Ken Burns UNUM

- Hi, this is Ken Burns with another UNUM Chat.

It's a really good and exciting one today.

And I don't usually sort of mark when we do this, 'cause we record on one day and we edit and we release it and it's evergreen and all of that, but I have to tell you that today is February 12th.

It is Lincoln's birthday today, very important person in my life, and I hope in yours as well.

It's two days from Valentine's Day, which many people like, but what's more important about Valentine's Day this year is that it's the beginning of pitchers and catchers reporting on Valentine's Day, which means that unlike Punxsutawney Phil who is notoriously unreliable about the approach of spring, pitchers and catchers most definitely tell you that the greatest game in the world is about to start shortly and the orchestra is tuning up, and that's a really great thing.

Another great harmonic convergence today is that we have two Kens talking.

I am not sure how much dissonance that will produce, but we are so honored to have Ken Rosenthal with you.

He's a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, which of course was founded by Benjamin Franklin, which we just did a couple films back a film on, which we were excited to know, and I gave the commencement there a year and a half ago.

His first real big job was with "The Baltimore Sun," which is sort of interesting because my first Major League game in '58, 1958 or '59 was at Memorial Stadium.

And the Orioles are in the process perhaps of being bought by David Rubenstein, the great patriotic philanthropist who is in fact the endower of our UNUM project.

So we can't think of a more perfect kind of day and conversation.

Ken, of course, went on to be an extraordinarily great sports writer and reporter in Fox Baseball and MLB Network, and we're so pleased to grab him, because of course, in two days he'll probably disappear into the cosmos that is baseball.

So, I thought it was a good time now, because we have such an important expert, to talk a little bit about the state of professional baseball in its context of its 150-plus year history.

I'm always gonna vote that it went back even farther than that.

Ken, first of all, welcome.

We're so happy to have you in conversation today.

- Well, thanks, Ken.

Honored to be here.

- Let me just, I wanna talk and do some questions in groups so that I gave you time to talk.

I wanted to move to the most recent rule changes, which were predominantly designed to reduce the length of the game, and let me read a few stats to you.

In 2021, the average game was 190 minutes.

Those of you who can't convert, that's three hours and 10 minutes.

In 2023 it was 160 minutes, a 30-minute drop in two years.

In 2021 there were 107 games that lasted four hours or more.

In 2023, there were just six.

There was a concern that players were not gonna be able to adapt to the new rules.

By September of last season, the number of pitcher violations per game was a third of what it was at the beginning of the year.

And most importantly, scoring in action was up dramatically.

Over 1,600 more runs than the year before, nearly 1,300 more stolen bases, one of my favorite things, more than 1,100 more hits, nearly 1,500 more base runners.

To quote you, "the first season of rule change baseball was a triumph."

So let's dig down in it.

Why did it take us so long?

Do you think the success of last year will compel the league to look at making more changes?

What do you think they look like?

What's the player/team sentiment about the changes going into year two, and what evidence do we have that these changes have resulted in any appreciable higher TV ratings or attendance?

Whole big package to unwrap.

The floor is yours.

- I'll do my best.

What took so long is that baseball is a sport that moves glacially, and baseball also has a player's union that opposed many of these changes.

And it took the commissioner, Rob Manfred, some time to get his head wrapped around the idea that he could do this unilaterally.

He knew he could do it, he just didn't wanna fight the union over it.

So for years he would make proposals and they would get rejected.

And finally he did what is permitted of him in the collective bargaining agreement and finally said, "Okay, we're going to do this."

And he unilaterally implemented the three big changes; the clock, the stolen base thing with the bases being what they were, and just in general changed the game.

Defensive shifts were banned as well.

So that is what took so long.

And obviously looking back now, we all can say, oh, this should have happened years ago, but that is baseball.

That is the way it works.

Now, as far as more changes going forward, this was the greatest set of changes, I believe, in any sport at any time in recent memory.

So to go further now I don't believe is necessary, I don't believe it's warranted, and I don't believe it will happen, because really the sport seems to be in a good place.

Now, you could argue that some tweaks can be made.

That's fine, and you could argue that the clock should be longer or shorter, whatever the case might be.

But, at the same time, I don't know that anyone wants to do anything more dramatic, or really, I can't even think of a rule necessarily, outside of maybe changing the extra inning rule back to what it was, that I would want to see implemented.

