Tag Archives: Baseball

On October Baseball

On October Baseball – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a great celebration commences in our national pastime. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, a great celebration commences in our national pastime.

Several years ago, near the start of the podcast version of my Wednesday Blog, I wrote two of my favorite stories in this continuing publication of mine about my love for baseball at the beginning of the 2022 season. I seem to remember even playing a poor rendition of Take Me Out to the Ballgame on the digital keyboard provided on GarageBand, where I do all my recording and editing. Don’t worry, I’m not planning on doing that again.

Today, I want to write instead about my joy at how this postseason is beginning. The 2024 season had plenty of potential for my beloved Chicago Cubs and my adopted second-favorite team the Kansas City Royals, and while the Cubs didn’t quite make it far enough to earn a wild card spot, the Royals did in spite of themselves. This is being released on the morning of Game 2 of the Wild Card series, following a 1-0 Royals win in Baltimore against the Orioles. So, should the Royals win again today they will advance to face the Yankees, a matchup that brings to mind the stories my Mom likes to tell of watching the Royals teams of the ‘80s face up against the Bronx Bombers in the American League playoffs.

Meanwhile in the National League the team that excites me the most in these Wild Card series is the San Diego Padres, a perennial favorite of the last four years to win the World Series. Their resounding 4-0 win at home over the Atlanta Braves last night in Game 1 proved to be a good alternative to the Vice Presidential Debate that was occurring at the same time from CBS News’s headquarters in New York. You might think it odd that someone as politically engaged as me would choose to watch a ballgame over a debate, and yes, I started the 8 pm hour watching Governor Walz of Minnesota and Senator Vance of Ohio face off on CBS, but as soon as the first question concerning the increasing odds of war between Israel and Iran occurred, I decided to seek some escapism.

There are a lot of things that we all are worried about today, and with good reason. Whereas for most of my life I’ve looked to the future with eagerness, today I’m scared about the future and what we are doing to ourselves. Over the weekend, I watched an episode of the PBS documentary series In Their Own Words about Jim Henson in which he said his inspiration for creating his 1980s children’s television show Fraggle Rock was to make something that could inspire world peace. To paraphrase the visionary creator of the Muppets, Henson believed the best chance we have at solving our problems is to speak to the youth who aren’t already jaded by the weariness of life and are more willing to imagine a good future. He spoke to the inner child in all of us, a part of me that I’ve found slinking back from the foreground as the world seems evermore scary and dangerous.

Even when I don’t have a team in the playoffs, and let’s face it as a Cub and Royal fan that’s most years, I still religiously watch the baseball playoffs because I love this sport. It’s the sport my parents introduced me to as a kid watching Sammy Sosa, Kerry Wood, and the great Cubs of the late ‘90s and early 2000s skirt so close to the glory of winning the World Series in 1998 and 2003. It’s the one sport that I played with even the remotest success. It’s a sport that I shared with generations of my family that I understood, and today it’s a nice antidote to the weekends of American football, which let’s face it I get but still don’t really understand. Baseball is one of those core things that makes me feel more American, and one of the parts of American life that I missed the most when I lived in England.

Locally here in Kansas City I feel that the Royals have lost some of their connection with the community in the wake of their failed bid to get a renewal on the stadium sales tax here in Jackson County, which would help them to fund a new stadium along Truman Road in the Crossroads neighborhood. I was one of those voters on the fence who wanted to support a downtown stadium but were really unhappy with the plan they laid out and repeatedly changed in the days and weeks leading up to the vote. Since the playoffs began, I found it harder to put on my Royals hat when going out. I’m having a hard time putting my faith in an organization that doesn’t seem to want to trust the city it represents. I hope this Royals playoff run, 10 years after their monumental and near triumphant 2014 run will revive some of that jubilation that I felt in Kansas City that year. I remember during the World Series that year driving down 47th Street in the Plaza and nearly everyone out walking down the sidewalks was wearing Royal blue jerseys and hats, and I even saw Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig’s motorcade parked outside the Classic Cup Café at 47th and Central. I want to feel that kind of community spirit again in Kansas City, where the team and the city are open with each other and working together in a productive manner.

