Bart Harvey, AB '71 and MBA '74, and outgoing Chair of the Alumni Education Committee of the Harvard Alumni Association,
welcomed event participants to "The Business of Baseball," describing the place of this unique event in the history of Alumni Colleges.
Mr. Harvey told an enthusiastic audience, "For the past year, we have wanted to honor the great sport of baseball, and the Harvard
alumni involved, through an educational program." Mr. Harvey introduces Peter Gammons, the opening speaker and moderator of these panels.
Peter Gammons is a studio analyst on ESPN's Baseball Tonight and the former sports columnist for the Boston
Globe newspaper. He has been voted the National Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association
three times during his career.
Mr. Gammons opens this panel with two earnest assertions: "I really believe that this is the golden age of baseball....
I think the players are the best they've ever been." In his introduction, Mr. Gammons describes the resilience of baseball in the face
of business-related problems. Despite the labor crisis of 2002 (involving a financial disagreement between players and owners that
provoked players to threaten a strike), attendance at recent baseball games has rebounded by fifteen to twenty percent and ESPN ratings
have risen by twenty percent. Mr. Gammons' optimism about the state of the business is coupled with his belief that "the game has become
more and more a reflection of its real roots," indicating that baseball reflects the immigration patterns in the demographic culture of
America. There are currently over twenty percent foreign-born players in the major league and forty-five percent in the minor leagues.
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