In "Fair Ball: A Fan's Case for Baseball", Bob Costas who made his celebrity for many years off NBC Sports makes the case for bringing back the fans, many of whom were turned off the game after the 1994 strike.
Although I'm not a fan of Costas' commentary, I liked a lot of his arguments in this book. The one argument that I agreed wholeheartedly was to scrap the wild card.
It was a...
more In "Fair Ball: A Fan's Case for Baseball", Bob Costas who made his celebrity for many years off NBC Sports makes the case for bringing back the fans, many of whom were turned off the game after the 1994 strike.
Although I'm not a fan of Costas' commentary, I liked a lot of his arguments in this book. The one argument that I agreed wholeheartedly was to scrap the wild card.
It was a brilliant argument in that if Major League Baseball, scrapped the wildcard in favour of the first round byes for the regular season's best records, MLB would be able to bring back the excitement of September pennant races and renew the interest of major television networks in carrying playoff baseball games again.
Currently, TBS, Fox and ESPN carried games which used to be carried by major networks such as ABC, CBS and NBC in decades past, prior to 1994.
In addition, Costas also touches on the problems of the economics of baseball where the lack of a salary cap or cost containment has allowed large market teams such as the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox to pay only a luxury tax to field the best baseball teams at the expense of medium and small market baseball teams.
Overall, a good read and if you listen to the audio version, Costas does an excellent job in laying out his arguments. For Toronto Blue Jays' fans, this book will also touch on how baseball owners in the United States began to panic and started thinking about making their league more like the NFL with wild cards and trying to market to NBA fans who were being dazzled in the Air Jordan era of Michael Jordan's three NBA Championships with the Chicago Bulls between 1991-1993 before his first retirement.
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