Deadball era

 The Major League Baseball season begins today, and so does the Masters golf tournament, and I'll give you three guesses which one will dominate the sports pages of your hedge-fund-pillaged local newspaper. 

Here's a hint: It won't be the one that's played with the larger ball.

It will be the Masters, of course, just like it's some random Jaguars-Panthers game in the fall, just like it's ... I don't know, "Law & Order: Mayberry" or some such thing. Andy and Barn chase down dirtbags; Fred Thompson orders Sam Waterston to plead 'em out. Fun!

Baseball, meanwhile, is a Pastime past its time, as the Blob and a million others have long noted. Every indice points toward a different sort of deadball era: Falling attendance, revenues artificially propped up by TV money, owners who are only in it for said money (Looking at, you, Pittsburgh Pirates). Combine that with an aging fan base that will soon be pushing up daisies, and you've got a game that's about to push up daisies itself.

Or so says a piece that ran this week in the New York Times.

A contributor named Matthew Walther posited that baseball is dying, and the only thing that can save it is the federal government taking it over. It's an argument Walther makes well up until his solution, which seems potholed by unintended consequences at best and as potentially disastrous as Venezuela nationalizing its oil industry at worst.

For instance: Walther admits, almost breezily, that a federalized MLB would perhaps drastically cut player salaries. I can't imagine the players' union sitting still for that, unless federalizing the game would also mean busting the union. In which case the players might leave to form their own league, as has happened before.

And what of free agency? Do we go back to the hallowed days of the reserve clause?

Perhaps it's simply a lack of imagination on my part, but I can't get my head around an MLB in which the job of manager is an elected position and the GM is appointed by the governor, as Walther suggests. A six-year term for a manager? What if he turns out to be a complete mushwit? 

Six years of dunderheaded managing would have fans setting fires in the outfield bleachers. And as for the GM ... what if he's the governor's idiot brother-in-law? Because nepotism has never determined political appointments, no, sirree.

The whole thing sounds so next-door-to-outlandish the Blob is tempted to think Walther is shining us on, and that his piece is just extremely clever satire. It doesn't read that way, but the Blob has been fooled by clever satire before. So, maybe ...

But no. The author seems in deadly earnest. And so the Blob will play along, and note that at least one aspect of Walther's vision sounds good to me: Federalizing the game would mean the cheapskate owner of my Pittsburgh Cruds would be out on his ear.

Now that I could live with.