The Sports Bizzo

By Jon…

As most of you have noticed, I’ve been a bit absent from the Bizzo of late. It’s not without reason, I started a new job about a month and a half ago. A job where I don’t sit at a computer all day and peruse sports news sites. Also, it’s baseball season. I still maintain that I am a fan of baseball, but at this point, I’m nothing more than a casual fan. The sport of baseball as a whole has just lost a lot of it’s luster for me. As a kid, I ate, slept, and breathed baseball. Baseball stats, baseball history, baseball cards.

And then when I was 13, I lost my favorite Yankees hat. I left it at a Chili’s in Mesquite. It was the best hat I ever had. It was fitted, I’d broken it in, and most importantly, it was a pre-New Era design. I tried to replace it sometime later with a New Era hat, and it just wasn’t the same. The problem with the New Era hats is the way they’re shaped. The front of the hat goes straight up off the head, not conforming to the shape of your dome the way the pre-New Era hats did. Being a small dude with a big hat equals not cool.

To make a long introduction short, when I lost that hat, I think I lost my love for baseball. In the ensuing years, my interest in football and basketball picked up significantly and my interest in baseball began to wane. There was a brief resurgence during the McGwire-Sosa-Bonds Home Run Extravaganza, but that all fell to pieces when the Steroid allegations started to come out. I was tired of baseball. I’m still, for the most part, tired of baseball. The season drags on, some of the games can be excruciating to watch. In fact, on a given day, I’d rather subject myself to a root canal than a National League game.

But all of this could change with one decision.

No, it’s not unifying the leagues with one set of rules, either eliminating or fully adopting the DH rule. Nor is it speeding up the games. Nope, the future of my baseball watching career all hinges on one man:

Mark Cuban.

If baseball knows what’s good for it, and it doesn’t, it should make sure Mark Cuban buys the Cubs. If baseball intends to attract a new generation of fans, a generation, mind you, that has an ever-decreasing attention span, it should make sure Mark Cuban buys the Cubs.

Mark Cuban can do for Baseball what he did for the Mavericks: Make them relevant again.

He took the Mavericks from being one of the worst professional franchises in any sport to one of the most profitable and successful teams in the NBA in less than 10 years. And he’s done all of this with the restrictions of a salary cap and in a city where absolutely no one cares about a team unless they’re winning

Now put him in Chicago, a city with a rich baseball history and an already rabid fan base, and give him the benefit of a non-existent salary cap, and I guarantee the Cubbies capture the title that has eluded them for a century.

The biggest Problem Cuban faces is the other owners. None of them want Cuban in the league. His reputation precedes. They see him as the loud-mouthed maniac trolling the sidelines at Mavericks games and garnering fines from commissioner and arch-nemesis David Stern. Hell, I see him that way, too, but I love it. He’s a fan’s owner, a guy who puts his money where his mouth his. He wants the game to be fair and just, but is always looking for ways to improve it.

Therein lies the rub.

Baseball has always been notorious for fearing change, keeping with the tradition of the “National Pastime”, and generally, being boring.

Well, here’s a newsflash for you, owners: Your league is dying, it’s in the midst of one federal investigation for steroids, and about to embark on another one, with the news of 8 scouts running a gambling ring. Not to mention the allegations of agents and team personnel skimming money off of talent-rich, but financially poor Dominican prospects. And your concern is that you don’t want the kind of publicity that Mark Cuban attracts?

Cuban respond to his own antics on his blog saying, “To this day, it seems that every mention of me, whether it relates to basketball or not has to mention my being fined by the NBA in some manner, although the only time I have been fined in the last 5 years was during the 2006 playoffs.”

And the whole “National Pastime” thing is a joke. If this were a title that was voted on or passed around based on what people were actually watching, football would have taken the crown years ago. The Super Bowl is practically a national holiday. The World Series just pisses people off because their DVR accidentally records Game 2 instead of the Season 2 reruns of “Bones” or whatever other mediocre prime time crime drama they’d rather be watching.

Put it this way: The Cubans are way better than us at a game we invented, why not allow one of them to own one of our teams, even if it’s in name only?