For the bargain price of $4.95 a month, you too can have your very own MLB blog. What's different about this blog than, say, a blogspot blog? Um ”¦ it has MLB.com in the title.
Link.
I don't resent MLB the charge for a service that is free elsewhere. If it's important to people to have MLB in their blog address, MLB shouldn't feel bad about charging for it.
But it's a great snapshot of what contributes to the problem with sports.
Fans are intensely interested in the branding surrounding the game: wearing the team colors, owning team paraphernalia, whatever. This excrescence around sports results in a flow of a ton of money that is only indirectly related to sports.
I hang out with a group of guys who thought they'd die without the NHL last year. Mid-way through the year, I took an informal poll: How much do you miss it? A few missed it a lot, but most said they didn't miss it at all or less than they thought they would. I was in the latter group.
A similar thing happened during the MLB strikes.
That's significant. People thought they valued these sports immensely, but it turns out they didn't. Why were these people's apparent subjective states so out-of-touch with their actual subjective states?
Maybe something else had convinced them that sports are far more important than they are.
And that's where I come back to the branding issue. All the marketing places an inordinate value on sports, which we demonstrate by our willingness to buy into the branding. The willingness to buy into the branding, in turn, swells sports budgets and the money available for marketing, which stimulates our willingness to buy the branding. And on and on.
Increasingly, the sports themselves aren't worth nearly what the money would indicate. The monetary amounts, in other words, become grossly disproportionate to the actual value amounts.
Such disproportionality often results in problems. In the drug wars, the excess street values result in vicious street warfare by dealers. In the stock market, inflated stocks and easy money sometimes result in Wall Street abuse. Among individuals, the child with excess dollars in his pocket (more money than he deserves or should have) is often a brat, and the low-class person who suddenly finds himself with a lot of money is often insufferable.
And in sports, I'm inclined to think the disproportionality has contributed to a gross distortion of the importance of sports, as a barrage of marketing campaigns relentlessly impress on our minds that sports are glamorous and a high cultural pursuit.
I don't have an answer for the problem.
But it helps if we can at least to see the issue.
