There’s something about a mild winter that whets the appetite for baseball.
But this week, Opening Day week, never arrives soon enough for those who’ve been counting the days since the last out of the World Series.
This is our time of renewal and redemption, the season when hope trumps experience.
Gardeners have their yellow-blooming forsythias.
The faithful have Passover and Resurrection.
Seam-heads have Opening Day.
Easter for agnostics.
But just where and when is Opening Day 2000?
If you’ve been distracted by the political primaries, by the pope in Israel or NCAA basketball, better sit down for the news. The first game of the major league baseball season, Chicago Cubs versus New York Mets, will be played at 4 a.m. (CST) here on Wednesday in the Tokyo Dome in Japan.
Anybody got tickets?
OK. Anybody know how to set the timer on a VCR?
Actually, this is a chance for hard-core Cubs fans to show their loyalty by watching the game, live, on Fox TV’s Sports Net. But you had better start now by going to bed early tonight. Lights out no later than 9 p.m., say, and 6 p.m. on Tuesday. That way you can be up and at ’em for the “Season Preview” show at 3 a.m.
Die-hard Cubs fans will do this because, let’s face it, they care more than the players.
How else to explain the whining and grumping among the young millionaires asked to make the trip? Even Cubs first-baseman Mark Grace, as hard a nose as plays the game, worries his club may be sleepwalking by the time it returns for its North American debut April 3 in St. Louis.
And speaking of St. Louis, a year ago the Cardinals’ players voted down a chance to play the first-ever regular-season game overseas.
“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the players,” explained the great Mark McGuire, the team’s $9-million-a-year home-run king. “You’re telling me that we’re going to fly two teams over 16 hours to play two games?”
Even the Cubs voted against it at first. Then baseball officials ordered a Chicago-style recount, but only after players’ union bosses explained the big picture and got each player a $25,000 bonus for making the trip.
Some fans will argue that the players had it right the first time; that baseball is a game of tradition; that a “home opener” ought to be just that.
I have sympathy with that view. But professional baseball gave up on tradition a long time ago. It had no choice. Your father’s game was too subtle and slow for Baby Boomers raised on fast-action television. And the children of Boomers? Their idea of a good time is video-game carnage, Wrestlemania and chasing soccer balls.
So baseball fought back with its designated hitter rule (more offense, less strategy), promotional giveaways and flashy graphics on the scoreboards and telecasts.
The razzle-dazzle paid off. Attendance has rebounded from the disastrous 1994 strike/lockout and TV revenues have risen apace. The problem, of course, is that free-agency continues to push player salaries into the stratosphere. Despite new parity-enhancing gimmicks like inter-team revenue sharing and a “luxury tax” on excess payroll, major league teams are more divided than ever into the haves and have-nots. While team payrolls in the huge New York and Los Angeles media markets push toward $100 million, medium-market clubs like the Pittsburgh Pirates and Minnesota Twins limp along on less than half that. Cinderella pennant runs are a thing of the past. The top-paid teams make the post-season playoffs and the rest don’t. It’s that simple.
That’s why the Cubs and the Mets are going to Japan this week.
Big-league baseball needs more big-league markets. It’s called globalization. It’s what’s happening everywhere else, and it’s about to happen in baseball. Although nobody in authority is talking, yet, about a World Baseball League, the idea is not far offstage.
“It’s important to secure and prove the popularity of the game worldwide, for all of our futures,” Cubs President Andy MacPhail has said of the Tokyo trip.
There will be logistical problems with global baseball, no question. But imagine the revenue possibilities once a billion Asians and South and Central Americans begin following the U.S. divisional races. And our fans begin following their races because winners end up playing winners in a true world series.
For audiences that big, the suits at Coca-Cola, Sony and Daimler-Chrysler might fork over enough so the Yankees could give shortstop Derek Jeter a hefty raise when his seven-year, $118-million contract expires.
To which I say: Good for Derek Jeter. Good for the Yankees. Good for professional baseball.
Knock ’em dead, guys. As for me, I won’t be rising before dawn Wednesday. Or watching the White Sox open with the rest of the majors next Monday, against the Texas Rangers.
Got my own, low-tech, Opening Day ritual nowadays. Friday I’ll take the day off and walk a few blocks to Rocky Miller Park (capacity 1,000) at Northwestern University. I sit by the on-deck circle and ring my cowbell when the Wildcat nine takes the field. The Illini are in town for the Big 10 opener. They’ll have blood in their eye after losing 3 of 4 in Evanston last April. Would have swept ’em, too, except our sophomore shortstop, a Derek Jeter-in-the-making, dropped the relay on a cinch double-play with one out and the bases loaded.
This year he makes that play.
But that’s what Opening Day is about–optimism. Flavored, this year, with a little globalism and a lot of insomnia.
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E-mail: jmccarron@tribune.com
