Fans’ Sympathies Die Along With the Baseball Season

If you cancel it, they won’t care.

That was the overwhelming reaction throughout the Los Angeles area Tuesday to the cancellation of the 1994 Major League Baseball season after team owners and players failed to reach accord to end the players’ strike--dooming the World Series.

In coffeehouses and sporting goods stores, at gas stations and topless bars, male and female fans alike expressed disgust over the impasse, saying they would get along just fine without this year’s Fall Classic, thank you.

There was little joy in Mudville or anywhere else Tuesday, just a lot of head-shaking and finger-pointing. In the eyes of many fans, Mighty Casey and his salary-minded friends truly have struck out this time around.

But the untimely death of America’s Pastime for this season threw no curve to most baseball watchers. They sounded as though they have adjusted to the fact that October doesn’t have to mean the silky play-by-play voice of Vin Scully. It doesn’t have to mean draft beer, peanuts and that funky organ music, and the delicious tension of “ . . . score tied in the bottom of the ninth, three men on.”

After all, couch potatoes and sports fans have still got the dash and crash of the National Football League. They’ve got basketball. They’ve got the National Hockey League (unless the hockey pros carry out their own strike threat).

“This is California, dude. We don’t care about this stuff,” scoffed Jay Eisenberg, the manager of the Footlocker store in the Sherman Oaks Galleria.

“I’ve got friends in East Coast cities that are about to slit their wrists over this thing. But this is L.A. It’s business as usual. We’ve got tons of other sports. We’ve got volleyball. We’ve got the beach!”

He seemed to speak for plenty of people who proudly proclaimed themselves ex-baseball fans Wednesday.

“Silly, silly, silly,” said Morris Jacobs, 82, as he walked in the mall with his wife, Ethel. “They should have settled this thing without making people suffer. But heck, I stopped being a baseball fan in this town back in the glory days of Koufax and Drysdale. Now I play golf.”

At the Kachina Grill in Downtown’s Wells Fargo Center, the upwardly mobile from the gleaming towers in the surrounding financial district gather for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at day’s end. But the aborted season put a sour spin on Wednesday’s happy hour.

“You got a bunch of ‘haves’ arguing with a bunch of ‘have-too-muches,’ ” said bond trader Kevin Schoening, 37. “I’ll miss the World Series, but I have no sympathy for either side.”

But engineer Tim Hampton allowed as how he “probably would have tried to get tickets for the Dodgers in the playoffs.”

For attorneys Milo Stevanovich and K. Todd Shollenbarger, the aborted season is a moot point since basketball has eclipsed baseball, in their view.

“I think basketball is the new sport of America,” said Shollenbarger. “There’s a lot going on.”

Out at Elysian Park, on the approaches to Dodger Stadium, the Wells Fargo Center is but a soaring point on a skyline so near, and yet so far away. In Wednesday’s lengthening shadows, Quintero Herson, 18, was hitting a baseball to several friends as dozens of soccer players practiced nearby.

“We’ll miss baseball, of course,” he said. “But if it returns next year, I’ll still watch it on TV.”

Devotion like that was not to be found at the Candy Cat lounge in Canoga Park. The afternoon regulars watched the topless dancers without the usual baseball game on the TV screen over the bar.

“I never watch baseball, so I couldn’t give a damn what they do with their sport,” said Steve Jones, a 42-year-old construction worker. “They make too much money anyway.”

All around him, nods of approval.

Over at the bar, Butch Cassidey and Pat Flynn weren’t shedding any tears in their draft beers.

“What do you mean, we’re not going to have a World Series? We’ve already had our World Series, as far as I’m concerned,” said Flynn. “Those kids from the Northridge Little League played with more heart than any of those major leaguers ever could.”

At the Sherman Oaks Galleria, 10-year-old Holden Burkons greeted the news with a quizzical look.

“It’s bad for them to just stop playing,” Holden said. “I mean, lots of people like to watch baseball. What are they going to do now? Even in my Little League, we wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

Even older fans talked in terms of heroes. And disappointment.

“Yeah, these guys are my heroes. And I feel they’ve let me down by quitting,” said Matthew Greenberg, a Footlocker employee. “They should just play ball. That’s what they’re paid to do. . . . You can’t blame one side or the other. Both of them are greedy, if you ask me.”

Some Southern Californians were glad to see baseball go. And not because of any anger about rising player salaries.

“Now I can reclaim my husband from the television set,” said one shopper who declined to give her name. “If I heard one more gripe about him wishing baseball were on, I think I would scream.”

Still, Ivana Lee is worried about her dad.

“He’s obviously going to be bummed about the death of baseball,” said the 18-year-old Bakersfield resident, who was visiting the Galleria. “He’s going to be grouchy. We’ll probably be renting more movies now for him to take up his couch-potato time.”