COMMENTARY : Lovers of Baseball Finding It Harder and Harder to Love It

You know the Jimmy Buffett song, “If the Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me”? It’s a baseball song, sort of.

It’s about unrequited love, and all. If baseball isn’t about love it isn’t about anything. I confess, I love baseball. A lot of people love baseball. But I don’t love it as much as I used to. A lot of people don’t love it as much as they used to.

Love is emotion. Now the people who run baseball are talking about strike issues just at the time people who love baseball love it best. Strike talk is cold and hard. This is perilous stuff for an industry whose own study last year cited “the decline and embitterment of baseball in American Life.”

A strike after Labor Day, when the rewards for faith, hope and loyalty are ripe watermelon to be tasted after mowing the lawn, would be a terrible thing. It might even be a little bit fatal. Worse than that, it would be stupid.

It’s painfully clear that only the fans love baseball. Owners, players--everybody is in it for what they can get or what they can bully the other side into giving up. The rudderless owners are meeting even now to plan their next assault on the players. The players are plotting their response to preserve what they have, and get a little bit more.

They’re fixed on paths to force or justify a strike when what they should be fixed on is reasons why they mustn’t have a strike. Doesn’t anybody think about what’s good for the baby? It was in Reggie Jackson’s speech at Cooperstown; he acknowledged money was the engine that drives baseball but warned us not to lose the joy of the game.

That’s what the fans love. They don’t get anything out of the game but love. It’s the players and the owners who get the money. And now the sense is that nobody gives any love back to the fans. “Just look at the people in baseball now--look at management, too--and the aura is that something is rotten in baseball,” said Martin Blackman, whose company, Blackman and Raber, consults with advertisers on which athletes will move the market.

Just think about what Vince Coleman did, or what Bret Saberhagen admitted Tuesday. Just listen to what Rickey Henderson says. He’s a rented player, a subcontractor who leaves his product at the door and doesn’t care what’s done with it. Is he a prostitute whose love song is the jingle of the cash register?

Sure, players always have been traded but the fan had the idea that they were traded to make the team better for him, that players were unhappy to leave and glad to arrive. Sometimes the fan was wrong--but sometimes he was right. Players weren’t just walking out on the fan’s love. And the players the fans loved best were rarely the ones who moved.

Now are they all Hessians who don’t have an emotional involvement with one side or the other, just in making a bagful of silver and staying alive?

Magic Johnson’s personal life is a self-inflicted tragedy, but his joy in playing basketball was always on display. Do you remember the last time you saw Barry Bonds smiling?

They don’t pay him to smile, is the argument. In a pig’s eye, they don’t.

The other day I came upon Newsweek of April 12, the start of the baseball season. It quoted Blackman pointing out that the only baseball player with national advertising was Nolan Ryan. And Ryan was typecast pitching Advil to the aching aged.

And that was before Coleman’s burst of enthusiasm burned the little girl’s face, before Saberhagen spread joy laced with bleach on reporters.

Since spring the image is only worse, even if Bonds’ on-field performance justifies his salary. “Roger Clemens should own the world of advertising, if he had the charisma, the electricity, if he showed the joy,” Blackman said Tuesday. Instead Clemens bristles. Bonds grumbles. Henderson says--nothing personal--it’s just business.

“If Rickey is seen snarling; if Bonds is being surly, you don’t have to be a psychologist to interpret it,” Blackman said. “The public interprets it perfectly.” Blackman calls it the “likeability quotient.” Do Mr. and Mrs. American feel they’d like to be with that person, sit down and have a beer? “An advertiser is not going to take a chance with the greatest player in the world if he isn’t going to deliver the atmosphere to sell the product,” Blackman said.

To say that’s purely Bonds’ problem or Clemens’ problem dodges the point. Every time Nike shows Michael Jordan or Reebok shows Shaquille O’Neal in mythical feat, it sells the excitement and glamour image of basketball.

Note also that Magic, Larry Bird, Jordan and most of the rest of the big basketball stars never changed uniforms, never walked out on the fans who loved them. Goodness knows, Pittsburgh loved Bonds.

It was the Pirates who offered a whole lot of money to keep Bonds, but it wasn’t enough. The owners are now--mindless as ever--portraying their best products as wretched ingrates, in hope of forcing concessions in the contract. At the same time San Diego Padres management is telling fans that their allegiance isn’t worth a farthing. Owners are saying the cost of players is too great a burden while the Baltimore Orioles are sold for $173 million--about $100 million more than the purchase price four years ago.

Basketball and football addressed the big-market/small-market conflict in some way. Baseball has refused to agree to share. Share is one of the emotional buzzwords of our language. “The public perception is that the owners would share but Mr. Steinbrenner and some of the others are so piggy that they won’t share,” the image analyst said. “They look greedy--one for all and all for me. Right or wrong, the perception is that both sides here have so much candy that they get sick over it.”

This is the time the two sides have to realize that sooner or later even the most ardent fan stops waiting for the phone to ring.