Smart Ball: Marketing the Myth and Managing the Reality of Major League Baseball

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3 AT BAT Some baseball is the fate of us all. —ROBERT FROST In 1999, economists James Quirk and Rodney Fort published Hard Ball: The Abuse of Power in Pro Team Sports. A sequel to their generic 1992 treatment of sports economics, Pay Dirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports, Hard Ball argues that professional sports should be more competitive and that government should act as a principal corrective of monopoly abuses. By using an analogue to an international political crisis, one could conclude that Quirk and Fort view the four major U.S. professional sports—baseball, football, basketball, and hockey—as possessing domestic“weapons of mass destruction” in the forms of monopoly license, media leverage, union power, and celebrity player influence. As abusers of power, these sports organizations, in Quirk and Fort’s opinion, deserve a combined public and private economic counterattack to deprive them of their autocratic controls and convert them to more democratic forms of governance. One of these professional sports, Major League Baseball (MLB), is now more productively serving itself and both its traditional domestic and growing international markets by channeling its strengths into a more collaborative strategy that significantly utilizes soft power, comparable to that described by Joseph S.Nye Jr.,dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard,in his 2004 geopolitical analysis bearing that name.Nye has developed a“smart power” model that seems generally applicable to any leadership evaluation and frames this book. 4 AT BAT Nye first defines power as “the ability to influence the behavior of others to get the outcomes one wants.”1 He then simply divides power into two contrasting subcategories, hard and soft, and applies them to nations that venture alone unilaterally or work together multilaterally. For him, hard power is typically military or economic in the form of inducements (carrots) or threats (sticks). He observes that unilateral nations, such as the United States, tend to consider themselves exceptional and to rely primarily on hard power military or economic forces to accomplish their national objectives. Nye contends that twenty-first-century U.S. foreign policy has combined“unilateralism, arrogance, and parochialism.”2 The early Obama administration actions, however, suggest a shift toward multilateralism. Outside Nye’s geopolitical context, hard power tends to be economic. Its dominant use also correlates more—but not exclusively—with organizations self-defined as unilateral and exceptional. MLB’s hard power generally has economic elements but can also simply reflect an autocratic adherence to the contrived mythology of baseball, without material economic implications. Soft power, Nye observes, is “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It builds upon the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies and co-opts others.”3 In his view, it “rests on the ability to set the political agenda in a way that shapes the preferences of others.” Soft power is not the same as influence but is a source of it. Soft power is more than cultural power because it includes values and behaviors .4 Therefore, he notes, nations that rely primarily on soft power tend to be multilateral and collaborative in their approach to issues. In MLB “country,” supported by its own culture, ideals, and policies, leaders have a multilateral option to persuade owners, players, fans, and media by improving the attraction of the game. Co-optative rather than coercive marketing has become a significant element of soft power in MLB as it has increasingly allied with various corporate sponsors and charitable organizations. Credibility , Nye observes, is a crucial resource and an important source of soft power. Historically, therefore, it has been important for MLB to maintain its credibility while addressing such challenging issues as gambling and steroids. Nye acknowledges that unilateral nations can and should use soft power and that multilateral nations can and should use hard power when appropriate.“Smart power,” he writes, is “neither hard nor soft. It is both,” an optimal blend of the two strategies.5 Since introducing his concept of power in Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (1990) and differentiating the benign soft power concept of influence through attractive promotion of culture and ideology with the AT BAT 5 more adversarial commanding or coercive military and economic forces of hard power, Nye has tracked U.S. power practices with increasing alarm.6 He...