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

FINAL SCORE

133 FINAL SCORE Baseball is baseball wherever it is played. The only difference is the game. —FRANK P. JOZSA Exemplified by the World Baseball Classic (WBC), Major League Baseball (MLB) is a composite of a sport, a domestic monopoly, a neocolonial power, and an international business. The WBC represents the blend of myth and reality that MLB strives to balance in pursuing its international strategy. MLB’s“smart power” implementation of the WBC represents a merger of its soft power culturalandcelebrityattractiontoco -optparticipatingcountriesandtheirfanswith the hard power economic leverage to induce countries to follow its leadership. Although baseball generally meets Allen Guttmann’s definition of a modern sport, with its organized and measured elements and its urban influence, it has created and still retains through MLB a primordial morality and fantasy that provide participants and spectators a quasi-religious spiritual connection with the game. Embedded in its Cooperstown “immaculate conception,” open time frame and venue, traditional rules and rituals, and seasonal progression, baseball re-creates a mythical agrarian imagined community that unites those who play and/or watch the game. From its early professional history, the baseball community embraced the sports media, which used their increasing soft power leverage to promote and further mythologize the sport. As both general and specific baseball history have shown, however, such a community runs the risk of exclusivity and therefore diminished popular appeal. Throughout most of MLB’s existence, its leaders shunned players and fans of color, as did white society, which practiced similar prejudice in day-to-day life. As MLB expanded 134 FINAL SCORE internationally, it also found that its strong national identity provoked resistance and game modification abroad. Accommodating local influence has been and will remain a critical factor in broadening the baseball market, as in other global consumer ventures. As baseball evolved in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it linked its mythology with the United States as the national pastime. From that connection , MLB reinforced a patriotic aspect and an expanded presence in national popular culture and language.With such enhanced visibility, however, came risk of negative exposure, as experienced in the Black Sox scandal and subsequent issues such as player strikes and illegal drug use. Generally, however, MLB has withstood the short-term consequences of these negative events and recaptured popularity, although that popularity has steadily declined in the face of increasing competition and of more critical media in an expanding entertainment economy that both worships and castigates celebrities. With the creation of the National League in 1876,what would become MLB commodified itself as a domestic business that leveraged its mythical appeal. It used celebrity attraction and product licensure to expand its revenue beyond the ballpark. Reinforced by an illogical Supreme Court decision declaring it a legal monopoly in 1922, MLB operated with virtual immunity for another half century. Its business progression, however, trailed the history of U.S. consumer marketing. Its management skills also lagged because of the antitrust protection and owners’ reluctance to hire, develop, and delegate to professional management . Like other seats of abnormal power, MLB leaders abused their power by exploiting players, fans, and local governments to increase profits, thereby complicating and contradicting its mythical stature as a moral sport. Its hard power monopoly status, however, enabled it to control its labor costs unilaterally and to establish local market exclusivity. But it also removed a competitive challenge that in a free market forces businesses to improve their practices. By allowing team owners’ significant latitude, MLB compounded its business development problem. It lacked critical elements of organizational control and consistency that could have avoided or mitigated subsequent resistant responses. Such excessive dominance begets resistance and counterforces. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, MLB saw the emergence of a powerful players union, government constraints, alternative entertainment outlets, and public backlash that demanded stronger management and marketing. While MLB has responded to those pressures, it has not always done so with adroit soft power tactics. Its bilateral monopoly relationship with the MLBPA produced a hard power economic cold war fraught with continuing hostility. Their Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations provide periodic and visible megatests that FINAL SCORE 135 determine whether the parties can complement their independent hard power goals with soft power collaboration toward smart power mutual success. Increased sponsorships, licensing relationships, and luxury box sales from corporate America have helped to increase the revenue...