needs to be run like your own personal budget. “Well you can’t spend more than you bring in” is the logic they use and it makes sense because if we did that we’d be bankrupt and homeless. But baseball teams don’t operate like your checkbook. They aren’t budgeting for player salaries the same way you budget for groceries or the way your dad budgeted for his small eyeglass frame business. Even if they did, most ownership groups now use baseball teams as ways to build equity anyway, rarely is the team their first source of income. Because of this fact, every dollar of profit a baseball team makes is a dollar they should reinvest in the organization and yet, we believe the owners when they say they couldn’t possibly do something like that. We let them take their helicopters to their second home in Sedona, Arizona to count the revenue windfall they saw from a 3% boost in beer sales and don’t think “something smells fishy here”. We purchase the subscription to their premium channel and we don’t ask where that income is going or why it’s not translating to more aggressive off-season spending, baseball is a business after all.

Nobody is demanding that baseball teams lose money, despite what some of the stupider fans may tell you in your Twitter replies. The understanding that baseball is a business is buried into our brains from a very young age. We understand that businesses must operate with a certain degree of spending restraint. But, stop treating us like we’re morons. The Rockies were valued at over a billion dollars in the latest Forbes review. It’s very likely they cracked $300 million in revenue in 2019, a franchise record. The Rockies are making money in droves and they certainly are profiting at such a level that an increased investment in on-field product is not only doable but required. Asking us to wait until payroll clears up is a pitiful thing to ask of fans. We aren’t the ones that sucked at putting together a good team last year, go ask someone else to be patient.

Now, one of the three greatest players the Rockies have ever had is being pushed out. And for what? Because he dared to ask a team he plays for to actually try to win? Because he didn’t like the answer of “budgetary restrictions” the same way we shouldn’t? He saw right through the bullshit and called it as he saw it and now the fans are once again being punished because baseball tried too hard to be a business.

Jeff Bridich, the Rockies prized Harvard Graduate and General Manager, is a shithead. There’s no doubt in that. He’s ruined a relationship with a superstar to salvage his own ego (and it’s not even the first superstar he’s done this with). That ego has lashed out at media several times so it comes as no surprise it would lash out at players too. It’s only surprising in the fact that it took less than a year for it to happen. Yes, Jeff is a shithead and now everyone hates him for it. But he’s only another face on the monster that baseball has become. Jeff Bridich is just helping run a business, after all.

So how do you love something that only sees you as contribution margin? How do you support something that makes clear it doesn’t care if you’re sad so long as you spend money? How do you tell yourself it’s only business when the only thing that seems business like about it is that there’s money involved? This wasn’t the regret we signed up for, this regret isn’t a gamble on getting happiness.

Hey, maybe the Monforts will see a nice 2% boost in margin sales and get themselves a cool new car to celebrate. Wouldn’t that be nice for them?