It started with the unfathomable - a tragedy on the biggest American stage. Super Bowl 53, in the sparkling alien spaceship that is Mercedes-Benz Stadium in downtown Atlanta. Tom Brady, soon-to-be-six-time Super Bowl champ, poster boy quarterback of the New England Patriots, husband to a supermodel, an MVP-caliber player at 41, lines up behind center to take a snap versus the NFC Champion Los Angeles Rams. It’s midway through the second quarter of a scoreless game.
The next play would wound the American consciousness and change the course of sports history in this country forever.
Rams defensive coordinator Wade Phillips, a heterodox strategist if there ever was one, dials up a ballsy play call: a double-corner blitz, in which both defensive backs ignore the wide receivers they are usually tasked with covering and sprint straight for the quarterback. It’s a preposterously risky move - no NFL team had run a double-corner blitz all season - and against a laser-precision ball-throwing machine like Tom Brady, practically a suicidal one.
Brady takes the snap and drops back to pass, just as he’s done thousands of times as a professional. Cornerbacks Marcus Peters and Nickell Robey-Coleman blast over the line of scrimmage, chugging toward their target, just outside of his peripheral vision to the right and to the left. At the same time, all 6’1” and 280 pounds of defensive tackle Aaron Donald explode through the Patriots’ offensive line. Brady’s mind registers this, and that he’s going to have to take a sack. There’s no time to do anything else.
All three Rams defenders converge on Brady simultaneously from three sides. The crunch is just as sickening as any other hit in a pro football game.
Brady is limp on the ground as the Rams celebrate the sack. The ball rolls out of his ragdoll hand back toward the line of scrimmage.
He doesn’t get up.
Years later, people will remember where they were when Tom fell, just as well as they remember the Twin Towers falling. TV announcers Jim Nantz and Tony Romo try to fill the air with gravitas as the nation stares uncomprehending at the crumpled quarterback. The camera cuts to Patriots owner Bob Kraft in his luxury suite as a medical aide rushes up to whisper something in his ear. The viewers don’t know, but they know. Tom Brady is dead.
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There’s only so much you can say about a tragedy without ending up in cliches. But we can talk about its effects, the way the world changed concretely in its wake. And in this case, what football lost - the sport-watching public’s soul - was baseball’s to gain.
Needless to say, football was never the same after Super Bowl 53. The NFL, a league which had obsessed over its image, over “protecting the shield” for so long, had just delivered live footage of a brutal manslaughter into every living room, smartphone, and Buffalo Wild Wings in America. The league never played another season after Tom Brady’s death. But there was no decrease in the demand for sports, for talk radio fodder, for Instagrammable highlight reels, for (strictly legal) sports betting action, for athletic entertainments targeted to the median cud-chewing American cable television subscriber.
Of course, it had to be baseball. For a public forced to confront every morning the rapidly approaching end of history at the hand of a psychedelically postmodern President, increasingly disgusted by the violence of the infinite American imperial war machine, and still reeling from the shock of seeing Tom Brady’s corpse on their flatscreens, the bucolic peacefulness and downright boringness of the nation’s original pastime was a welcome relief. The vast, empty boredom of baseball (sprinkled with moments of sheer joy, terror, or excitement, of course) was a feature, not a bug.
But - crucially - it wasn’t just the absence of the NFL that left the country with a gaping sports hole to fill. Nearly every high school in every small-time backwood one-elevator town, and in the larger televangelist suburbs and in the urban cores, shut down their football teams. The national hootenanny of NCAA Football, and all its attendant tailgating, pageantry, and message-board wailing, ceased to exist before summer arrived. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in the fall - for so long, sacred appointments where boys could become men and men could become legends - were suddenly just regular days on the calendar.
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Credit where credit is rarely due - Major League Baseball’s 30 owners, a bilious bunch of wax-faced animate corpses with net worths clear into the billions, who like a pack of rabid private equity firms up to this point concerned themselves mostly with siphoning as much cash as they could off of baseball’s managed decline into relative obscurity, saw an opportunity also to profit off of football’s tragedy. And in this case, for once, their gain was ours as well.
Erstwhile Commissioner Rob Manfred, a khaki-souled lawyer whose approach to improving baseball was to give the public less baseball in the form of militant pace-of-play and game-shortening initiatives, was cast aside in favor of a new Commissioner: a shadowy figure never seen in public and known only as Mr. X. Empowered with dictatorial control over the sport, Mr. X immediately made a series of moves to capitalize on football’s collapse and solidify baseball as the object of the public’s affection.
Step one: emancipation of the minor leagues from their longtime serfdom as farm teams for the big league clubs. All 60 AA and AAA clubs would immediately become full-fledged professional teams - albeit smaller, with worse players, and in crappier towns than their 30 major-league counterparts. Mr. X shrewdly realized that the real attention gap created by football’s abrupt demise was not in the big-league towns, where baseball had always competed with football, basketball, hockey, and everything else for attention, but at the high school and college level. In cities that had poured their hearts and souls onto the gridiron there would be a need for an emotional connection with athletes on a field. Suburbs where the high school football coach makes more than the mayor, police chief, and school superintendent combined. Small towns with three blocks of cutesy old main street, one jail, and a high school football stadium that seats 10,000. These are the communities that would re-energize the game.
Four up, four down. It’s a simple idea. Every year, the top four AAA clubs get a ticket to the Show. The top four AA teams get sent to AAA. And the four worst major league teams are sent down to AAA. A unified draft system, where the rights to amateur players are doled out to all 90 professional teams one at a time. It’s a fair system, even if it has the stink of European soccer on it. It eliminates tanking, first of all - no incentive to be last if you’re getting sent down a level. But even more importantly, it supercharges the virtue most particular to baseball: hope. Foolish hope, eternal hope, physically unhealthy levels of hope in a group of men you’ve never met. Hope that the Hartford Yard Goats will one day take the field in Fenway against the Red Sox. Hope that your hated rivals will be sent down to the minor leagues. Hope that your local nine from the eastern part of nowhere will one day call themselves World Series champions.
Mr. X called it the American Baseball Association - 90 Teams, 1 Dream (tm). Media distribution deals were inked quickly - think of the panic at CBS and FOX when the NFL was cancelled - bringing unheard-of levels of cash into previously decrepit baseball markets. Frisco, Corpus Christi, Biloxi, Scranton, and every other minor-league town have circled April 1 on the calendar. An Opening Day for a new era of baseball, where the sport is second to nothing. A new dawn over a land where baseball, after its long walk in the darkness, is once again king.
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