As for players and teams, what they wanted, most players were coming from the minors, right?

Who had been accustomed to a pitch clock.

They knew and understood the rhythm that the game was about to change into.

The older players, veteran pitchers in particular, they had some problems with it and some of the outspoken ones were some of the more accomplished pitchers of our time, Max Scherzer being most prominent among them.

For the most part, that conversation has quieted down.

The question that lingers is whether the clock has had a detrimental effect on pitcher health.

And that's not something we have an answer to.

And they're trimming it again this year a little bit, and we'll see where it goes with injuries.

It's not as if pitchers weren't getting hurt before.

They were getting hurt in huge numbers before.

So that's something to watch, and it's something that obviously the sport is going to need to monitor carefully, but they are thrilled with how this has all played out, which brings us to attendance.

Last year attendance was 70 million plus.

That was for the first time since 2017, second biggest attendance ever.

It was up about 10% over 2022.

That's a huge jump.

Now, is it all due to the changes?

I don't know that you can say that.

We're still another year removed from COVID.

That makes fans more comfortable.

But certainly, the changes were well received.

I don't know that anyone said, "Wow, this is bad.

I wish we could go back to 3 1/2 hour games."

So all things look good.

The TV ratings too, Ken, they were, in the regional sense, the regional networks up overall.

Now, some teams were up, some teams were down, some teams were stagnant, but overall up about 7% for the season for the regional networks.

The national networks like Fox where I work, not necessarily up, but that's also contingent on other things.

For instance, the World Series.

We had the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Texas Rangers, not a sexy matchup from a national perspective.

It's not Yankees, Dodgers.

And this sport doesn't do what the Super Bowl does, doesn't command the national attention unless certain teams are involved.

But overall, there is no way for anyone involved with the sport really to say that these changes were anything but a success.

- Yeah, I sort of felt that it was good, up in New England in Red Sox Nation, it was really wonderful to watch.

And I'm thinking back about all the big changes, live ball, dead ball, raise the mound, lower the mound, designated hitter, you know, all the sorts of things that have gone, and I think really this is a sea change that I don't think we've ever seen this many things at once that had so instantaneously a profound effect on how the game was played, and more importantly, how it's received by the fans who are gonna be the ultimate arbiters of the game's success.

- Yeah, it was interesting too, as the season went on, an East Coast game might start at seven o'clock, or any time zone might start at seven o'clock and games were ending by 9:30.

And for fans, for writers, it was a welcome change.

- Yeah, well, I was working on our baseball series, and the biggest lament that was heard on the sides, not on camera so much, this is back in the early '90s, was that, you know, as a kid you'd come home from school and you'd watch the World Series game, or you were let out from school.

Now they're on at night and they run till midnight, and there's not a parent that, responsible parent, who, like, lets a kid on a school night stay up that long.

And so there was a sense that we were, you know, hurting ourselves and the perpetuation of the game by not creating new fans.

You know, dads and moms who love the game are always gonna bring them and there's nothing more magical, you know, than going to a ballpark.

You know, football's a really great sport.

Everybody loves it.

It's a wonderful sport.

But when you go and describe something, you just describe the action on the field.

But a baseball game always begins, my dad or my mom took me, and I remember coming out and seeing the green, and then all of a sudden everything, then whatever Mickey Mantle did or Ted Williams did or Maury Wills, the number of bases he stole, follows.

But it's all based on who you saw it with, which is why it's the greatest game ever invented.

And I think when you say some teams did more or less, and you talk about the question of the Diamondbacks and the Rangers coming together, not as sexy or a big market enough group that's gonna make it a national event.

And there's lots of complicated reasons.

It used to be this was the national pastime.

There was nothing else except professional boxing and everything else was kind of minor and it was the national pastime.

It still is, but it competes with lots of other things for the eyeballs that do that.

So I wanna talk a little bit about, again, the slowness of baseball to adopt something that's been, at least at first blush obvious to other sports and particularly football, and that's parity and a salary cap.

So let's talk about that and the economic model of the sport, particularly the salary cap.

We're halfway through the current CBA.

That's the collective bargaining agreement that you referenced.

That's between Major League Baseball and the Baseball Players Association, both of whom, since the advent of the terrible free agency, have done incredibly well.

(Ken Rosenthal laughing) It was the end of the game, but it's been nothing but remarkable.

