Why the World Series is going down the tubes (literally)

Greedy, shortsighted owners and one-dimensional teams playing bad baseball add up to an event that nobody cares about.

By Keith Olbermann

Oct. 30, 2002 | By legend, Miss Barton had been standing on Farragut Parkway when they decided to put the school there in 1905, so they just built it around her.

In fact, she'd only been at the head of her homeroom since 1942, but for us seventh-graders 1942 might have been a date from Julius Caesar's reign. She was friendly but formidable, and what, if any, connection she had to the world outside school eluded us. In retrospect, it took a good deal of courage for me to hand her the note my mother had scribbled asking her permission for me to miss school on Oct. 15, 1969.

She looked up at me with unalloyed shock. My plans were doomed.

And then she smiled, broadly and warmly. "You're going to the World Series? Have you got an extra ticket?"

They were all like that. Mr. Motylinski, the science teacher who looked like nothing less than a proto-Nathan Lane, not only accepted my carrying a transistor radio and earphone into class, but periodically called on me for the score. Mr. Bub, the hard-assed phys ed teacher who once fended off 27 kids who tried to force him into the showers, suggested that when I went to Game 4, I should bring a movie camera and we could watch highlights -- instead of gym. The social studies teacher, Mrs. Rice, outdid them all. She moved my chair up next to the blackboard and turned a corner of it into a makeshift scoreboard. Every half-inning -- and in those days you could cram a lot of half-innings into your average seventh grade social studies class, not just one -- I'd add a digit to the line score:

BALTIMORE 0 0 3

METS 0 0 0

The previous school year, they'd herded us all into the vast cobwebby auditorium at the top of the school to watch Nixon's inauguration, and several times had done the same for Gemini and Apollo launches. But these had tangible -- if to us, vague -- connections to the actual schoolwork.

The World Series, however, was apparently more important than school.

I don't remember anything else that adults would admit was more important than school.

Thirty-three years later, hearing those words "world" and "series" sends a chill through me as reflexively as the loudest Pavlovian bell. I could not have known I was the last generation to be so indoctrinated. I assumed it had always been that way, and always would be.

It no longer is.

The official data is in, and the 2002 World Series was the worst-rated in television history. There is a myriad of causes: I have about 117 more television channels to choose from than I did in October 1969. I have at least 20 more than I did in October 2001. Similarly, baseball no longer dwarfs the sports landscape. The de-nationalizing of the sport was symbolized by the presence of two geographically homogenous teams, formerly a boon to ratings, now a curse. And there have been strikes and scandals and expansion and ties at the All-Star Game and Bud Selig.

Yet the underlying cause of baseball's malaise is that, like me, the owners just assumed it would always be that way. I had an excuse: I was 10 years old. Their excuse, that mentally they're 10 years old, is insufficient.

All but a few of the owners have failed to understand television in any way other than as a revenue stream. They have never recognized its function as a merchandising, even a proselytizing, mechanism. They didn't know about Miss Barton and Mr. Motylinski and Mrs. Rice. They didn't know about the kids with their cheesy white plastic earplugs and their scratchy transistor radios. They didn't cultivate the tradition they had been given by their forbears in the first half of the 20th century. They let the World Series become less important than school, and less important than the NBA, and less important than "The Sopranos."

It takes a certain foresight to say to a television executive, "No, we can't play the whole World Series at night because the kids won't be able to watch. We can't bend to society and prime time and demographics because to do that is to lessen the obligation to watch the World Series. We have to play day games. Here's some money back."

As evidenced by the All-Star Game, baseball owners don't have the foresight to plan for the 12th inning, let alone 12 years from now. They didn't write off the few million less NBC would've paid them as seed money. Instead it's the World Series that's gone to seed, sometimes being reduced to the symbolic filler between Fox's next promo for "24."

Next page: The two best teams weren't in the Series