Major League Buttheads

 Sometimes you listen to folks in Major League Baseball, and you wonder when the Pittsburgh Pirates infected everyone else in the game with their Chronic Dumbness disease. Or you think of that old joke about the redneck.

Q: What are a redneck's last words?

A: Hey y'all! Watch this!

That sort of thing.

Seems like Rob Manfred and the rest of the Major League Buttheads are continually shouting "Watch this!" these days, as they go about making baseball even more irrelevant than it already is. The game's capacity for self-harm has always been epic, but maybe never more so than now, when even the World Series goes into eclipse every time the Cowboys suit up.

MLB's solution to this: Hey, y'all! Let's have a lockout!

So no pitchers-and-catchers report this month, or any gooshy reveries about baseball heralding the coming of spring. Only silence beneath those high desert skies and tropical Florida ones.

But wait, there's more!

The owners' latest half-assed proposal to the players includes a provision that would enable them to axe hundreds of future minor-league playing jobs, including 30 alone from the Domestic Reserve List. This on top of telling 42 minor-league towns -- some of whom had supported baseball for a century or more -- to piss right off 14 months ago.

As a business strategy, it might make sense. As a growing-the-game strategy, it makes none.

The Blob is not going to get all gooshy itself and talk about dreaming boys with baseball gloves dangling from the handlebars of their bikes, and how their dreams just got a little less possible. But it does wonder how fewer minor-league roster spots advances anything but the already-bloated bank accounts of MLB and its owners.

Because the city where I live, Fort Wayne, has had a minor-league affiliate for almost three decades now, I've seen some things. I've seen kids come through here who went on to great baseball things, and I've seen kids who went on to sell mortgages and insurance and interest-free loans. 

Low-A ball, which was the Fort's designation until this past season, was the entry point or close to it for all of them. It was also the entry point, or close to it, to possibility-- and that possibility was the same for all of them.

And if Possibility ended in northeast Indiana?

At least it got to breathe it for awhile. At least a bunch of young baseball players got a few summers as certified members of Organized Baseball, and got paid to play a child's game.

Fewer minor-league players would mean fewer chances to do that.

Fewer minor-league players would mean MLB telling young men who fell hard for baseball as kids they're dead weight. It's telling them they're nothing more than negative assets the clubs need to clear off their books.

This is not the way you win back the next generation from basketball and football. 

This is the way you dim an already dimming game even further.

Geniuses, these people. I swear.