I just wanted you to know that this is me trying. At least I’m trying. — Taylor Swift
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The biggest problem with Jerry Dipoto’s quotes from Tuesday, when he said, “We’re actually doing the fanbase a favor by asking for their patience to win the World Series while we continue to build a sustainably good roster,” is not that he spoke at all.
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It’s also not a question of whether Dipoto, the Mariners’ president of baseball operations, has already bankrupted the patience that fans could rightly extend, or whether the goal he pointed to really makes sense.
“If you go back and you look in a decade, those teams that win 54 percent of the time always wind up in the postseason,” Dipoto told reporters in an end-of-season press conference. “And they, more often than not, wind up in the World Series. So there’s your bigger-picture issue. Nobody wants to hear the goal this year is, ‘We’re going to win 54 percent of the time.’”
The problem is that this mindset is just dreadfully, painfully boring. Soul sucking.
This is supposed to be one of the greatest leisure businesses in the world. Baseball is theater. The product is drama.
What is the great lesson of the successful rules changes this year, the pitch clock and so forth? That nothing is more paramount than entertainment. The new rules made the sport on aggregate more enjoyable, and the owners in turn reaped financial rewards.
Of course, were Dipoto a one-off, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But among lead executives, his approach is representative. His words are a reminder of a large problem that baseball’s powers, the owners and the league office, have not yet cared to attack.
Jerry Dipoto says he operates with a 10-year plan to win 54% of the time.
"We're actually doing the fanbase a favor in asking for their patience to win the World Series while we continue to build a sustainably good roster." pic.twitter.com/EUfd04TsTo
— Jake García (@Jake_M_Garcia) October 3, 2023
The sustainability fetish is in direct conflict with what drives people to sport, and a GM didn’t have to verbalize the issue for the problem to be apparent.
The 30-team circuit of the best professional baseball players in the world should be dazzling. And what is compelling is not only the nightly performances of such great athletes, but the efforts to create the best group of them, to one-up a rival nine. The goal of winning should feel consuming: in free agency, in trades, in spending, in the winter.
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Effort is discernible. Wasn’t it the wildest thing, oh, gosh, 20 years ago now, when the Red Sox were on the cusp of landing Alex Rodriguez via trade, only to have the Yankees swoop in? Those moments aren’t totally lost: maybe Shohei Ohtani provides a wild ride this winter.
But teams can also visibly display greater effort without spending the hundreds of millions it’ll take to get Ohtani. A few extra million here or there can go a long way. One additional piece, maybe two. But somehow, some way, try harder.
In a world so crowded with alternative ways for people to spend their time and money, the sustainability obsession is penny-wise and pound-foolish. If most every team is playing some sort of tepid Wall Street simulation, it comes at the sacrifice of drama that could actually be a separator for the sport overall — and for owners’ wallets.
Every competing product, from MLB right on down to Netflix and Apple TV+, can use as much distinction as it can muster. Yet baseball teams time and time again make promises that “Someday, we’ll be good, if you just stick around long enough.” (Fandom is really just brand loyalty on steroids, and boy, do the owners push it as far as they possibly can.)
It’s easy to argue that a typical, rational outside business might well behave the way Dipoto describes. Ignore for a moment that, as new Mets president David Stearns said this week, “a sports franchise is not a normal business.” Even if Dipoto is in fact some righteous warrior of rationality, then the answer is to make the behavior less rational. Change the CBA. Mitigate the incentive for owners to behave in a way that makes their game, what they sell, more boring.
But keeping baseball from its full potential for short-term cost savings also isn’t exactly rational.
When the league office — from Rob Manfred and his economics wiz Morgan Sword on down — pushed for the on-field rule changes this year, they did so because they really had no other choice. They did it because they could see baseball’s bottom line was in danger: adapt, or the revenues start to dry up, and then their own jobs and big salaries would be on the chopping block.
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The ideas weren’t sprung from foresight, but necessity. The league waited until the time-of-game and pace-of-action problems were too loud to ignore, and that’s typical of the commissioner’s office.
Look at all the TV woes. Only once the cable model started to collapse did the league make unwinding exclusivity deals and lessening blackouts a priority, and they’re still behind the 8-ball.
So with reactionaries rather than visionaries at the top of the sport, it’s hard to see the commissioner’s office finding the compulsion, the wisdom, to get more of its owners to back away from the nickel-and-diming obsession in service of a better overall product. Not until the shine of the rule changes wears off and they’re sitting around wondering, gee, how do we keep growing?
But the answers are right in front of them.
The Padres of 2023 assembled some massive names and contracts. They played terribly. The team also sold the most tickets in their franchise history, more than 3 million. They were interesting, a curiosity, and that sold. You don’t have to spend as much as the Padres to foster intrigue, either.
This winter, the Mariners should be giving people reasons to frantically call their friends: “Did you see who we just got!?” Stars and storylines should be the goal.
Instead, too many owners hawk a really lame adaptation of The Wolf of Wall Street. And in Seattle, it’s forever in previews.
(Photo of Dipoto: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)
