They’re Out, and Forgotten, in the Valley

If you cancel it, they won’t care.

That was the overwhelming reaction in the San Fernando Valley area Wednesday 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, one of the nation’s most-watched TV sports events.

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

Indeed, there was little joy in Mudville, or anywhere else on Wednesday, 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 sound as if they have simply 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 threat to strike.)

“This is California, dude. We don’t care about this stuff,” scoffed Jay Eisenberg, 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 be speaking for plenty of people who proudly proclaimed themselves ex-baseball fans Wednesday.

“Silly, silly, silly,” said Morris Jacobs, 82, as he walked 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. They don’t throw strikes in that sport.”

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.

Some of the guys couldn’t have cared less.

“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, as he sipped a beer in his front-row runway seat. “They make too much money anyway. I wouldn’t watch them if they were the last sport on the face of the planet.”

All around him, nods of approval.

“Hell, baseball is a fun game to play with the kids,” Jones continued. “But to sit and watch adults play the game, over-muscled guys making $5 million a year, that’s not any fun.”

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. It was the best baseball I’ve seen in years.

“And you know why? Because it was real. There weren’t dollar signs hovering over the ballpark.”

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

Holden, who plays on a Little League team, said he always looked up to the real professionals, but now it seemed the players were spending more time in court than on the diamond.

Explain that to a 10-year-old, said his mother, Donna.

“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 of 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.”

At the Kachina Grill in the Wells Fargo Center downtown, attorneys Milo Stevanovich and K. Todd Shollenbarger said they won’t miss the canceled season.

Stevanovich said that although he usually watches some of the World Series on television, he prefers NBA basketball. “I think I have a short attention span,” he said, adding that baseball “doesn’t move very much.”

Shollenbarger said baseball is such a small part of his life that he feels no impact from the canceled season. Baseball is like soccer, with play that “goes on and on and nobody scores,” he said. “Basketball is the new sport of America. There’s a lot going on. Watching a game is really exciting.”

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

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

“Good, now I can reclaim my husband from the television set,” said one woman shopper in Sherman Oaks 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.”

At the mall’s B. Dalton bookstore, manager Amanda Nobes worried that the prematurely buried season might slow sales of a book that was published to coincide with a public television documentary on the sport that will be broadcast this weekend.

“The best thing to come out of this whole thing is that Nike commercial showing the fan walking around an empty stadium,” she said. “When he sits down, the words come on the screen ‘Play ball. Please.’ It’s great. That’s what I say, just play ball.”