So, who am I picking to win the World Series this year? Well, even though we’re down to the last handful of teams, and even though I have a horse in the race this time around, it’s still too hard for me to say. I want the Royals to win again, that’s for sure, though were they not playing against the Orioles I’d be excited for Baltimore’s chances this year. In the National League though it’s a two horse race for me between the Dodgers and the Padres. While Los Angeles has one of the greatest baseball players of our time – Shohei Ohtani – on their team, the Padres have been red hot in the second half of the season, and I stand by my long held claim that the weekend I spent in San Diego in 2021 was one of the best I’ve had in the last few years. What I want to see most is amazing baseball that makes me want to watch the guys on the field play more and more and more; and by the end of this month to long for March and Spring Training.

Writing this tells me one thing for certain: even when I’m trying to celebrate something I love as much as baseball, the muddied waters of the world still appear, yet even then I remain hopeful of better tomorrows.

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A selfie I took beneath the statue of El Cid in Balboa Park’s Plaza de Panama in San Diego on Halloween 2021.

Bad Practices in Baseball Broadcasting

Wrigley Field from the press box.

Bad Practices in Baseball Broadcasting – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how baseball broadcasting today is a tale in what not to do. All musical performances included are my own.

As you’ll have gathered from last week’s episode, I’m a big baseball fan. I always have been, and probably always will be. Baseball was the first sport I watched as a kid, the first I played (Kindergarten T-Ball), and the one that I have spent the most time watching both in the stadium and at home on TV. Growing up in the 90s and 2000s baseball was one of a handful of things that were just normal to have on the TV or the radio during the day in the background. No matter which major league city you were in, the local team or teams would probably be on the airwaves on any given Spring or Summer afternoon or evening. 

As a lifelong Cub fan, I was lucky after my parents & I moved to Kansas City in June 1999 to be able to still watch the Cubs live on WGN’s national superstation. Those broadcasts became one real big constant in my young life, something I even introduced to my cousins on occasion during those long summers in the early 2000s when I spent the day at their house. They were all Royals fans first and foremost, but I distinctly remember one particularly exciting game from Wrigley when we all were buzzing with excitement in front of the TV watching an especially close day game, cheering & celebrating when the Cubs won with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the 9th.

That all began to change in the early 2010s when baseball began to move from the ubiquitous over-the-airwaves channels to special sports channels that you either got through your cable package or that were only available at special request. The Cubs left WGN in 2015, and one of my last day-to-day links with my original hometown went with the last of those broadcasts. I didn’t notice it at first, in September 2015 I moved across the water to London to do a master’s degree in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster, and only rarely got to see baseball at the odd American restaurant in the British capital. When I returned to the U.S. the following year the Cubs were almost always on MLB Network or any of the other regular baseball broadcasters, mostly ESPN and Fox Sports. It was 2016, the year when the drought was finally lifted (see last week’s episode for an emotional recounting of the night of Game 7). In the following years I was able to see the Cubs fairly regularly on national TV, and the Kansas City Royals, my favorite American League team on the local Fox Sports Kansas City broadcasts on a daily basis, but as the 2010s ended all that began to change yet again.

Around the same time as the beginning of the pandemic in this country in March 2020 the news broke that Fox was selling their Fox Sports division as a part of the Disney acquisition of 20th Century Fox. The Federal Trade Commission ruled that Disney couldn’t control Fox Sports and ESPN, that’d be a monopoly, so Fox Sports was up for grabs to the highest bidder. That bidder turned out to be Sinclair, America’s shadiest right-wing owned media conglomerate, the Hearst of the 21st century, the true Charles Foster Kane. I wasn’t happy from the beginning about this; Sinclair had been caught red handed making their local news anchors read a prepared statement that sounded way too much like propaganda for my liking, and nearly anything they touched seemed to be weaponized to benefit their own ideals and mission. So, when Sinclair announced that the Fox Sports naming rights had been sold to Bally’s, the casino chain, I wasn’t totally surprised. One thing to get out of the way: I’m fine with legalized sports betting, I’m just annoyed with how gaudy and grotesque its advertising often tends to be, and frankly I don’t want any part in it. What frustrated me the most was that as a part of the deal Sinclair decided to get greedy, as robber barons are known to do, and raise their rates to the point that Fox Sports, now Bally Sports, was cut from most TV providers’ channel listings, especially from streaming TV providers like YouTube TV and Sling. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t watch baseball, whether the Cubs or the Royals, on local TV.

