Some of the guys playing slow-pitch softball for Edna’s Bar & Grill may be heading for tryout camps. Hold ’em and they will come. The Blue Jays reportedly held three camps, saw more than 600 players, signed one – a pitcher whose Northern League ERA last year was a comical 7.71. Imagine watching has-beens and never-will-bes without even the consolation of cold beer. Will unionized truckdrivers deliver the beer to games played by strikebreakers?
Ontario law forbids the hiring of replacement workers, so the Blue Jays might have to make a 162-game road trip. Canadian law bars the immigration of non-Canadian citizens as replacement workers, so Montreal’s Expos might have to cobble together two teams, one of Canadians for home games, another of Americans and Latinos. And then there is the basic flaw in the replacement player idea: When, say, tractors are made by replacement workers, customers do not care, if the product is good. But in baseball the workers are the product.
Ruth, and the livelier ball, rejuvenated the game after the Black Sox scandal of the 1919 World Series. When Ruth reached the Red Sox at 19, in 1914, the baseball statistics published in Sunday newspapers included batting averages, sacrifices and stolen bases, but not home runs, which were not a significant part of the game. The American League leader that year, “Home Run” Baker, hit 9. In 1920 Ruth hit 54, more than any other American League team that year. Between 1926 and 1931 he averaged 51 a season. His appetites, like his talents, were prodigious, and suited him to the roaring ’20s, when broadcasting, movies and the new arts of ballyhoo ushered in the age of celebrity. Furthermore, he was one of nature’s democrats, whether chatting up President Harding (“Hot as Hell, ain’t it, Prez?”) or Marshal Foch (“I suppose you were in the war”).
Back then, baseball had no serious competition for the title “national pastime.” Today? Well, the California Avocado Commission says that on Super Bowl Sunday Americans scarfed down 8 million pounds of guacamole. Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times notes that the average NFL regular season game has a bigger television audience than baseball’s postseason games. A Harris poll finds that 25 percent of respondents call NFL football their favorite sport. Baseball comes a distant second with 11 percent. Baseball’s demographics are ominous: among young people, it is behind NBA basketball, too.
But baseball was back in a strong ascent last year, flourishing commercially (as measured by rising attendance and franchise values) and artistically. Indeed, history may conclude that baseball’s long trajectory was at its apogee last Aug. 12, when the strike began. The Padres’ Tony Gwynn was flirting with .400. The Astros’ Jeff Bagwell, the Giants’ Matt Williams, the Mariners’ Ken Griffey and the Braves’ Greg Maddux were putting up numbers that could reasonably be called Ruthian. (Yes, Maddux is a pitcher. So was Ruth, of Cooperstown caliber, until his bat made him too valuable to play only every fourth day. Of all his records, the one of which he was most proud – it lasted 43 years, until Whitey Ford broke it – was pitching 29 consecutive scoreless World Series innings, one more than Christie Mathewson.)
Never mind the tangle of conflicts and animosities that produced the strike. Today the players believe – and many on management’s side, including some owners, agree – that the minority of owners currently controlling baseball do not want a negotiated settlement. They want to feign an impasse, impose a new contract and break the union. (The only purpose of replacement players is to provide a setting for real players to abandon the union.) Having won in eight consecutive negotiations with the owners over a span of 22 years, the players have since Aug. 12 made substantial concessions. They have agreed to the owners’ demand for an end to the arbitration process that has ratcheted up salaries. They have agreed to the owners’ idea for a “secondary” or “luxury” tax on all spending by teams over a level to be negotiated. Such a tax would penalize high-spending clubs, thereby exerting a drag on players’ salaries. When the players proposed such a tax in December, the owners bolted from the negotiations. The owners seemed to understand that the two sides were now in the realm of splittable differences, and they had to hide to avoid reaching a settlement.
A strike always is a test of each side’s capacity for absorbing pain. Both the players and the owners have proven themselves gluttons for punishment. But the game can take only so much. If the 1995 season is made ridiculous by beginning with replacement players, or if it is otherwise truncated or blemished, baseball will go from 1993 to 1996 without a proper season. If so, two of major league baseball’s most attractive attributes, its continuity and dignity, already much diminished, will be squandered. So will be the value of what the owners own. And the owners had better not count on baseball being rescued by another Babe Ruth. Nature is parsimonious of such prodigies. Fortunately, there is plenty of talent in the game today, as real players will resume proving when the owners give them a chance. In the negotiations that resume this week, the players, whose professional ethic is maximum effort for maximum victory, must steel themselves to define victory as the making of merely modest concessions. And the moderate owners must tell their immoderate colleagues to learn to take “yes” for an answer.
