Baseball is the sport best-suited to an All-Star Game, which I think is what makes the Midsummer Classic such a, well, midsummer classic. I can’t put myself in the mind of those who don’t enjoy the pastime, but more than any other month belongs to any other sport, July is baseball’s for the taking, and the interchangeable nature of a game where slotting in the best player at each position is, more or less, the key to winning makes for an all-star contest that closely resembles any other game, something that cannot be said for football, hockey, or even basketball (somewhat surprisingly). While the NBA and the NHL and the NFL have tinkered with format over the years, MLB’s sole All-Star Game design questions have revolved around the small questions of how to handle tied ballgames and whether to connect the event to home-field advantage in the World Series. In a lot of ways, baseball is a simple game. It’s hard to make it anything but itself.
Baseball is not the sport best-suited to having stars. It nearly is. Players play nearly every day of the week for six months of the year. Their faces are unhidden by masks. The most durable best players can play well into their thirties. But unlike prominent basketball players, and unlike quarterbacks, the best baseball players do not control the game close to 50% of the time, and the strength of a team is less tied to the strength of its best players than in either the NBA or the NFL. This is paradoxical, to an extent: Baseball is the sport where, again, you can plug in the best players at their respective positions and expect to succeed, but its stars matter less than their basketball and football-playing counterparts. See: Trout, Mike. See: Ohtani, Shohei. You need supporting casts in basketball and football, but they’re just that: They’re supporting casts. You don’t get to have supporting casts in baseball. Every weak spot is as big a vulnerability as every strong spot is an advantage.
A lot is made within baseball of the difficulty of marketing Mike Trout, but I’m not sure the personalities are the problem so much as the nature of the game. Sure, Derek Jeter was a big deal in the 90’s, but he wasn’t Michael Jordan. And he was constantly on the postseason stage. Mookie Betts and Bryce Harper aren’t playing in the World Series with the frequency of the 90’s Yankees.
What’s the solution, then, to baseball’s struggle to put individual stars in the mainstream? Oddly enough, you might need less of what many call “competition.” Tom Brady’s played in ten Super Bowls. LeBron James has gone to the NBA Finals ten times. In baseball? A Soviet-style attitude towards parity taxes the hell out of teams who try to win while making cats fat in places like Pittsburgh.
You want stars? Set aggressive spenders free. Derek Jeter was a good player, but his best was nowhere near that of Trout, or Ohtani, or Betts, or Harper, and that’s not just a statistical comment about his “defense:” The guy never won an MVP. The reason Jeter held such star power definitely wasn’t his performance, and it wasn’t even entirely his charisma. He simply had enough of those things that when he was constantly present during the sport’s biggest moments, he was able to shine. People like to say that if you put Jeter in Kansas City, he might not have made the Hall of Fame. But it’s more complicated than that. He was in New York and his teams went to the World Series seven different times. That’s a recipe that’s really hard to duplicate. Especially if you force the Dodgers to pay millions of dollars to their inferiors when they try to duplicate it.
A Big 12/Pac-12 Merger Was Discussed
The Big 12 and Pac-12, per Pete Thamel, discussed a merger over these last couple weeks. The discussions were about more options than the merger, but according to Thamel’s sources, the merger was the only option that came close to making sense. In the end, it didn’t make sense, and we can make some assumptions regarding why.
The elephant in the Pac-12 offices is the reality of dead weight. Certain schools in the Pac-12 do not bring a lot to the table financially, and that’s not just about location. Oregon State and Washington State haven’t done a lot of winning in their histories. Not enough, anyway. It’s about location, yes, but it’s also about that success side of the equation, and it’s about strength of brand, which ties back in large part to alumni engagement. If you don’t have the location, you better have the success, and if you don’t have either, your brand better be improbably strong. Oregon State and Washington State don’t bring in the revenue on their own campuses that most if not all of their Pac-12 counterparts earn. Start accounting for TV markets, and the equation gets even worse.
Dead weight exists, of course, in every conference. This is a bit haphazard, but I would imagine Mississippi State, Wake Forest, Purdue, and Kansas State are all below their league average in those three realms listed above: media market, on-field success, and strength of brand. For Mississippi State and Purdue, that isn’t a problem right now. They’re already in the club. In a hypothetical future, yes, they might be in some trouble should their leagues eventually try to contract, but that’s likely a long way out. Possibly long enough for media markets to really start mattering less, if streaming does win out as our preferred method of consuming live television. For Wake Forest and Kansas State, it doesn’t appear to be a present problem either. There’s some long-distance fear (the same fear that exists for Iowa State, and for a couple dozen other schools in the ACC and the Big 12), but they’re in a club, and while it isn’t the best club in town, it’s a fairly stable, safe place for the moment. Oregon State and Washington State? They’re in danger. Their club might be disbanding, and if that club disbands, it’s not clear why another would want to take them. Dead weight exists in every conference. It only matters in ones trying to hold on to survival.
Making matters worse, Oregon State and Washington State may be the deadest of the Power Five dead weight. Going by operating revenue alone, using the Sportico database, in the last full pre-pandemic year those two schools ranked 51st and 52nd among the Power Five’s 52 public institutions. That’s not indicative of a great brand, and with the success not there and the media markets not helping, the rather obvious question coming out of the failed Big 12/Pac-12 merger is whether the merger would have worked had the Pac-12 agreed to throw its weakest members to the wolves.
It’s possible that the post-USC/UCLA Pac-12 can, adding Boise State and someone like Memphis (and maybe Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s, if they’re going the Memphis route and getting legitimately aggressive), get a grant of rights close enough to what the Big 12 and ACC can offer that everyone agrees the costs of splitting up would be worse than the costs of a few years of underwhelming TV revenue. It’s possible a Pac-10 might even be, though worse, not bad enough on the revenue front to provoke an exodus. At the moment, though, that appears to be the only path to continued power conference survival for Oregon State and Washington State, and at the moment, it appears unlikely, partially because for the Pac-12 to actually hold together, every single one of those other eight schools will likely need to independently make the same decision as the rest. If even one school departs, one would imagine the dam will break. Which is, of course, bad news for Beavers, and it turns out Cougars as well.
So, we continue to wait. But the outlook remains the same. And the questions remain the same. Who will move first? And will they go to the Big 12 or the ACC? Or will some new surprise throw us all for a loop?
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No more thoughts today, but excited for the All-Star Game tonight (8:00 PM EDT, FOX). As we mentioned yesterday, we’ll catch up on the rest of our worlds as the week goes along. Taking some advantage of the biggest break in the sporting year.
