COMMENTARY : Baseball Is Losing From Top to Bottom

They are playing baseball on the diamonds behind Scottsdale Community College.

Two intrasquad games were held on side-by-side fields one afternoon this week with Oakland A’s Manager Tony La Russa, pitching coach Dave Duncan and the rest of the brass watching intently, first one game, then the other.

Maybe two dozen fans were gathered in the small seating area behind the two ballfields. Between innings of one game, Oakland coach Rene Lachemann, serving as home plate umpire, spotted a familiar cap in the crowd.

“Look at that,” Lachemann said, “a San Francisco Giants fan. Hey, did ya have a good winter?”

Laughs all around, and a few high fives from the Oakland fans who cherish the memory of the A’s four-game sweep of the Giants in the Earthquake Series of 1989.

The atmosphere is fun and loose at these spring training camps, but you have to wonder how much fun it will be a week or two from now if the owners continue to lock out the major-league players.

There is a dark sense of trouble just below the surface of the otherwise optimistic coaches, players and fans who have shown up for the Quiet Spring of 1990. Even the young players who benefit from showcasing their abilities in front of the major-league manager and coaches know the extra attention they receive today is attention the big leaguers are forced to grant because of the lockout.

It has been said that the only ones who really lose in the baseball lockout are the fans and the spring training businesses that will suffer for the lost revenue. But baseball is a loser, too, from top to bottom.

The biggest losers inside the game will be the players on the 40-man roster who are barred from working out or even observing the practice sessions being conducted with the minor-league players.

Every team has its ‘tweeners, those individuals who figure to wind up in AAA, but who were invited to the major-league camp for an opportunity to show coaches something they hadn’t seen a year ago.

Those players have lost, as of today, and each day the lockout continues will hurt more.

In the organization of the World Series champions, the sting is being felt by pitchers Ray Young, Scott Chiamparino, Dave Otto, Joe Law, Mike Norris and outfielder Steve Howard.

All are on the 40-man roster and none had anything close to a position won on the Opening Day roster. For each, whether he opens the season in the big leagues or the Pacific Coast League was dependent on his performance in spring training.

“It’s not doing any of the big-leaguers any good not being here now,” said Duncan. “But those guys who had to show something, it’s really got to hurt them not to be working.

“When the word comes (to open camps), we’re all going to be under some time pressure. You’ll have to go pretty much with who you expect to open the season with, that has to be the No. 1 priority, and the rest of the guys will be affected by the (reduced) amount of exposure they get. They’ll just have to get whatever’s left over.”

Unless the lockout is settled Friday, Opening Day and the first week of the season will be lost. Most baseball people are of the opinion that a minimum of 20 days will be required to get their teams anywhere close to being ready to play for keeps. Even then, expanded rosters will be a near necessity.

“If we have to break camp with 24 players,” said La Russa, “I’m thinking right now of taking 13 pitchers and 11 position players, 12 and 12 for sure. If they let us expand the rosters to 26 or 28 for a few weeks, we’ll be all right, but it’s not going to be normal any way you look at it.”

Young, Chiamparino, Otto and Law are all pitchers with enough minor-league experience to warrant a serious look for an Oakland staff that is being restructured after free agents Storm Davis and Matt Young departed.

Norris is a major-league veteran who had been the ace of the Oakland staff until his drug addiction drove him out of baseball and nearly cost him his life on a couple of occasions.

Norris appeared to have a chance to make the Oakland roster as a long reliever, but his chance now has been reduced to that of a safety valve. He might be brought up simply as an extra arm to get the team through games until the pitchers Oakland is counting on have regained form.

Howard is an outfielder up from AA Huntsville who would have come to spring training with dreams of intriguing the Athletics brass in the same way young players such as Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco and Walt Weiss made their impressions in recent years.

The reality faced by those marginal players now is that when the lockout is eventually settled, they will not only have had their major-league opportunity wasted, they will also be a month or more behind the top minor-league players who had an opportunity to make a name for themselves with the big-league coaches.

“It stands to reason that those guys who aren’t getting the opportunity will take a while to get adjusted and ready to play,” Duncan said. “We have enough players in the organization to fill out the rosters. But, logically, it will mean that the bottom will come up and you have AA and A guys playing in (Class AAA) Tacoma until everything evens out.”

The quality of major-league baseball will clearly suffer for a short spring training, but so will baseball right down the ladder all the way through the minor leagues.

Finally, that’s where the fans will see it and feel it -- in the pocketbook when they buy tickets to a weakened product.

By then, most of the heavy damage already will have been done.