Workerrs of World, Unite (Ballplayers Not Quite Included)

It is widely reported of the impending baseball strike that more people understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in its entirety than understand the issues between the players and the owners.

The polls indicate that the public favors the owners by more than 50% over the players but that’s nothing. The polls always show that the public favors the owners.

We thought today we’d repeat a pilgrimage we made before to the shade of one man who might be presumed to tell us better than any what the impasse is all about. We refer to the father of modern Communism, Karl Marx, himself.

As we look, the great author of “Das Kapital” and founder of the present system of Soviet socialist government is sitting under a bare tree sticking pins in a statue of the czar. A small, barefoot boy with a smudge on his nose, a taped bat and an autographed ball from Pete Rose approaches.

Boy: Comrade Karl, say it ain’t so, but the baseball workers are going to go on strike and no one seems to know quite why. Can you give us a clue from your vast knowledge of the war between capital and labor?

Marx: Of course, my boy, it’s the old story of exploitation by the system. The poor peons are striking for better wages, working conditions. They’re sick of the slave-labor conditions, the sweat shops, the abuse and the poor pay. The long hours.

Boy: But comrade, these workers work less than two hours a day six months a year.

Marx: Yes, my boy, but highly dangerous work, eh? They go down in mines several miles below the earth with canaries in their hats to detect fatal gases? They put out oil well fires at sea? They get lung dust, jaundice? Their life expectancy is one third the national average?

Boy: Pardon me, comrade, they just stand in one place all night long chewing gum and checking out the local chicks in the short skirts in the bleachers.

Marx: But, there’s heavy lifting? They run dangerous machines? Perhaps they work with an arc light that’s harmful to the eyes or factory noise that produces deafness?

Boy: They never have to lift anything heavier than a jockstrap. They never have to bend down more than one or two times a night. they sit down over half the time.

Marx: Well, the air is foul. Full of gasses. Fumes. Cave-ins are possible?

Boy, shaking his head: They work out in the fresh air and moonlight. Or in bright sunlight. Working conditions are ideal. These are the healthiest specimens of the race. They have their own doctors, massagers, health paraphernalia. Trained therapists to monitor their every ache and bruise.

Marx: Then their production quotas are unrealistic? They are overworked, saddled with unrealistic projections?

Boy: The best of them succeed only 3 times out of every 10. It’s been 45 years since anyone even met the 4-out-of-10 achievement quota. A worker who succeeds 3 1/2 times out of 10 is called “The Man” and a guy who gets a home run 11 times out of ever 100 at bat gets called “The Sultan of Swat.”

Marx: Well, then these people are woefully underpaid! Their families are starving, right? They’re emaciated?

Boy: They get paid more than the czar. They own more property than a railroad baron. One relief pitcher gets $42 million for the rest of his life. We bought Alaska for less. The Louisiana Territory.

Marx: What’s a relief pitcher?

Boy: A part-time worker. He pitches less than an inning some nights. But he might have to come in as many as three nights a week.

Marx: What’s an inning?

Boy: Oh, it can be as few as three pitches. It depends. He throws the ball to get the side out.

Marx: This ball, it is heavy? It weighs 20 or 30 pounds?

Boy: It weighs five ounces.

Marx: He has to throw it a long way? A mile, perhaps?

Boy: Sixty feet.

Marx: Let me understand. This, this product they manufacture, if it can be called that, is marketable? I mean, someone buys this cornucopia of mediocrity?

Boy: By the millions, comrade. The ones that can’t do it in person buy the products of the advertisers who put it on radio and television.

Marx: Gott in himmel!

Boy: I beg your pardon, sir, but how can this be saved? Who’s right here?

Marx: Why the proletariat, as usual, my boy! The exploited!

Boy: The ballplayers?

Marx: “The ballplayers? Bah! Those bloated plutocrats! The public, dear boy! The poor benighted sons of the poor, as usual, who support the system. They’re the ones who should go on strike! Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your bubble gum cards. Baseball is the opium of the people!

Boy: Not if you know your ballplayers it isn’t, comrade Marx.”