Growing up in Redwood City, California, on the San Francisco peninsula about an hour south of “The City,” the Giants were the local team and Candlestick Park was a wondrous place.
A few years after I lost interest in playing Little League baseball, I began to really get into listening to Giants games on my transistor radio about the age of 13 in 1973. If you were a Giants fan in the 1970s, you became used to hearing about the lack of fans at the games.
It was common for owners and players blaming the customers for not coming out to see a mediocre product in a ballpark that was not easy to get to from anywhere except the rundown neighborhood it bordered.
As I got older, I realized how messed up it was for any business to complain about its customers, and remembered thinking that people would laugh at a bowling alley owner for doing that. But when MLB owners said it, the media would treat it as if there might be truth to it.
It’s 100 percent about being entitled. MLB owners have territorial rights. Even if they have to share a market with another team, they are essentially shielded from competition from other pro baseball operators, and belong to a crime family of owners who by determining which cities can host one of the 30 MLB teams, excel at blackmailing local elected officials to get sweet stadium and tax deals.
And when one hears the kind of bile spewing from the Oakland Athletics’ owner, John Fisher, who inherited his wealth from the founders of the Gap, it is a clear sign that one is dealing with an excessive sense of entitlement.
I used to think this was limited to the world of American pro sports, but I’ve since realized that America’s political system creates the same atmosphere of entitlement in election districts that are gerrymandered in one party’s favor so strongly that even the most vile candidates are electable.
I can’t remember who it was who said, “Power does not necessarily corrupt, but it does expose one’s character for better or worse.” But, when one gives power or influence to someone who believes they are entitled to it, you get a shit sandwich.
On Saturday, there was a major league example of that when Donald Trump, speaking at an event intended to raise awareness of antisemitism, said, “If I don’t win this election – and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because if 40%, I mean, 60% of the people are voting for the enemy.”
By “the enemy” he meant the candidate of the other party, further highlighting the extreme sense of entitlement that is central to America’s MAGA extremists, that rejects compromise and debate for the general welfare of the nation in favor of advancing an unpopular view favored by a small minority with power and influence.
We live among people who look to their left at the hottest summer in history, at rising ocean levels, and then look to the right and see how much better off they as individual can be if they take bundles of cash from the fossil-fuel industry and declare global warning a fraud.
Thus, it’s no surprise that MLB owners, America’s most entitled business people, see Trump as a kindred spirit, someone who calls himself self-made but whose fortune came from his father’s ability to exploit government building-program loopholes and then avoid paying his share of taxes on those profits.
These entitled billionaires now wave the banner for white Americans whose parents and grandparents raised themselves up and created wealth with a helping hand from government programs that provided quality education and opportunities.
MLB owners, who happily take taxpayer handouts as their due, are all about calling protection for families and labor “socialism” even though virtually all of them got where they are because those programs helped their hard-working parents and grandparents build wealth.
I get people who scrape by not wanting to pay taxes to support those less fortunate, but the people leading that fight against government programs are the ultrawealthy who pay virtually no taxes and complain about the national debt that their tax breaks helped build.
These owners are the ones behind the “Save America’s Pastime Act,” the legislation meant to strip minor league professional baseball players of labor protections they might be entitled to, such as a minimum wage, because unlike handouts to billionaires, paying fair wages to ballplayers whose sweat greases the wheels of the machine that lines owners’ pockets would be socialism.
