Baseball? More Like <i> Biz</i> ball

The average salary is $1,116,000. Some 260 out of a possible 700 in the business earn that or more.

Members of the New York Stock Exchange? The boardroom at GE? Toyota? OPEC directors? Owners of railroads?

Naw. Baseball players. Guys who make their living hitting, catching or chasing a little white five-ounce ball in front of a lot of people eating hot dogs or swilling beer. They make more money doing this than the owner of the Cunard White Star Line used to make running a fleet of ocean liners, or Aristotle Onassis operating a fleet of oil tankers.

You have to hit yourself on the side of the head to comprehend how an individual can earn $6,329,000 a year for turning the double play.

To be sure, Ryne Sandberg handled 830 chances at second base last season and had 539 assists and batted .304. But this is not exactly like inventing the electric light or the phonograph. He does not give employment to millions of people, as did Henry Ford. He gets $6 million a year because he can hit the curveball and struck out only 73 times last year. And got a hit every three times up.

As a matter of fact, he gets $6 million for doing absolutely nothing for a while. He’s on the disabled list at the moment.

Of course, he doesn’t need the money. He can get up to $10,000 or $20,000 a day at commercial autograph signings when he’s through playing.

One company (doing business as the Cincinnati Reds) has eight executives (i.e., players) earning more than $3 million a year apiece. Match that around ITT.

Two companies, the Colorado Rockies, Inc., and the Florida Marlins, Inc., paid $95 million apiece just to sit in on this high-level game. That didn’t include players.

Is there a product connected with what they do? Yeah. Entertainment.

Is it worth those kinds of investments? Well, the television network, CBS, paid more than a billion dollars for exclusive rights to this entertainment conglomerate. Since this included the World Series and playoffs, the price was right. Maybe.

Because this also included Saturday afternoon May, or even September, games, which can be as meaningless as a politician’s promise. Who in the world is going to turn on the TV set on an August afternoon to watch two fourth-place teams struggle through 3 1/2 hours of one of 162 games? Anybody caught watching a midseason game between the Houston Astros and Chicago Cubs--or the Milwaukee Brewers and Seattle Mariners--should get a life.

There is a large and growing school of thought holding that baseball is once more “the sick man of sport.” It has been run over by basketball and football, which get the kind of ink baseball used to reserve to itself.

When pro basketball was in its infancy, the great Celtic guard, Bob Cousy, once mourned to this reporter: “We in basketball have an uphill fight--we are bucking a 75-year bin of anecdotal lore.”

English translation: Baseball had the sports pages virtually all to itself. Dempsey and boxing intervened only sporadically. College football was regional. Pro football was in its crib. Pro basketball was so nonexistent, it used to be played as part of the preliminary to an appearance by the Harlem Globetrotters in the main event. The sporting press scorned basketball as “whistleball” or “jumpball.” You went to it only because there was a dance afterward.

All that has changed. It has become the game of choice for millions of our finest young athletes. It has become a sports page staple. The Final Four doesn’t need a dance afterward.

Baseball came to be mocked because it was too slow, too long, too much inaction. And its practitioners in some cases became too rich.

The game didn’t command the affection it once did. Players moved around too much to be perceived as hometown heroes anymore. No longer legally forced to stay where they started, they began to shift franchises with each season. Have bat, will travel. Today’s beloved became tomorrow’s archenemy. It got harder to tell the good guys, a fatal flaw in the morality play that is sports.

The attendance figures belied the doomsayers--31,759,501 in the American League, including the all-time, one-team high of 4,028,318 by Toronto, and 24,112,770 in the National League with two fewer franchises--but baseball no longer lives by attendance alone. The profit motif is television. Television controls the purse strings; it controls the product. Television wants night games, it gets night games. Television wants playoffs, it gets playoffs.

A lot of the purity has left baseball. A World Series used to pit the certifiably best teams in each league against one another, the teams that had won the most games over the season. That changed in 1973 when the New York Mets, 82-79 for the season, three games above .500, beat the Cincinnati Reds, 99-63 for the season, in the National League playoffs.

Television will want more teams in the playoffs. To give more substance to late-season (or even early-season) televised games. If television wants them to play on donkeys, they will.

Still, the game putters along, struggling with its heirloom past and its gaudy show-biz future. What’s next? Two-strikes-yer-out-at-the-old-ball-game? The “home nine” has become the home 10 in one league. The grass is unreal.

But the salaries are surreal. The Mets are paying $6,200,000 to a guy who hit .249 last season. The Florida Marlins are paying $4,125,000 to a pitcher who pitched 28 2/3 innings last year.

The minimum salary is $109,000, or $29,000 a year more than Babe Ruth made in his prime.

Of the 10 players making more than $5 million, only one, Dwight Gooden, could be classified as a drawing card. The nearest thing to an all-time player, a player who would be mentioned in the same breath with Walter Johnson or Grover Cleveland Alexander--Boston’s Roger Clemens--gets “only” $4,655,000. Sounds like a lot, but he isn’t even the highest-paid pitcher on his own team.

Baseball is just corporate America. It’s dollars and no sense. Milwaukee is paying $3,250,000 to a pitcher who spent last year in Beloit, Wis., El Paso and Denver with a season record of 2-1 and 11 innings pitched. And he’s on the disabled list this year.

The national pastime is dumping truckloads of money on journeymen infielders and steel-gloved outfielders. It’s hard to believe you haven’t stumbled into Alice’s Wonderland when you think the most money Sandy Koufax ever got was $120,000, and he had to hold out for that.

Satchel Paige pitched for whatever could be collected when they passed the hat, and a bunch of guys agreed to throw the World Series one year because the gamblers offered them more in a week--$10,000--than the best of them, Shoeless Joe Jackson or Eddie Cicotte, could make in three years, $7,500.

If it’s a sport, so is General Motors.