The Lockout Is Over, Yes, but Who Won and What Was Lost?

Our long national nightmare is over. The baseball lockout has ended, and with it comes the close of teeth-gnashing season. We’re all just slightly embarrassed about it, too.

I mean, what was lost exactly?

It seems that after the sacrifice of a month of spring training and who knows how many rounds of golf, added to the tears of anguish rained down by the bow-tied Op-Ed boys who probably hadn’t sweated since 1964, the total loss to baseball--owners, players and fans alike--adds up to, at most, four games per team over the course of a 162-game season.

That’s it. Nobody died. The sun didn’t refuse to come up. The fabric of our nation is not forever rent. We may get as few as 158 games instead of 162, or we may, if the weather is kind, get the whole lot.

Did we overreact to what has become this very predictable labor strife? Does Gregg Olson have a nasty curve ball?

Spring training begins today, the first day of spring, as it happens. There seems to be a message there. The regular season begins a week later than scheduled, meaning only that the stat freaks will insist we put an asterisk by 1990 in the record books.

And for all you fans who screamed, in big, bold letters--THIS IS IT! YOU’VE SEEN THE LAST OF ME AT A BALLGAME! THOSE GREEDY PLAYERS AND GREEDY OWNERS AND THEIR OVERPRICED HOT DOGS CAN TAKE A FLYING LEAP OFF A BRIDGE WITHOUT THEIR REEBOK PUMPS ON--I’ll see you on Opening Day.

Not coming? You sure? I’ve got two tickets behind first base I’m trying to get rid of. You’ll be there. The louder you yelled, the more games you’ll attend; that’s the law of baseball inversion.

If you think about it, there really wasn’t anything to get so upset about.

Did it take a lockout to suggest to you that owners, players and most other people with whom you come in daily contact are after all the money they can lay their grubby little hands on? Does either of the Trumps play ball? Let’s be serious. This is a national condition, not a condition exclusive to the national pastime.

But before we put this baby to rest, let’s take one last, loving look at just what did happen. For one thing, the owners lost. They always do. Oh, they’re the bluster kings of the ‘90s, same as they were in the ‘80s. They talk tough. Or they cry loud. Whatever, the way they get the rhetoric machine going--life and death, good of the game, arbitration as a communist plot--it’s no wonder people get worked up.

In the end, the owners back down because they know they don’t have a case.

This time, the players basically wanted to maintain the status quo and got a little more. The owners, for their part, wanted to change the world, but I don’t see many Vaclav Havels in that group. The owners made many radical suggestions, all of which were eventually withdrawn.

And so the lockout was a waste of everyone’s time in what was, as somebody said, essentially a war between the millionaires and the billionaires.

There weren’t any losers, if you except the towns in Florida and Arizona that count on revenue from spring training camps and those faithful who actually plan their vacations around the spring schedule of their hometown team.

There is no point in discussing the details of the new contract, because who cares? The players are as rich as they were before the lockout, and the owners are too.

This is really all you need to know: The players report to camp today or as fast as they can get there. The bats and balls and suntan lotion are on their way.

After six days of getting in shape and working on fundamentals, they’ll open their exhibition season. And two weeks later, they’ll open the season.

What will be interesting is to see how the players react to a truncated spring training in which fundamentals (most of the teams this year are saying, surprisingly, that they want to go back to fundamentals) will have to be taught or retaught in just a few weeks.

This should lead to a great rise in mistakes, mental and physical, or, if it doesn’t, the lockout could offer evidence that seven weeks of spring training is at least three weeks too many.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with spending the last half of winter somewhere warm. And ballplayers romping in the sun do give all of us who are, at the same time, someplace cold the hope that it will be warm again.

Instead, for the past few weeks, we watched negotiators romping in hotel meeting rooms and knew, as much as we knew anything, that we did not want to be wherever they were.

But it’s over now. And the new contract between the owners and players will run four years, meaning it will be a long while before we have to see the faces of Chuck O’Connor or Donald Fehr again, and I won’t have to get letters from the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Fans (give me a break).

In the meantime, we’ll find something else to gripe about--rising ticket prices, rising hot dog prices--and, no matter what anyone said, we’ll forget this whole thing ever happened.