Goldman’s baseball quotables #9: Andrew McCutchen is the cure

Henry Ford said the above in March, 1931, at a point at which the Great Depression hadn’t yet reached its nadir. The official unemployment rate that year, which most historians agree was vastly undercounted both in terms of raw numbers and effect, was about 16 percent. There were breadlines, hunger marches, whole cities-within-cities of the homeless living in makeshift dwellings of tarpaper and packing boxes. Ford, who had promised to maintain employment and wages despite the downturn, soon was forced to renege, which led to some murderously bloody riots in Dearborn. In short, Ford was way, way, waaaaaaay off.

Today’s quote was, by far, not the dumbest thing that Henry Ford ever said -- as “great” Americans go, he was a spectacularly ignorant man -- but I use it without irony. These are great baseball times, but only a few know it.

Throughout the season, the estimable Craig Calcaterra over at Hardball Talk has been cataloguing recurrent examples of the experts pronouncing baseball dead, dying, putrefied. In truth, he’s been doing this for years, and if he keeps going he’ll never run out of material, because as he well knows, for some reason people have wanted to say the mourner’s prayer over baseball virtually from the moment that General Doubleday didn’t invent it.

The example I’ve linked here features the suggestion that Derek Jeter will “go down as baseball’s last famous player.” Well, maybe, but I’m not sure why we should care. There are famous pro bowlers now too, but they’re only famous to some people, famous comic-book artists, but the same thing is true -- comic-book fans know them and many others don’t. To springboard off of something an old Baseball Pajamas colleague said to me, there’s famous, there’s niche-famous, and there’s niche-niche famous. The world is big enough that even if baseball in a post-Jeter world shrinks to niche-niche famous, that’s a lot of people who know you.

Baseball has “lost” Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, survived the Black Sox and Bud Selig... It can get by without Derek Jeter. The Yankees are a big enough mess that it might be awhile before the flagship franchise throws another hero up the pop charts, but in the meantime our other media capital, Los Angeles, is happy to let the rest of the nation borrow Yasiel Puig for a while. (Or Mike Trout, if you believe the lie that Anaheim is Los Angeles.)

Yes, attendance is static or a little down at best, but as this article about the struggles of chain restaurants like the Olive Garden suggests, or as the table here flat-out states, the recovery from 2008 has not spread equally to all sectors of the economy, and businesses that need to sell their product to the middle class are having a hard time of it. That in no way suggests that the OG’s generally horrible product is in any way equivalent to Major League Baseball’s, but that they have some customers and customer-problems in common:

What OG and other sit-down chains offer is in essence escapist kitsch. Come, eat your $14 dinner, drink your nine-ounce pour of wine, enjoy unlimited breadsticks, feel safe. But in this economy, transmitting a feeling of security through a plate of salty, reasonably priced carbohydrates seems a task far beyond any restaurant chain, no matter how well run.

Baseball costs a lot more than $14/person, and its attendance may remain static until the 99 percent gets a little of its own back, if it ever does. Again, I’m not sure why so many pundits want to make that the fan’s problem. It’s Rob Manfred’s problem. It’s whoever follows Barack Obama’s problem. Whether baseball is the National Pastime or a tiny cult, the game will go on and give its audience some excellent players to root for, many of them better than Derek Jeter, who was very, very good for a very long time and will rightfully take his place in the Hall of Fame but ain’t the end-all be-all of anything.

If you add up the home attendance of every team so far this year, you get 69,027,520. Add in all the people watching on television and that’s an awfully large niche-niche. If a full half of them drop out in 2015 AD (After Derek), that’s still a pretty big crowd to appreciate those that follow in his wake. You know, the little, unimportant guys: Trout, Clayton Kershaw, King Felix, Giancarlo Stanton, Josh Donaldson, Miguel Cabrera, Buster Posey, Chris Sale, and on and on to, by no means last, the man above, last year’s National League MVP award-winner, Andrew McCutchen.

The Pirates have every chance of winning a wild-card slot, so we should have the pleasure of another October showcase for McCutchen in just a couple of weeks. Tune in. It will make you forget all about the age-40 foibles of Derek Jeter, whose era really ended two years ago.

These really are good times, but only a few know it.