Failure's Batting Order
by Bob Cook

Opening Day was, what, Tuesday or something? Do you care? Apparently I don't, not knowing exactly when Opening Day was.

For baseball fans, Opening Day is a time when hope springs eternal, the time that the great writer Boswell (Thomas, that is) declared that life begins. For most of us, it's a time to guess exactly how this year baseball will again thrive despite shooting itself in the foot multiple times.

The PR nightmares on deck include:

1. Barry Bonds passing Hank Aaron's career home run record.

Bonds is only 22 home runs away from No. 756, and it won't be a happy occasion when he sets sports' most hallowed record. As the last one standing from the start of the steroid era — and an unrepentent jagoff — Bonds is the antihero to the extreme. It's not even clear (as in apparent, not as in, the Cream and the Clear) that commissioner Bud Selig will make it a point to be in attendance for No. 756, the stink around Bonds is so great. But then again, won't it look just as bad if Selig isn't there? Let's be clear (as in apparent, not as in... you know): for most of Bonds career, he appeared to be drug-free, and reportedly only started taking performance-enhancing drugs late in his career when he believed other elite players were, and when it still was not barred under baseball rules. Plus, Selig sitting out brings up unhappy memories of another white commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, failing to show up for Aaron's then-record setting No. 715 in 1974, which brings us to...

2. The lack of black major-league ballplayers.

During spring training, C.C. Sabathia of Cleveland bemoaned the lack of black players in his locker room, which will have no black Americans but him for the second straight year. Detroit's Gary Sheffield claimed owners promoted white players as the faces of their franchises. Clearly (I'm off of Barry Bonds, so I won't differentiate between the use of "clear" anymore), baseball and black people are not mixing.

The sport of Jackie Robinson has seen a long, steady decline in black American players. Only 8.5 percent of major leaguers were African-American, according to a 2005 report by the University of Central Florida Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. The institute said that's the lowest percentage recorded in the two decades since the annual study began. Whites made up 59.5 percent of major-league rosters, Latinos 28.7 percent and Asians 2.5 percent.

There's a chicken-and-egg question baseball has to answer — what happened first, the decline in the number of black ballplayers, or the decline in black interest in playing ball in the first place? Players such as Sabathia are doing their part to establish inner-city leagues or other ways to create future black major-leaguers, but it appears baseball is not being seen as a "black" sport.

My local high school, Richards in Oak Lawn, Ill., Dwyane Wade's alma mater, is roughly 40 percent black. But on the baseball team, it's all white. Meanwhile, basketball is all black. The PR problem baseball faces is not controlling what goes on at Richards High, but showing that it cares that black participation in every way is declining.

Speaking of declining participation...

3. Baseball's Extra Innings exclusive with DirecTV.

Ask NFL fans without DirecTV what they think of that league's exclusive deal with the satellite network, and without fail they will tell you they hate it. NFL fans would love to pay big money to have access to every game on every day one is played, but they don't want to have to get DirecTV to do it.

So why would baseball go down the same road? Easy: DirecTV is paying a load of money to be the exclusive provider. (You can look up yourself how much — suffice to say, it was a lot.) Now, instead of anyone with any dish or cable system getting access to every game, you have to rip out your system for a provider you don't want.

Despite attendance being as high as it's ever been, there's still a sense that baseball has a knack for doing whatever it can to turn off fans. This deal is one more exhibit.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.