There Is No Joy in Mudville : Baseball club owners and players--and the fans--have struck out

The baseball season has been canceled. The owners have borrowed a line from the Gershwins and said, in effect, let’s call the whole thing off. Somehow Americans will fill their calendars in September and October, traditionally the autumnal provinces of pennant races, playoffs and the World Series.

What if the games had resumed and nobody came or cared? It’s a delicious thought of vengeance for the only authentically aggrieved party in the 1994 baseball strike, the American public.

Somebody asked baseball’s acting commissioner, Bud Selig, during his news conference Wednesday to explain just what would be in it for the fans once this messy dispute was resolved. Well? One might have expected his response to present a rousing portrait of the national pastime, a conjuring of wonderful games just on the other side of labor troubles. Instead, the response was like something out of a graduate labor relations seminar, a rambling speech on how difficult it is to understand the complexity of modern economics.

Give us a break. Neither the owners nor the players get it. America turns to baseball precisely because it is not like everything else. But ever loyal in our expectations, we fans will in all probability be there. Baseball’s warring factions seem to take this as a given. In past work stoppages, we have obliged them ever so willingly. Why else would they put us through the disingenuous posturing of recent weeks?

The owners have wrecked a season by holding fast to a salary cap proposal that from the beginning was received by players as warmly as a brushback pitch. In this “anything but new taxes” climate for business, the players proposed that the owners put a levy on themselves to address financial inequities.

Would that we had the resolve to make both sides sweat to recapture our enthusiasm. This year as never before, the participants have treated us shabbily indeed, going out of their way to overwhelm our sentiments with the knowledge that, for them, this dispute is merely a matter of dollars. Baseball fans know all about strategy. But mostly they know that baseball should be fun. They prefer not to have the business side flaunted.

During this spectacle, there were at least some rumblings of a fan revolt. Even Congress with its own wobbly approval ratings could start to look good by comparison; it now wants to have an overdue look at baseball’s antitrust exemption. Good. Go to it.

While baseball’s economic mess gets sorted out, the owners should hire and empower a new commissioner. The players might use this time to fully realize that few people will ever get paid so much for having so much fun. The rest of us maybe can find solace in Ken Burns’ forthcoming PBS series on the great game’s past, and hope for a time when once again we have not only memories and film clips but the game itself.