Baseball is the only major US professional sport without a salary cap.

The difference in payroll between the top spending team, the New York Yankees, and the lowest spending team, the Oakland Athletics, is $255 million per year.

And yet, you could argue that there's never been more parity in the sport.

There hasn't been a repeat World Series champion in more than two decades, while the NFL and the NBA, both of which have salary caps, have all had repeat champions.

And because this is the 12th of February, yesterday, the 11th, the Kansas City Chiefs became the first team since the early aughts, so the New England Patriots, to repeat Super Bowl championships, and supposed dynasties over this time, which we can list over the course of the time of parity and salary caps, many certainly in the NFL and in the NBA.

The Orioles, an important thing because you worked in Baltimore, my father grew up there, my first game is Memorial Stadium, are in the process perhaps of being bought by our benefactor, David Rubenstein, the patriotic philanthropist and private equity guy.

The Orioles, who many suspect will be one of the best teams in baseball this year, have the second lowest salary and they've done amazing things.

They stormed into contention a couple of years ago and really just had a fabulous run last year.

And the Arizona Diamondbacks, the aforementioned team, small-market team that has, you know, really struggled over the last years, went to the World Series.

So do you think baseball really has a parity issue?

How are the economics of the sport changing, and do you see any sea change on that issue of salary caps?

And with the growth of mega deals like the near, you know, half-billion-dollar deal to Shohei Ohtani, how will that impact the economics across the league?

I mean, this is the sport we love.

Where are we headed, Ken?

- This is a question that divides fans across the country, and it is very sensitive in a lot of markets.

I would suggest that the parity is fine, that what we've seen in the last 25 years is reflective of a sport that does not have a parity problem.

The sport does have, in the eyes of some, a payroll disparity problem.

And that's what you just mentioned, the Yankees being at one spot, the A's being at another, and a bunch of teams in between.

That is a problem they've tried to address through revenue sharing, money flowing from the rich teams to the poorer teams.

- Luxury tax.

- And the luxury tax, which is another aspect of this where a team that spends over a certain amount at different levels gets penalized and has to pay money into a penalty situation.

All of that helps.

It doesn't solve the problem.

Now, there are some who say it's not a problem, that some of the lower-revenue teams can spend more money, that their owners are pocketing the revenue-sharing money and that this isn't really working as it should.

There's a reasonable argument to be made there.

And then there are some people who will say, well, okay, why not a salary floor to force those teams to spend?

But if you're gonna have a restriction on one end, you need to have the restriction on the other and that's a salary cap, and that is something that the baseball players' union has historically opposed and strongly opposed and is not going to relent on that anytime soon.

So, the sport has certainly a measure of parity, especially compared to the NBA and NFL.

I find it crazy when fans say, "Oh, look at the NFL."

Well, the NFL does some things well with regard to this.

One, they have a national television contract.

The revenue's much different in the way it flows.

It flows mostly from national revenue.

Baseball flows mostly from local revenue.

But you do see in the NFL teams like Kansas City, Buffalo, keep their quarterbacks.

You're starting to see that in baseball too.

The Kansas City Royals just signed Bobby Witt Jr. for a long time.

Other teams have done similar things.

Now, those teams are not as able to spend around these players and add other players when they commit like that, not always.

But if teams are aggressive about that kind of approach and get these guys when they're young, when possible, there is that counterbalance to what you're talking about.

When you have a deal like Ohtani's, he is a unique figure in the game's history.

He is a unique figure in so many ways, because he comes from another country where he's a huge star.

He has marketing money coming in from that country and this one that enabled him to take this monster salary but defer almost all of it.

No other player can really do that, because he is not making enough money on the side.

No other team, or no other situation would ever be like this.

Other teams could do this.

The deal that he did, teams can handle that, and in fact, he offered it to several teams and some were amenable to it.

But I don't see that as having any kind of long-term effect.

He is singular, he is a unicorn.

It's just something that we will not see anytime soon again, in my opinion.

So the sport in general has problems, and I understand people in Cleveland and in Kansas City and in some of the other smaller markets who say, "Hey, my team might win for a couple of years, but we can't sustain it," and that is a problem.

But I don't know that a salary cap is the answer to that problem.

I would suggest that further tweaks of the current system are the way to go.

For instance, you can give more draft picks to the lower-revenue teams.

