Who Owns Baseball?
By convention, sports in America is treated as news. Journalists who write about the movie that opened last night are called reviewers. Journalists who write about Julia Roberts's love life are called gossip columnists. But journalists who write about the baseball game that was played yesterday, or about Derek Jeter's new haircut, are called reporters. This essentially arbitrary distinction--between what are, after all, simply two types of privately owned entertainment business--is such a fantastic boon to the sports industry that it is hard to understand why anyone on the industry side of the arrangement would wish even to call attention to it. But Major League Baseball has. At the start of the season, it announced new restrictions (and the enforcement of some old restrictions that no one had paid much attention to) on the information that journalists gather at ballgames.
Major League Baseball wants to limit the use of the pictures that newspaper and magazine photographers take inside the park to news coverage of the game. It wants to prevent, for instance, a newspaper from using those pictures for its own commercial or promotional purposes without the permission of the baseball commissioner. In legal terms, Major League Baseball's position is that when a team issues a press pass to a reporter or a photographer it is licensing the use of a product that it owns--as when George Lucas licenses the manufacture of a Wookie doll. In setting off down this road, Major League Baseball is following the lead of the National Basketball Association, which is currently suing the Times for offering for sale on its Web site five pictures taken at the 1999 N.B.A. playoffs by the paper's photographers. The standard clause in the agreement that members of the press are supposed to enter into when they receive their credentials refers to any "account, description, [or] picture" of the game, and this suggests that Major League Baseball may hope to control the future use not only of photographs of the games but of written accounts as well. It is as though the writers were working for Major League Baseball, with their nominal employers, the newspapers, entitled to a onetime use of the material. The press, not surprisingly, is balking. "The underlying issue," George Freeman, the Times's lawyer on this matter, has said of Major League Baseball, "is that it views a baseball game as a private performance whose information it totally controls, rather than a public news event which ought to be in the public domain." Exactly.
The desire to control not only an event but the image of an event may seem vaguely Orwellian; but the image of an event, and nothing more palpable, is, in fact, what the sports business sells. You don't take a baseball game home and put it in your living room. You watch it, and, when it's over, the "accounts, descriptions, and pictures" are all that remain. In a sense, "accounts, descriptions, and pictures" are all that was there in the first place. What you get is entirely what you see. Since the cost of mounting the spectacle is huge, and is growing huger every year, some anxiety about sharing the income that flows from its consumption is natural. But does the cost really exceed the benefit? Major League Baseball is a business that enjoys free, extensive, and almost entirely upbeat publicity about its product every day, in virtually every newspaper and on almost every television news show in the country, and all on the theory that baseball is news, rather than merely entertainment. The notion that the people who cover baseball are "news gatherers" is crucial to the whole deal. It is what allows them to treat what happens on the field at Yankee Stadium as though it were more "real" than what happens on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera. It makes a ballgame a story, rather than a show.
There has been some talk about the press refusing to cover major-league baseball games unless a more satisfactory agreement can be worked out, but this is talk that newspaper publishers are unlikely to encourage. The exact percentage of Americans who buy a newspaper every day for the sole purpose of checking the scores is a fact that, if it were known, would probably not do much to boost the national self-esteem, for that percentage is undoubtedly substantial. Papers help sell sports, but sports help sell papers, too. A more diabolical method of protest would be to take Major League Baseball up on its insistence on treating its product as a private performance, and to cover the games in that spirit. If journalists wrote about baseball in the same way that they write about movies, the sports page would read very differently. Reporters would be obliged to point out how predictable and derivative most games are. They would note that a particular running catch in the outfield may look original and impressive but is actually a cheap knockoff of a play made by Willie Mays in an earlier performance. They would complain about how stale and conventional the intentional walk truly is (can managers invent no wittier way of putting a man on base?), or about how the promise held out in the first few innings of a game is so often betrayed in a bathetic finale of ground balls, pop-ups, and called third strikes. And then there is the dreadful cliché--how many times must we sit through it?--of the game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth, more often than not hit by the rookie shortstop, a scrappy home-town kid, up against the most grizzled and fearsome closer in the league. . . . No, it's too awful. Baseball cannot stand up to the standards of show business. It's better off pretending to be news.