Baseball and Football are fundamentally different in one very important respect.
Football is primarily a suburban sport in big stadiums that you reach on the interstate. Like Giants Stadium or Foxboro. Baseball especially the old line teams are much more urban playing on "Fields" in the inner city. Yankee Stadium. Fenway. Wrigley Field. Camden Yards.
The recent incident where they held the crowd back because of riots in the streets of Baltimore reminds me of how close to the edge the survival of baseball really is in the real world. Baseball has become a sport where white people pay a lot of money to see Hispanics play ball in a black neighborhood. Baseball has destroyed it's traditional working class clientèle. Or at least the Yankees and the Mets have in their ticket pricing policies and seat license fees for their new ball parks. The seats are all owned by corporations and businesses who take a write off. The old time season ticket holders are gone. Most working class or middle class people get their tickets in the resale market from Stub Hub or some other ticket exchange. The days where you would buy a Sunday plan or a weekday plan are gone because it is just too expensive. So you are not getting the real "fanatics" who come out by hell or high no matter what. Corporate people will not put their clients at risk. Who is going to give out tickets to clients who have to wait in the park until the rioting stops.
I remember the 1970's and 1980's when it was much the same. Yankee stadium was considered a war zone where people were afraid to bring their families. The rise in popularity of the Mets was in part directly attributable to the fact that people didn't want to go to the South Bronx. Those days are coming back. It seems that a lot of people don't want to pack into graffiti scarred packed trains to be harassed going in and going out of the ball park. Or walk a couple of blocks to their cars and dodge homeless beggars and squeegee men. You are not going to pay the big bucks and put up with that crap.
What happened it Baltimore this weekend is part and parcel of the racialism and resentment policy of Obama and the progressive movement. The entire power structure in Baltimore is black. The mayor. The city council. The police chief. A majority of the police force. But still there are riots and violence because of police misconduct. I don't know the rights and wrongs of that particular case but there is no reason for the riots and civil unrest before any investigation or trial. The sense of entitlement and racial resentment stoked by Obama and Holder and Sharpton and MSNBC and the New York Times is boiling over.
Baseball and their inner city stadiums might just be collateral damage.
