Nobody of Importance Is on Strike

Guess who is on strike?

Of course, you know the answer to that question. Once again, major league baseball has been shut down by a labor dispute.

Predictably, cries of anguish have spread through the land. Folks from all walks of life are reacting as though the very fabric of American life has been torn asunder.

Crowds will rally around frenzied yuppies burning baseball cards.

Politicians, especially those campaigning for re-election, will deplore the impact on contemporary society.

Bureaucrats will lament the revenue lost by empty stadiums and threaten special taxes on charcoal and lawn chairs.

Wild-eyed sportscasters will plead the case of the suffering fans.

And suffering fans will proclaim that they will never again patronize such unpatriotic ingrates, and might give up apple pie and hot dogs as well.

What is this game which inspires such an outpouring of emotion and opinion? And who are these men?

When I read or hear about all the inconvenience and suffering a baseball strike will create, I am puzzled. How is life changed by not going to a ballpark or not turning on a radio or not turning on a television? Is that inconvenience? Is that suffering?

Around our house, baseball itself can be an inconvenience. How many times has a televised baseball game caused dinner to be eaten in the living room? How many times does a baseball game cause me to sit in a hot car, listening to the radio and waiting for an inning to end?

Inconvenience? Suffering?

A strike by baseball players, to my mind, causes neither inconvenience or suffering. If you want to talk about trash collection or supermarket checkers or gas station attendants or the mail carrier, I’ll accept that a strike would have impact upon day-to-day living. I’ll take the butcher and the baker and you can have the pitcher and catcher.

I’ll tell you what. We are lucky here in San Diego. No one important to our lives is on strike. Just the baseball players.

Just to be sure, I checked Tuesday with the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council.

“You know by now that the Padres are on strike,” I said. “Can you tell me if anyone else is on strike.”

A woman named Betty excused herself and left the line for a minute or two.

“No,” she said when she returned. “No one else is on strike.”

I was flabbergasted. Of all the working stiffs in San Diego (and, I presume, Imperial) County, none were on strike. No one from a sweat box of a factory was on strike, trying to get to $10 an hour? No one hauling trash off curbs was on strike, hoping to get back to a 40-hour week? No teachers were on strike, hoping to earn higher salaries than bartenders?

No one.

I submit that the Padres, on the average, are the highest paid working stiffs in San Diego County. Who could possibly be close to them? A law office? Unlikely. A clinic of cardiologists or neurosurgeons? I don’t think so. The Padres are salaried like company presidents, and companies generally have only one president.

I find it ironic, and incongruous, that grown men earning such salaries for playing a child’s game should be the only “laborers” on strike hereabouts.

Lest this begins to sound like I am siding with the owners in Strike ‘85, that is not the case.

I don’t know which side is right or which side is wrong. I don’t even know if either side is right or wrong. More likely, both sides are wrong.

Simply stated, I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for either side. I have always liked the underdog, the perennially beleaguered and bedraggled have-not who rises from literal or figurative poverty to enjoy a taste of fame and fortune.

Can anyone find an underdog in this scenario? Somehow, I don’t think Norma Rae would have developed much of an interest in a labor dispute between millionaire owners and millionaire workers.

Basically, what they have on the bargaining table is a pie made of gold, and what they are discussing is who gets the biggest wedge. I don’t think either side is likely to be eating Thanksgiving dinner in a soup kitchen.

The timing of this work-stoppage could not be worse for the Padres. They had been last year’s darlings, toasts of the town. The romance between team and community burgeoned during the off-season and blossomed in the spring.

Somewhere out there, the threat of a strike was being whispered--but surely nothing so rude would befall these Padres in this year. It was another charming year, a chance to get back into a World Series and right the wrongs of Detroit.

Unfortunately for the Padres, a couple of things went wrong. It turned out that the strike was for real, and they weren’t.

So they limped to the airport Tuesday night.

The strike had hit when they were on a low, losing games in alarming numbers and alarming ways. The populace was grumbling, and would continue grumbling because the strike struck and left bitter last impressions.

And the Padres have no consolation from others in the same predicament. If they choose to set up picket lines, they will have no company.

After all, in San Diego County, they are the only laborers on strike.

Thank heavens.