COMMENTARY : Baseball Finds a Hero, but Only by Losing Him

For months, ever since they canceled the World Series, baseball owners have waited -- like spoiled rich kids on Christmas morning -- for the opening of spring training so they could get their presents.

And what form might those fabulous gifts take, pray tell? Why, superstar ballplayers betraying their union and reporting to work to play alongside the truck drivers who will soon populate the owners’ replacement teams.

All winter, as they negotiated tepidly in public, the owners dreamed about who’d break ranks. When you spend years laying a trap, you want to see who falls into it, don’t you? At the Super Bowl, a team president asked me, “Who do you think will cross first?”

Which player had gone bankrupt? Who was mad at the union? Who’d swallowed the owner’s red-ink tale? Who’s just plain dumber than a box of rocks?

Now we know the answer. A future Hall of Famer has crossed baseball’s imaginary picket line: Detroit Tiger Manager Sparky Anderson.

However, to the owners’ amazed and infuriated embarrassment, Sparky went the wrong way! He didn’t come in. He went out.

To his lasting credit, the most famous, colorful and respected manager in the game refused to run a scab team. This is a moral fable that’ll grow with time. In 2095 fans will still tell the tale of the manager who jeopardized his job -- and risked being blackballed out of a chance to break the all-time record for wins by a manager -- rather than disrespect the game he loved.

Well, that is, if there still are baseball fans in 2095.

Just as you’d expect Lenny Dykstra to expand on his drunk-driving, poker-patsy past, so you figured Sparky would know right from wrong.

“I will not compromise my beliefs for any amount of money,” said Anderson, who was about to earn $1 million in a season for the first time in his 42 years in baseball. “If I did that ... I could not live with myself. ... I will not bargain my integrity.”

The Tigers immediately placed Anderson on unpaid leave. Some wanted to fire him instantly. Anderson, 60, may never manage again. He’s in the last year of his contract. His teams have sagged recently, and his stock with it.

By taking no stand, Anderson would have remained baseball’s honorary Good Old Boy No. 1 indefinitely. As the game’s modern-day Stengel, he could always have found some team, somewhere, glad to have him, if only to boost public relations. Now, unless baseball’s venomous backroom politics change overnight, Sparky’s employment chances have shrunk by 50 to 99 percent.

In his simple, decent, unlearned way, Sparky has drawn an elemental line in the dirt, probably without even knowing it.

Even if history someday shows that the owners have been right on every economic issue, they are wrong about replacement players. Deeply, movingly, gut-level wrong. In this whole murky, complex mess, replacement ball is the one stark issue. In the end, its raw ugliness -- its intrinsic arrogance and disrespect for both the game and the public -- may end up sinking the owners, rather than the players it was intended to undermine.

Sparky has managed Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Pete Rose, Tony Perez, Tom Seaver, Jack Morris, Kirk Gibson, Cecil Fielder, Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell. He’s not going to manage a bunch of slapstick bums in Tiger Stadium -- the grand green park that Ty Cobb, Sam Crawford, Charlie Gehringer and Hank Greenberg called home.

Sparky still believes in baseball. He thinks that profit margins and salary caps are lightweight subjects that never moved a child to cheers or a grown man to tears. Money’s nice, but not as the defining measure of your life. What’s a little cash, more or less, compared to managing, perhaps, the greatest team in history -- the 1975 Big Red Machine?

Sparky thinks big-league baseball is one of the realest, hardest, most craftsmanlike dignified corners of the world that you’ll find. If you can cut it there, it means something.

Now they’re going to let a bunch of shameless donkeys run around in Al Kaline’s pasture. They’ll even put those trash statistics in the book. They’re asking Sparky to manage a bunch of guys who should be dragging the infield, not playing on it. And he just won’t do it.

Sparky doesn’t have tons of book learnin’. Sooner or later, he’ll try to explain himself and make Casey sound coherent. That’s not the point. This is plain old Biblical good-and-evil stuff. If you don’t understand it’s dead wrong to use scab players in the majors as a strategy to win one round of labor negotiations -- which will be rewritten by the next negotiations in a few years anyway -- then, ethically speaking, you’re an imbecile. Nobody can help you.

Anderson has, as they say, framed the issue. Post-Sparky, it’s not going to be so easy to waltz across that line, is it? How can you play in scab games -- or talk seriously about it -- and still call yourself a big leaguer? Heck, Sparky won’t even manage ‘em, not if it costs him 10 seasons and $10 million.

For six months, there’s been no side to take in baseball’s tragi-comedy. The owners’ gall usually wins the prize. But the self-infatuated union has almost caught up. Perhaps it was inevitable this strike would be a war that was not won but, rather, would be lost by the most colossal blunder.

In the past week owners have put before us a spectacle so trashy, so shameless, so small-minded, so selfish and so revealing of the men who’ve orchestrated this strike, that an end to this debacle may finally be on the horizon.

Angry, syntax-mangling, decent-to-the-bone old Sparky Anderson -- his sorrow-filled mug the very symbol of the torture inflicted on his sport -- has held a mirror up before the face of every player and owner. Maybe, just maybe, his profile in character will be the catalytic act of spiritual mediation that baseball so desperately needs.