Leadership Quote by John Thorn

"And then came the nineties, when management, suddenly frightened that they had ceded control to the players, sought to restore baseball's profitability by 'running the game like a business.'"

John Thorn, Historian

About this Quote

The line lands like a period at the end of baseball's innocence: not because the sport stopped being commercial, but because it started talking about itself that way, out loud, with a kind of managerial panic. Thorn frames the 1990s as a moment when owners realized they had accidentally produced a more empowered labor force - richer, louder, harder to discipline - and responded with the language that always tries to win an argument before it begins: "profitability", "control", "business". That phrase, tucked into scare quotes, is the tell. It's not a neutral plan; it's a slogan, a moral cover for reasserting authority.

The subtext is labor history in cleats. After free agency and the union's gains, "running the game like a business" becomes code for treating players as costs to be contained, not partners in the product. Thorn's "suddenly frightened" also punctures the owners' usual posture of inevitability. If you have to restore profitability, you are admitting that the previous arrangement wasn't broken - it just wasn't yours.

Contextually, the 1990s are the decade when televised money explodes, salaries spike, and the sport begins to resemble corporate America: consolidation, brand management, public relations, and eventually the 1994 strike that made the "business" argument impossible to ignore. Thorn's historian's move is to suggest that the real conflict isn't nostalgia versus progress; it's governance. Who gets to define what baseball is: a civic ritual with messy human stakes, or a revenue stream with uniforms?

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Topic	Management
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About the Author

John Thorn (born April 17, 1947) is a Historian from USA.

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