A Pin Drops in Fenway Park

If you don’t live in Boston, you have no idea how devoted local Bostonians are to their Red Sox. No matter how successful the other teams may be, this is first and foremost a baseball town. In the dead of winter, a Red Sox free agent pickup will run at the top of the sports pages over a Celtics or Patriots victory.

The Red Sox have the payroll to put a competitive team in the American League East for years, and of course the long championship drought ended in 2004. But despite the league’s second highest payroll, injuries and an underachieving bullpen have devastated the Red Sox this year, and the team will not make the playoffs.

The Red Sox jumped the shark after the Yankees swept a five-game series at Fenway in August, and since then the team has vanished. It’s bizarre. The team is a non-entity here, with game summaries disappearing into the back pages. No traffic jams at Kenmore Square. Tickets are easy to obtain, and scalpers aren't making a dime. Fans aren’t even talking about next year. The team and its owners are being treated like jilted lovers – completely erased from Bostonian lives.

I didn’t make any baseball predictions this year, but last year I said baseball’s steady decline in popularity was due to its financial structure that places rich teams in large markets like New York an advantage over many of the small market teams, and the best bet to succeed in baseball is to be able to afford the best stars money can buy. Of course I’m a capitalist, but the NFL, the NBA and, belatedly, the NHL learned that a salary cap is the best financial solvent for sports and the best way for every team to have a shot at a championship.

For small market and small payroll teams like Kansas City and Pittsburgh, there is no way they will ever compete with the large payroll teams. This has caused baseball TV ratings (and subsequent revenues) to plummet and baseball now ranks behind football, NASCAR and basketball in popularity. What is the point of following baseball in a place like Tampa Bay or Milwaukee knowing your team never has a chance of competing?

Here in Boston, the Red Sox’s disappointing season has brought this point home. It’s bizarre to be in a place where baseball has practically ceased to exist. Unfortunately, this is the case in most of the country, and baseball has reaped what it has sown.