You can also implement something at the bottom of the pay scale similar to what we have at the top, the luxury tax system.

If you're the Pittsburgh Pirates and you spend below X number of million in a certain year, you get penalized, you lose something, a draft pick, money, whatever the case might be.

Force those teams to climb upward a little bit the way you're restricting teams at the top.

None of those things in my mind is going to be that disruptive, is going to cause a work stoppage, and greater minds than I need to figure this out.

- Well, you know, it's so interesting that in both the cases that we're talking about, significant, profound rule changes and the question of the salary cap, as you've described them, the impediment has been the Players Association.

Can you talk a little bit for a lay audience about the extraordinary dynamics.

They're born in the original battle over free agency and the mistake of all mistakes that was made by owners.

And then let me counterbalance that with a second question about the spirit of the game, because we know that some teams with the biggest payrolls of all are just lead-footed, that there's some other intangible in this beautiful game that isn't just how much you pay Reggie Jackson.

Something else has to come together, something else has to coalesce.

So briefly just talk about the Players Association and then what really goes into championships, because we've seen the Tampa Bay Rays, we've seen the Baltimore Orioles, we've seen small-market teams do really well with less.

You know, it all comes out of Oakland and the analytics that Beane was was promoting there, which has been celebrated in a major motion picture.

But, you know, there's some really big questions here.

They're still at loggerheads over something other player associations have capitulated to.

- Well, the baseball players' union was the first to, what's the word, get free agency, I guess, for lack of a better term.

And they were headed by the late Marvin Miller, who was one of the great union leaders, not just in sports, but of American history.

- No, of all time.

Yeah.

- And he established a culture that really remains to this day, and it's a free-market-loving culture.

The baseball players' union opposes any restriction at all on the free market, not just with salary cap situations, but also in deadlines that you might want to impose to speed free agency along.

No, no, no, no.

They want the market to work as the market will work.

That has been their history, that is something that they have fought for and had work stoppages over, and that is something that is ingrained in players from generation to generation.

Hey, your predecessors fought for this, they fought for this for you.

You have to fight for it for the next guy.

And I don't see that changing anytime soon.

It's a really important part of the union's fabric.

Fans can be upset about that, can oppose it, can grumble about it, but it is what has made this union, arguably, in my opinion, the strongest union in American history.

- Oh, no question!

- Their wealth and their just overall strength.

Now, you make a great point, Ken, when you say that money isn't everything in this sport.

Just look at last season.

The Mets, the Yankees, and the Padres spent a ton of money.

Every one of those teams flopped.

And you have these same teams like Tampa Bay, like Baltimore, like Cleveland for a time, low-revenue teams that sustained it for several years, Oakland when they were rolling before this current mess.

They do it through shrewd operation, through identifying players in the draft, through trades, and also, most recently, in the last several years, through great instruction.

Tampa Bay has great instruction.

They have taken analytics and they have applied it in ways that help players and make players better.

Things that work against big market teams at times, yeah, they can spend 150 million on a free agent.

Well, if that free agent is not very good, then they're kind of hamstrung.

And some of those lower-revenue teams are more nimble and it enables them to operate in a more efficient manner.

So again, not perfect and no one would ever pretend that the system is perfect, but it does work better than its critics would sometimes have you believe.

- Yeah, and I think that what's so interesting, if you look back at another era and try to find a comparable thing, we know that Branch Rickey profoundly changed baseball twice.

The obvious one is that he promoted Jack Roosevelt Robinson, the grandson of a slave, to the Brooklyn Dodgers and revolutionized baseball.

And if you need a great statistic on that, after Jackie's arrival in the National League where there was a minuscule quota, maybe one or two Black players, Black players won the MVP of the National League 9 out of 11 years.

That, to me, if you wanna know what you're missing, if you're gonna start some golden ages in the '20s, you can't do that till April 15th, 1947.

The other thing he did that's a little less well known is he invents the farm system, which is a way to cultivate and grow your own produce.

It's a victory garden, is what I call it.

Because he was a small-market team in St. Louis that couldn't compete with the money that the Yankees and the other big-market teams were throwing around, so he figured he'd grow his own.

And so I think we've always had baseball struggling with itself, but I think that its uniqueness also has delivered such extraordinary play.

I mean, Willie Mays' basket catch off Vic Wertz in the '54 World Series is wonderful, but it's wonderful because it was caught on film, 'cause there was not local TV playing every game every night.

