George Mitchell has said that baseball is rotten to its core. Not in those words, but he paints a picture of a widespread, ingrained culture of cheating in baseball.
The problem seems so deep that Mitchell recommends that no punishments be handed out—probably because the league, the owners (yes, same thing) and the player union are as much to blame as individual players.
But call it what you want...punishment, atonement, penance, even reparations...the institution of baseball owes their fans something for the deep level of corruption they have sunk to.
Our civil torts system has a concept of punitive damages in order to "reform or deter" the offending party or other parties—like the NBA or NFL—from repeating the offending action again.
Certainly the fans of basebase deserve punitive damages for 2 decades of cheating. I know this is a fantasy, but it really is the right karmic thing to happen. To bad life does not run on real Karma.
A fair and very reasonable punitive award would be free baseball for a year.
That’s right. All seats for all major league baseball games next season should be FREE. No one would go broke, there’s still millions of TV dollars that would keep the trains running, but everyone...the owners and ball players would all take a big hit on their 7 and 8 figure incomes to adjust to the lose of the gate. Offhand, I don’t know what that will be. I’ll figure 50% in reduced income. Maybe more and I don’t care. So people making $2 million a year may face making $200,000 for a year, before they’re back up to $2 million the next year. I’m sure some yahts will have to be sold and the purchase of Bentleys will be deferred. But baseball will bounce right back.
Season ticket holders would reap a free year and a significant portion of the regular sale fo seats would be given to low-income populations.
Of course this won’t happen in the world we live in. But we can at least conceive what the appropreiate punshiment should be for the voilation of a social contract between the powers within baseball and the fans that have made them rich.