It’s Opening Day of the 2024 Major League Baseball season. From America to Canada. Japan to Korea. In the Dominican Republic and Venezuela and beyond, for many, it is a national holiday.
The Major League Baseball season is not for the faint of heart; it is the daily rhythm for many – a heartbeat of sorts – that fans set their clock to as the daily grind wears on. It starts in the cold and wet of spring tinged with the promise of summer and ends with frost on the pumpkin. It is often the family vacation where children bask in the sun, and dine on ballpark food that won’t win any nutrition awards but surely nourishes the soul.
Baseball can also be your drunk uncle who you love, warts and all. As we head into the 2024 season, baseball (again) finds itself clouded in controversy. Whether Shohei Ohtani did or didn’t wager on sports dominates the headlines, just as it did when Pete Rose was investigated for betting on baseball. While not in labor talks, the union for the players had an uprising that questioned top leadership. As the season gets underway, do these matters drift away? Does controversy ever leave Major League Baseball? It has been a thread in its life since players started getting paid.
Today, many will focus on the games at hand, which is what the league always wishes for. Writers and diehards will question how some of the best players in free agency signed deals well below market value or remained on the sidelines. Joey Votto and a minor league deal with the Blue Jays. Jordan Montgomery signing a one-year/$25 million contract. Yes, it has second-year player option of $20 million if he makes 10 starts. Yes, the option jumps to $22.5 million if he achieves 18 starts and $25 million at 23 starts, but most expected more. Same for Cody Bellinger and other Scott Boras clients. After all, that’s a big part of the uprising with the players to upend the MLBPA. But, it’s Opening Day. The uprising will likely have to wait as players focus on the season. Fans will become distracted, or at least until MLB’s awkward offseason kicks back in.
There are 30 clubs in Major League Baseball. Not all of them are being fully embraced at the moment. Being a fan of the Oakland-soon-to-be-maybe-possibly-Las-Vegas-A’s is as much about protest as it is about anything at this stage. Raging against owner John Fisher has become a right of passage for A’s fans. After all, their Opening Day player payroll is projected to be around $61 million. That’s $18 million less than the $79 million in 2007. When accounting for inflation the A’s 2007 player payroll would be worth $118 million in today’s dollars. In an industry with gross revenues exceeding $11 billion, the A’s are an embarrassment.
Still, Opening Day has hope spring eternal. Everyone has a shot, or at least that’s the dream. The Baltimore Orioles will begin the 2024 season with a new owner. Player payroll disparity is at an all-time high. If the A’s are baseball’s worst, the Dodgers, Mets, and Yankees are the free-spending Goliaths of the league. Still, as the Arizona Diamondbacks showed in 2023, you can become the “David” of the league. Only the Texas Rangers stood in the way of Arizona reaching the promised land of a second World Series title last year, knocking off the likes of the Dodgers and Braves along the way. No one expected it. And maybe that’s why the league’s expanded playoffs with it’s 3/5/7 playoff format gives fans the hope that if somehow, someway, their team makes it to the postseason, anything is possible.
For the league’s owners, coffers are to be filled and asset value will grow. As the most recent Forbes MLB valuations show, every club is now valued at least $1 billion. The Yankees ($7.55 billion) and Dodgers ($.5.45 billion) dwarf those toward the bottom.
But for today, it’s just about breathing baseball. With NASCAR and the Daytona 500 the possible exception, in no other sport is the beginning of the season so revered. Clubs that will struggle to pull fans through the gate the rest of the season will likely see sellouts on Opening Day. Even with two games rained out on the league’s schedule, it’s as if you can smell summer just around the corner.
So, settle in. If you call in sick to work, can anyone blame you? After all, baseball is the heartbeat of the soul. Play ball.