Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency

Epilogue

166 epilogue ichiro’s phenomenal debut season in Seattle, in which he led his team to a runaway division title and a showdown with the Yankees in the American League Championship Series, helped Mariners fans get over the departure of the previous face of the franchise: star shortstop Alex Rodriguez . Following the 2000 season, “A-Rod,” widely considered one of the best players of his generation, signed a ten-year $252 million free agent contract with the Texas Rangers. For Seattle fans this marked the second consecutive winter of catastrophic loss, coming on the heels of Ken Griffey Jr.’s departure for his hometown of Cincinnati after the 1999 campaign. When Rodriguez returned to Seattle for the first time with his new team in April, sellout crowds at Safeco Field greeted the former Mariner with thunderous boos. Some in attendance even showered the field with fake $100,000 bills, protesting the player’s apparent choice of money over loyalty to his first major league home.1 There was a certain irony in the spectacle of Seattle’s baseball fans mocking A-Rod while rallying behind Ichiro, who himself had only recently changed jerseys in pursuit of a lucrative opportunity in a new city. As the Safeco Field crowd’s alternate booing and cheering suggests, fans and players alike have had to become increasingly adept at the art of flexible affiliation . To connect with their teams, communities must engage in nimble acts of fiction writing, embracing each year’s roster of athletes as hometown heroes, in spite of the crude reality of MLB’s marketplace of athletic talent. Fans’ collective revisions of local identity, like the annual acts of player mobility and roster replenishment with which they are inextricably linked, have come to define Major League Baseball in the age of free agency. New practices—and politics—of flexibility lie at the heart of three of the baseball industry’s most significant developments in the early years of the twenty- 167 Epilogue first century: the growth of the World Baseball Classic, the increasing popularity of fantasy baseball leagues, and the public revelation of players’ use of banned performance-enhancing substances. One of the most conspicuous developments in the baseball industry in recent years has been the World Baseball Classic (WBC). Held for the first time in 2006, reprised in 2009 and 2013, and scheduled to be repeated at four-year intervals thereafter, this round-robin tournament pits national teams against one another in a format modeled on soccer’s World Cup. Reflecting the balance of power in the industry’s labor relations, the MLBPA has been a core partner in the WBC from the beginning.2 While one longterm ambition for the contest is to develop new territories of baseball interest , the event relies first and foremost on fan investment from established national strongholds. One nation that has figured especially prominently in the early history of the WBC is Cuba, making the tournament a relatively rare instance in which the country’s athletes have competed against the rest of the baseball world’s top professional players. Cuba advanced to the championship game in 2006 with hard-fought wins over both Venezuela and Puerto Rico, showcasing the exemplary play that has long defined Cuban teams’ performance in international amateur competition. But the Cubans ultimately fell in the championship game to a great team from Japan, led by Ichiro Suzuki. The iconic Mariner and his fellow Japanese stars continued their WBC dominance in 2009, this time besting South Korea in the final game. In the wake of their back-to-back victories, Japanese players campaigned for a larger share of WBC revenue. In July 2012 the Nippon Professional Baseball Players Association announced that its members would sit out in 2013 unless the tournament’s profits could be distributed more equitably. The players did not back down until Nippon Professional Baseball officials negotiated a new agreement on sponsorship rights with WBC organizers.3 Seeking audiences across the baseball world, the WBC builds on a signature element of Major League Baseball’s transnational business model: tapping into communities of fans through the popularity of local stars. But the tournament has at times placed athletes’ multiple identities and constituencies in conflict. Ichiro, for example, faced criticism in 2009 from some members of the Seattle sports media over whether his commitment to winning a WBC championship for Japan might hinder his preparation for the upcoming MLB season.4 Alex Rodriguez confronted scrutiny of a different sort as...