Millions of Americans will be deeply disappointed, even depressed, if the big-league baseball players don’t strike.
If the ballplayers call off the strike they’ve been threatening — if, at the last minute, the players and the owners come to an agreement — that will be deflating news indeed.
It will mean there will be a World Series after all. Which will be nowhere near as fascinating as watching the players and owners stew in their own juices. The players and the owners are counting on Americans loving baseball — on that love being so strong that the country will breathe a sigh of gratitude if an agreement is reached. The players and owners are counting on saying to America: See, you don’t have to hate us — you can love us again.
The players and the owners are oblivious to one fundamental fact:
The opposite of love is not hatred. The opposite of love is indifference.
America doesn’t hate the ballplayers and the owners for doing this cynical little dance again. Hatred requires passion — and America’s passion tank is just about empty when it comes to big-league baseball. Over the years, the players and owners have done the just-about impossible: They have made the country not care.
There is still a core constituency of devoted baseball fans who will come back to the ballparks no matter what. But at the prices the owners are paying the players — which translates to the prices the owners are charging customers for tickets, hot dogs, parking — the game on the big-league level can’t survive with just the core constituency.
This is why the owners probably want a strike, and have wanted it all along. They can’t say it out loud, but they seem to despise the ballplayers, despise the salaries they pay those ballplayers, really despise the leaders of the players union — they seem to have made a determination: Let’s let the game die for a while, and start over.
What may catch them all by surprise — players and owners both — is that this could turn out to be just fine with the American public. President Bush, on the day last week when the players set their strike date, said: “The baseball owners and the baseball players must understand that if there is a stoppage, a work stoppage, a lot of fans are going to be furious. And I’m one of them.” The president may be misreading the national state of mind. Disgusted at baseball? Yes. Furious? Probably not. Fury requires caring. This time around, America may not care.
Baseball — the game, not the corporation — is still a thing of beauty. At the same time last week the big-league ballplayers (average salary: $2.4 million) were threatening to walk away and strike, U.S. Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan were setting up Little League games for impoverished children in the area. The soldiers knew that baseball could be one of America’s most glorious calling cards.
That baseball — the game, the fun — will never die. But what the big leagues have become? Maybe that game deserves to die, and then be reborn when the country allows it to be.
It’s not just big-league baseball that has descended into a delusional alternate reality. The other major professional sports are also on the verge of making their customers not care. There was a one-paragraph news brief about the National Basketball Association on the sports pages the other day — not even considered an important enough piece of information to rate its own story — that read:
“Mike Bibby signed a seven-year, $80 million contract with the Sacramento Kings. He averaged 13.7 points and 5.0 assists.”
Apparently that is what we in the public have allowed American professional sports to become. A basketball player who averages less than 14 points a game, and 5 assists, is deemed to perform a service worth $80 million. And in the end, you, the fan, will pay it.
As for the multimillion-dollar baseball players: Certainly they must have set up a generous strike fund to give financial help to the ushers, soda pop vendors, ballpark janitors, hot dog stand cooks, locker attendants, groundskeepers, box-office employees and other working people they will be throwing out onto the street — right? They have set up that fund, haven’t they?
Oh — they haven’t?
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– Late-night this Friday (12:05 a.m. Saturday), Bob Greene interviews soldiers and volunteers from the North Platte Canteen on ABC News’ “Nightline UpClose” on WLS-Ch. 7.