I recognize that this isn’t a serious societal problem on its own. Having professional baseball off the airwaves for a good portion of the population isn’t going to cause people to starve or to lose their homes or their jobs; it isn’t a matter of public education or human rights. Compared to those problems this is insignificant. Culturally though, in a country that is largely isolated from the global sports market, baseball remains our national past-time. It’s something that developed as our country grew, a sport that came into its own after the Civil War with teams that have existed as long as some communities in this country have. My own Chicago Cubs have an old heritage in professional baseball dating back to around 1870. They joined the National League at its founding in 1876 and have stuck around in the same city ever since. For the first 30 to 40 years professional baseball was seen by spectators in the stands and reported on in the newspapers. In the next few decades with the invention of radio it was broadcast around the country alongside sports like boxing to homes and businesses from Atlantic to Pacific. Following World War II it began to be seen on TV screens, with greats like Jack Brickhouse calling games from the press box at Wrigley Field. Some of my fondest memories of baseball are the most mundane ones, like the times I’d sit in my grandparents’ kitchen watching the Cubs with my grandmother, or the summer evenings in recent years when my parents and I would sit around in our living room in Kansas City watching as the Royals played fun small ball, outwitting heavy-hitting teams with their base running, base stealing, and excellent fielding. Memories like those are what companies like Sinclair are burying deep in the ever-receding past.

A year ago, Sinclair announced they’d have a streaming service ready to go for the 2022 baseball season called Bally Sports+ (because every streaming service is called “so and so +” for some reason). The report said it would cost around $23 a month, or $184 per baseball season, including Spring Training and the playoffs (March-October). This would cater to people like me who don’t have traditional cable packages, owing to their exorbitant prices around $80-120 a month, and would fill the void that Sinclair themselves created to gouge the market during the 2020 and 2021 seasons. Well, Spring Training has begun for 2022 and Bally Sports+ is nowhere in sight. I was lucky enough on Monday afternoon this week to catch a Royals Spring Training game against the Angels but that feels more like a chance encounter than a solid resolution to the problem.One potential solution would be to build off the legal exception that the 1922 Supreme Court Case Federal Baseball Club v. National League made for Major League Baseball to be exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act, the very act which opened the door for Sinclair to buy Fox Sports over Disney’s objections. In the present case, I’d argue that baseball is an exception to the rule because it’s a deep-rooted part of American culture. As such it ought to be available to watch over-the-air, exempt from any special cable or streaming packages, exempt from being hogged by the greedy arms of broadcasting conglomerates like Sinclair. Unlike the NFL, baseball’s closest competitor, Major League Baseball’s season doesn’t lend itself well to having an all-national broadcast schedule. We’re talking about 24 weeks between April and the end of September with 162 games being played by 30 teams, or 2,430 games in a season. A solely national broadcast system like the NFL’s simply wouldn’t work for the MLB. Instead, local broadcasts should be prioritized, and broadcasting companies should be incentivized to put the viewers first. The alternative, if baseball isn’t easy for people to watch on a regular basis, is for the sport to decline in popularity, something that hurts companies like Sinclair anyway. I only hope that Sinclair’s executives realize it’s to their benefit to let people watch baseball at a fair price.

My Dad and I in front of the Wrigley Field Marquee in December 2016

Baseball is Back

Jon Lester pitching against the White Sox in 2015.

Baseball is Back – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a celebration of baseball's triumphant return and one small complaint about a rule change.

