When Baseball Didn’t Seem Like Big Business

Phil Alden Robinson, who wrote and directed “Field of Dreams” from the novel by W. P. Kinsella, recently sent me a copy of a Kinsella short story, “The Last Pennant Before Armageddon,” from a collection called “The Thrill of the Grass.”

A voice out of nowhere is part of the action, as in “Field of Dreams.” This time it says, in effect, “If the Cubs win the pennant, Armageddon will follow.” It’s the supreme cruelty, the hardest-luck team in baseball would get lucky, only to see the end of the world as we know it. The club is led by Al Tiller, who has the unenviable reputation as the losingest manager in baseball, and it is he who hears the whispered message.

It’s the supreme dilemma. How can a manager not try to win, especially with a reputation like Tiller’s to overcome? Then again, there he is in the dugout with the whole world in his hands.

Wonderful, open-ended story (neither a Cubs pennant nor Armageddon having made the newspapers yet). But as I read it, on the eve of Monday’s opening day of the season, I realized that part of the appeal of the short story and of “Field of Dreams” (from the Kinsella novel called “Shoeless Joe”) was the nostalgia they engender for baseball as it once seemed to be.

Nostalgia, like sex and violence, is not likely to go out of style, ever. The past, its rough and unpleasant edges softened by time, as if by Jergen’s Lotion, appears simpler and steadily more attractive.

But, to an aging sandlotter and memorizer of ancient statistics, yesterday’s baseball is even more alluring than other aspects of nostalgia. The commercial face of baseball was never so evident as now, although whether this is because the hero-worshiping youth was terribly innocent or whether there was a willful national naivete is not easy to say.

There were always owners, of course, and it was sometimes obvious that a few of them were hard-trading rascals. But the prevailing impression you had was that they were hobbyists at heart who wanted to win for the sake of winning rather than to improve their return on capital.

Jacob Ruppert, the brewer who owned the Yankees, appeared to take pride in a team that was the class act of the game, the MGM of baseball. Tom Yawkey, pouring his heart and his millions into the Red Sox, in his often-frustrated hope for a winner, was somebody you could sympathize with. In a later world, Gene Autry is the only owner I can think of whose fans would will him a pennant if they could, a Big A for his effort.

But who then knew from strikes and lockouts? You seldom read how much the players were paid and--childhood naivete was certainly at work here--you were sure it didn’t matter. Playing the game and winning was all that mattered to the guys. It came as a later, jolting revelation to read that the great Pepper Martin only made $2,500 as a member of the Cardinals’ great Gas House Gang of the early 1930s.

They weren’t paid much; that’s now all too clear, although in those prewar and Depression years it was possible for a major league club to draw fewer than 100,000 customers in a season (as I think the St. Louis Browns did). Now, according to one pre-season story, the average player salary is $600,000, and the stars receive sums that would satisfy a savings and loan executive. The justification for the wages appears to be at the turnstile more often than on the field; Babe Ruth at least satisfied both demands.

The game was faster then. A regulation nine-inning game was once completed in less than an hour. That was in the 1920s and it is a record surely never to be broken or even approached. These days it can take you that long to get out of the first inning.

In the days of our youth it was a game, and purely a game, and you stayed at the radio for hours at a stretch, listening to telegraphic re-creations of double-headers between the Rochester Red Wings and the Newark Bears, finding them exciting and somehow important.

(The cheer track preceded the laugh track in broadcasting. During those re-created games, you could still hear the Teletype clicking away in the background, and you could envision the announcer hitting a wood block to signal a single and cuing up the cheers.)

Television has changed not only the salaries but to some extent the game, as it has affected almost everything else in the society. The longer inter-inning breaks accommodate the commercials. (An hourlong nine-inning game would be an abomination.)

And yet, despite the delays and the one-pitch relievers and the ritual four wide ones on an intentional pass, and such travesties as the designated hitter, the game of baseball is as beautiful, unpredictable, skillful and exciting as ever. The perfect double play is as pretty as it was when the principals were Tinker, Evers and Chance.

Afternoon games in the blazing Southern California sun are not quite the joy they were in Red Wing Stadium. But to watch a game in the soft Southern California night is to be part of a ritual that is deep in the blood--probably deeper and more personally felt even than Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July.

The years drop away; the awareness of baseball as a very big business fades out (surfacing briefly in the long, listless waits between half-innings). And you can speculate pleasurably on whether this might be the Cubs’ year, Armageddon or not.