We Wuz Robbed

If baseball is going to abandon the poor, then I’m going to abandon baseball.

Photo by Joshua Peacock on Unsplash

With people dying in Ukraine, the overturning of Roe V Wade, and the diminishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the fate of baseball in America may seem like a trivial concern. But after a hard week of fighting the fight for climate remediation, social justice, and economic equality, I was more than disappointed to learn that I would be unable to watch Friday night’s Mets game without a subscription to NBC Peacock. It wasn’t just the loss of my weekly relaxation ritual. It felt to me as if the privatization of baseball represented the final surrender of our shared values and experiences as a people to the short-term interests of the market.

I realize this is just the latest stage in a longer process. When I was a kid, we could watch baseball games on broadcast television. Here in New York, the Mets were on WOR channel 9, and the Yankees were on WPIX channel 11. It seemed as if everyone could afford a television set, or at least get to a friend who had one. Cheaper black and white sets could be purchased new for less than sixty bucks, or just ten or fifteen at a thrift store. Almost everyone who lived indoors in New York City also had a TV set.

But over the years, games moved from free broadcast channels to basic cable, and then to…