Every Man to His Specialty

Sometimes the worst thing you can do in this business is appear to take the side of management in a labor dispute. It’s politically incorrect. It’s elitist. It can run you afoul of the implacables of our civilization, the ones who think they know what’s good for society and you better get in line, Buster, if you know what’s good for you!

But I have to say I found jarring a note in an essay published in our paper the other day by someone named Neal Gabler in which he wrote: “If there is a baseball strike . . . rest assured the players will be the ones castigated.”

He adds: “It is a peculiar turn of events that has the fans demonizing the players and siding with the plutocrats. We are supposed to be a meritocracy, and there may be no more meritocratic institution than sports. Breeding, wealth, connections count for nothing on the athletic field. Only talent matters. Mike Piazza earns his salary because he can whack a ball out of a stadium. What did Dodger owner Peter O’Malley do to earn his millions aside from having the good fortune to be Walter O’Malley’s son?”

Whoa! Wait just a darn minute there, Neal! Time!

You say Peter O’Malley--to single out one owner--didn’t do anything except be Walter O’Malley’s son?

Let me ask you something: What did Barry Bonds really do except be Bobby Bonds’ son--and Grandfather Bonds’ grandson?

Maybe all Peter O’Malley had to say was, “Thanks, Dad!” Maybe all he had to do was wake up one day and his inheritance was in place? OK. But so was Barry Bonds’. So was Mike Piazza’s.

Peter O’Malley got from his father rich trusts, the Dodgers, the real estate--and the corporate savvy to run them.

But Barry Bonds (or Mike Piazza) got from his father the 20/20 (or better) vision, the reflexes of a young deer, the strength to hit a ball 400 feet or more on demand. Barry Bonds and Mike Piazza should say, “Thanks, Dad,” and thank all their ancestors, too, for their legacy. For which they had to do nothing, either. It came in the will, so to speak. And therefore they should say thanks for the $7 million or so they will make each year from that legacy.

Nature made them athletes. Well, nature made O’Malley a businessman. He hits his curveball, too.

You say, all he has to do is sit there and clip coupons? Well, all the average outfielder has to do is stand out there all night long blowing bubble gum or spitting tobacco. And brushing by autograph seekers by growling at them, “Get a life!”

Actually, it is the long-held conceit here that the game of baseball was put in place by neither owners nor players. It’s an old story with me, but I take the position it was put in place by writers, dramatists if you will, poets of the press box who extolled it, saw in it a national metaphor for America and its dreams. You think some center fielder first called it “the National Pastime?” You think some general manager wrote a poem about “Tinker to Evers to Chance?” Who made it a “Field of Dreams?” Some second baseman? No. Some ink-stained wretch.

Let me ask you: You ever see an organized baseball park without a press box? The Lardner family handed down a love of the game and an aptitude for dramatizing it, fully contributing to the dominant economic position it now occupies as much as any family with an aptitude for playing it.

What I’m trying to say is, the grand old game--Who do you think first called it that?--needs more than just guys who can play it.

Ballplayers have always come from, so to speak, the other side of the tracks. You don’t get athletes out of silk-sheet America. You get them off the farms, out of the canebrakes. They are the natural selection of generations of progenitors who chopped cotton, split rails, baled hay, plowed ground, grew wheat. Their stomachs are hard, their hands strong, their nerves steady. From Ty Cobb to Hank Aaron, they are either country boys or they come from a long line of country boys, hard-muscled, superb physical specimens.

This doesn’t make them more “meritorious” than guys who got none of this from their parents, guys whose eyesight is 20/50, who can’t go down to first base in 3.5 seconds or run the 40 in 4.3, guys who were bequeathed only the family jewel, money, guys who were, in a sense, deprived.

The French have a saying, “Chacun a son gout” --”Every man to his specialty”--and what is wrong with inheriting an eye for a balance sheet, a talent for business, even a family team? If you don’t get the hard belly, the fleet legs, the home run stroke, what is so unmeritorious about a head for business? Nature compensates. No one gets it all.

I take no position on the current strike talks. Neither do I condemn the labor leaders because they can’t hit the ball as far as Mike Piazza. Nor do I fault them that they don’t know what it is to run a team. They do what they do. We all do. Maybe their fathers bequeathed them a talent for negotiation instead of a talent for hitting or throwing the curve.

Baseball is lucky to have these superb athletes. But they’re lucky to have baseball. The ability to hit the curveball would otherwise be of limited use in our society.

If Peter O’Malley inherited business acumen--and the Dodgers--from his father, what is so wrong about that? You’re going to make him give it back? Not unless you make Barry Bonds give his inheritance back. Which he did nothing to earn. Didn’t even pay taxes on.

You don’t have to get off the world because you can’t bunt.