This past Thursday afternoon I listened to the latest episode of the Sidedoor at the Smithsonian podcast talking about the history of the song Take Me Out to the Ballgame and the Seventh Inning Stretch, one of the most American of rituals out there. It’s the moment in a baseball game when the entire stadium stands up and sings about going out to the ball game, eating cracker jacks, and peanuts of course as well. In the last 20 years following Take Me Out to the Ballgame usually we will also sing God Bless America, because that’s what we do in this country.

In the aftermath of listening to that podcast episode I began to think about how I might like to go see a ball game this Spring, but with the Major League Baseball lockout I knew I needed to find another outlet to see baseball, excluding the majors and probably the minor leagues as well. So, I looked at college ball. I was going to buy a ticket to a game or two of the Binghamton Bearcats Division 1 Men’s Baseball Team, my own university’s team. I still plan on doing so, however in the process of going to buy those tickets I saw the wonderful news that the lockout had been resolved and was going to end. Major League Baseball would be returning for the 2022 season with some changes to the rules.

Plenty of bloggers, columnists, and people on the radio have complained about different aspects of the rules. I want to add my voice to once specific area: the introduction of a universal designated hitter rule. This means that the National League will no longer have the distinction of having pitchers that bat alongside all the other players. Now National League teams too will have Designated Hitters like the American League has had for a while now. I’ve got to say I’m not terribly happy about this. For the longest time I’ve always preferred the National League’s way of doing things. In my own humble opinion, my own entirely amateur, spectator opinion, standing atop my soap box way out in the bleachers, some of the best ball games we’ve ever seen have been pitchers’ duels. Where it’s back and forth, back and forth two amazing pitchers on either side striking out almost everyone, letting in a few pop flies but very few runs. Those games often finally finish, perhaps miraculously with one pitcher getting a hit off of another pitcher and batting in a run. 

Even better, there was Game 3 of the 2016 National League Divisional Series between the Chicago Cubs and the San Francisco Giants out in California. Madison Bumgarner was pitching for the home team and Jake Arrieta for the visitors, my beloved Chicago Cubs. Bumgarner to this point was unbeatable. He was the darling of everyone in San Francisco and especially Fox Sports commentator Joe Buck. He was unbeatable until Arrieta looked him in the eye that night and with two men on swung for the fences and got a three-run home run. He cracked the façade of the unbreakable Madison Bumgarner for the first time in the playoffs. The Cubs would go on to win that divisional series, and then they’d win the National League Pennant over the Los Angeles Dodgers and on a stormy night in Cleveland at the beginning of November they won their first World Series since 1908 on a night when I prayed more decades of the rosary than I’ve ever prayed before in my life.

Having pitchers bat allow for games like that to happen, allow for moments like that to happen. They allow for the opportunity for the most dramatic of finishes to take places, of pitchers taking the game into their own hands and becoming the hero of the day. On the other hand, so many major league pitchers are terrible batters that if you don’t have a really dramatic grandiose situation like Arrieta’s home run in Game 3 let’s say then at the very least it’s going to be a quick out, meaning it speeds the game up. Designated hitters are fun to watch, they’re sluggers after all, but the more fun kind of baseball is small ball, it’s the singles and the doubles, the base hits, not the home runs. The home runs and grand slams are exciting but it’s more exciting to see the team work together and strategize to earn runs over a couple of at bats, that’s the most fun kind of baseball out there.

So as much as I’m happy to see Major League Baseball return, to see the 2022 season after a long lockout, after the greed of the ownership was made plain and clear for all to see, and even though I have many other grievances alongside the universal DH rule I’m happy to see the season starting so soon. I do have other problems with professional baseball today, notably how Bally Sports continues to be the Scrooge of baseball broadcasting here in the Midwest, keeping their televised games off most peoples’ TVs out of the same greed that kept the lockout going so long. I hope this will be a good season for my beloved Chicago Cubs as well as for my adopted second team the Kansas City Royals. And if not, well, let’s just hope for a good year of baseball.