And so we have that film, and we forget that as soon as the season starts, we might see something almost as good as that once or twice a night.

And that to me is when people say, "Oh, when was baseball at its best," I go now Because the quality of play is so great.

- No question about that.

The players are better than ever before.

They can do amazing things.

And I would argue also that it's not bad for a sport to have a target, a villain at the top.

- Yes.

- The Yankees for all those years, the Dodgers now.

In my view, and I know I'm not a fan of any one team 'cause I'm a journalist, but in my view that heightens the drama.

It makes for a better storyline.

Now, if you're sitting there in Oakland, you're not thrilled about that kind of point of view.

But at the same time, there is something to that, the David-Goliath thing.

- Yes.

- And you don't wanna promote it necessarily, but if it happens, it's okay.

And right now, if you look at the NFL, everybody's gonna be shooting, and has been for the last several years, the Kansas City Chiefs.

They want to go get the Chiefs.

Well, that's a story that we watch every single year and it's really interesting.

- It is really, really interesting, and I'm really glad you brought that up.

I know as a journalist, and you've now moved, and I neglected to say that you've moved also to your writing to The Athletic, which is the online sports site of "The New York Times," which is just a phenomenal resource of baseball stuff and it's such a great pleasure to read you there as well as see you on the field.

But I think that these narratives, the David and Goliath one that you bring up, the hating the Yankees.

You know, I mean, people in New York fell in love with the Mets because the Yankees always won and the Mets were so hapless that they were outdrawing the Yankees because of their haplessness.

And so there's a wonderful kind of almost cosmic, spiritual, poetic justice.

But having been a reporter, dutifully not rooting for any particular team right now, you did grow up rooting for a team.

Tell me what your team was when you were growing.

What sucked you into this game and why?

- It was the Mets, and I grew up first in Queens, New York, and then Long Island, Nassau County, Oyster Bay, and the Mets were on the rise when I was a child.

They were a team that made the World Series when I was seven years old and won the World Series.

And they were charming, as you mentioned.

- [Ken Burns] Yeah, really good.

- So that was my team.

And people will say to me all the time, "Well, that must mean you still have a secret Mets passion," and it doesn't work like that.

- No, it doesn't work like that.

- You do the job, Ken, you know this.

Once you do it, you're doing it and it's a whole different story.

But yes, the Mets were my team growing up, and I was at Game 7 of the 1986 World Series as a fan.

I was still a young reporter then.

I was covering hockey, so I didn't feel any- - Ouch!

- or anything like that.

- Ouch!

(laughs) - Yeah.

- Well, Game 6 was worse, but ouch!

(Ken Rosenthal laughing) You know, it's so funny because so many of the Dodger fans when they left gravitated to the newly-created, soon-to-be-created Metropolitans.

Some of the Giant fans also dissipated, but I've heard- - My dad was a Giants fan.

- More of them transferred their allegiance across the Harlem River to the Bronx.

But I'm very interested in the way these alliances and these allegiances sort of go.

I grew up, you know, a little bit older, you know, watching the Mets and their haplessness, and by the late '60s, because of what was going on politically and socially in the country, baseball, I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by that point I won my first World Series championship with the Tigers.

But then after that, it's a big, big hole, because baseball didn't hold that same love that it always did, except in '69 when the Mets won, because that was more of a feature story, a novelty story, that the perennial losers finally won and they did it so magnificent and with such great cast of characters.

And then again there's darkness for me until I went off to college in New England and saw a colored Trinitron Sony set with the Red Sox and like the baby chick that had fallen out of the nest.

(Ken Rosenthal laughing) That's why when you say '86 it hurts.

I was in Kansas City making a film, and when the ball went under Buckner's legs and the game fell apart, I walked out into not a very good neighborhood of Kansas City and just was willing to sacrifice my life, because it was clearly over.

(laughs) Such is baseball.

Ken, you've been such a good sport today.

We really appreciate your thoughtfulness and your observations and your obvious talent that you display day in and day out, and we're just grateful that you took a little bit of time for this UNUM Chat, and look forward to seeing you in a stadium sometime in person.

- Ken, thanks so much.

It was a pleasure.

Really, an honor.

- My pleasure.

So that's today's UNUM Chat.

Thanks for being with us.