Pondering a True Life Fantasy Team

I saw a movie the other night, “Little Big League.” Cute. Funny. Disneyesque. No crashing cars, steaming sex, gratuitous violence. As wholesome as a July 4 doubleheader. Take the kids.

It’s about a card-collecting, rabid baseball fan, a Little Leaguer whose grandfather (Jason Robards) leaves him a big league team (the Minnesota Twins) in his will.

The kid can recite every base hit Ty Cobb ever made, he knows baseball inside out, he can call a slider from a seat in the third tier, knows who the third baseman was in the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield, and when he takes over the team, he decides that the manager--a Billy Martin type with a sulfuric vocabulary and a volcanic temper--is not spurring his team to the pennant with his runaway sarcasm but actually robbing his players of self-esteem. He takes over as manager himself.

As I say, it’s a fun gimmick. But it set me to thinking. What would I do if they gave me a big league team of my very own to run?

Aha! Oh, boy! Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack and let me get at that franchise! Stand back! I would do lots of things to those spoiled darlings. Such as:

--I would hand out those big salaries only based on performance. No guaranteed income. Swing for your supper.

--If the guy was a home run hitter, I would offer $4 million provided he hit 40 home runs, $3 million for 30, $2 million for 20. If he hit less than 10, I would consider it breach of contract, pay him nothing and sue him for non-performance.

--I would draw a parallel to golf and explain to the players that golfers collected monies only for performance and success at it. In other words, they had to play well to get paid. They got paid on a sliding scale. Golfers, if they play well, shoot in the 60s and get rewarded. If they play poorly, they miss the cut and get nothing and are out the transportation and hotel money they had to put up for the week. I would tell the ballplayers I would pick up the travel and hotel costs but if they went 0 for four, they miss the cut at the pay window. Good enough for golf (and tennis), good enough for baseball.

--I would insist that no player ever get more money than Thomas Edison or Marconi, factoring in inflation, of course. I would explain that there is no way standing out in right field blowing bubble gum all night equates with inventing the electric light or the wireless or the motion picture, and the gift of light to mankind should be far more rewarded than hitting .257 for the season.

--If a pitcher had a less-than-.500 season or an earned-run average of more than 5.00, he should return the money.

--If a relief pitcher or a relief corps could not hold onto a seventh inning 9-3 lead, they should, like golfers, have their playing privileges picked up and they should have to go back through qualifying school and retire the side with the winning run on base before they could again get their cards--and job--back.

--If a team loaded the bases with none out and the next three batters could not bring even one run in, those three batters should have to donate their salary for that night (or that week) to charity.

--Anyone who strikes out in the bottom of the ninth or pops up with the winning runs on base should have to pay to play.

--Salaries should be contingent upon ability to draw people into the ballpark. It should be remembered the greatest draw in the history of the game, Babe Ruth, earned only $80,000 in his best salary year. Hollywood can find out who fills seats, baseball can, too. Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax filled a ballpark. A lot of guys making more money than they did cannot fill a Volkswagen.

--If a player objected to being a role model or spokesman for the game, I would take him at his word, take his number and name off the back of his uniform, list him only as Player X or Player to Be Named Later and let him play anonymously for the rest of his career. Let’s see how many shoe contracts he would get out of that.

--If a player was rude to the public or surly with autograph seekers or prone to getting into 2 a.m. fights in nightclub parking lots, I would suggest he get a job that would suit him better: bouncer in a disco.

--I would let guys wear earrings if they were hitting their lifetime averages, but I would ask they pull their pant legs up so they didn’t look so much like guys who just got out of a hotel fire.

--I wouldn’t object to scruffy hair and dirty uniforms if my team were called the Gas House Gang, but I would prefer the Yankee image. The Yankees always looked like chairmen of the board when they went out. One John Kruk is OK, but a league full of them? Do you think Joe DiMaggio ever even needed a shave?

--I would never let anybody bunt and I would never walk anybody intentionally. I would tell my pitchers, “You got a 65% chance of getting the hitter out, even the best one.” If my pitcher had to walk anyone, I would walk him intentionally.

--I would remind fans that a wise man said that in the age of man, hours spent in a ballpark didn’t count.

--My doctor, Gary Sugarman, has a simple first step for his ballclub. If it’s on AstroTurf, take it out. If it’s got a roof, take it off. If a player doesn’t play 142 games, make him a temp.

The director of the film, Andrew Scheinman, obviously loves the game too much to put it down, but he does have a symbolic scene in which the 12-year-old upbraids the star player for taking the fun out of the game, which is what Dr. Gary thinks the modern player has done to the game anyway--broken faith with all the 12-year-old fans.

As Roy Campanella said, you have to be a man to play baseball but you have to have a lot of little boy in you, too. There’s a line in the movie quoting Bob Lemon: “Baseball was made for kids, grown-ups only screw it up.”

It’s not so far-fetched a notion for a young boy to run a ballclub. Who is more into the game with less distractions than a 12-year-old? There’s nothing wrong with baseball that a 12-year-old’s dreams and enthusiasm can’t fix. Just ask Willie Mays. Willie stayed 12 for 22 years. The rest of the world grew old, he didn’t. The game grew up. That’s its principal difficulty.