In his indictment of ”The business of baseball” (April 23), Douglas Bukowski wrote that ”baseball no longer concerns itself with the needs of the grandstand crowd. It is devoted to the preferred fans and their appetite for conspicuous consumption.”
Needless to say. And yet I`m glad somebody has finally said it. Fans would search the sports pages in vain for a writer willing-and able-to say it. Of course, by ”preferred fans” Bukowski means the important people-the ones for whom classic old ballparks get torn down and ”state-of-the-art”
stadiums get built, stadiums paid for by somebody else-preferably by the same fans against whose interest the old ballparks get torn down.
In today`s upside-down sports world, the fact that the ”preferred fans” are ”fans” means only that they can afford to lease a skybox.
Somewhere off in the distance, miles below the sanctuaries where the
”preferred fans” recline, beyond the outfield fence on the other side of the stadium, the unimportant people sit, non-preferred. And the seats allotted to them keep shrinking in number. Neither baseball nor sport in general is theirs anymore.
