El Cardquistador

The Question Beneath the Arguments

There’s a divide among baseball fans that has nothing to do with the American League versus the National League, or whether the designated hitter ruins the game. It runs deeper than that. It comes down to a more fundamental question:

What are you actually watching when you watch baseball?

Baseball as Story

For some fans, baseball is a story. It’s about the arc of a career—the way a player becomes inseparable from a city, the way time and loyalty compound into meaning. It’s Whitaker and Trammell in Detroit. Ripken and Baltimore. Identities forged not through optimization, but through continuity.

Baseball as Market

For others, baseball is a market. It’s about contract negotiations, surplus value, and whether an agent extracted every possible dollar from ownership. The real drama unfolds in boardrooms and arbitration hearings, with the games themselves reduced to supporting evidence in a financial argument.

Two Audiences, One Game

One perspective is rooted in history and emotion—the human stories that give the sport its soul. The other is pure accounting: a materialist view where every decision collapses into dollars and market efficiency. And increasingly, these two groups aren’t just watching different aspects of the same game—they’re watching entirely different things.

The Illusion of Meaningful Difference

Here’s what gets lost in the market-first view.

When we argue over the difference between $200 million and $400 million, we’re talking about sums most people can’t meaningfully comprehend. Both figures represent generational wealth. Both secure a player’s future, their children’s future, their grandchildren’s future. The financial incentive doesn’t vanish—but the practical distinction between those numbers does.

When Optimization Becomes Erosion

Yet for that margin—an abstract delta with no real-world impact on quality of life—we’re willing to dismantle the institutions and continuity that give baseball its meaning. Loyalty becomes inefficiency. Identity becomes a market failure.

Destruction Cuts Both Ways

This isn’t just destruction of the story-first view of baseball. It’s destruction of the market view as well. When continuity collapses, so does long-term attachment. When identity erodes, so does fandom. And when fans stop caring about the people on the field, the market itself loses the very demand it depends on.

It’s destruction.

And it’s destruction of the foundation for both kinds of viewers.