COMMENTARY : True Spirit of the Game Is Hidden

The game is run by people unworthy of it, from Bud Selig and Donald Fehr on down. Selig is the acting commissioner, but Fehr is the real commissioner because he has the Players Association. Since August, the two of them have cost baseball three-quarters of a billion dollars. Selig and Fehr might as well have burned the money, which is gone forever. If they ran another business this way, they both would be fired by now.

For eight months of the strike, the game was embarrassed on almost a daily basis as the national pastime became a new kind of national joke. Now, the strike is over but the embarrassment continues as teams conducted red-tag sales of their best players.

There is no commissioner in baseball, no collective-bargaining agreement, no guarantee that we will get through this season without another strike or a lockout. There is no leadership or vision or plan for the future. Since last August, the caretakers of the game have done everything to kill it.

But baseball is very hard to kill. A hate-filled business is still a wonderful game.

It was there to see Thursday at Yale Field in New Haven, Conn., when the New Haven Ravens of the Eastern League played the Reading Phillies and another season officially began.

“This is the first professional regular-season game in 1995,” Raven General Manager Charlie Dowd announced to the 4,500 people in the ballpark. The announcement produced a fine cheer from the 4,500.

The temperature was in the 40s but the sun was out, and there were blue and white and black balloons behind home plate, about to be released. Someone had a barbecue going in the new bleachers down the right-field line, and rock ‘n’ roll music blared over the loudspeakers. The people kept coming into Yale Field.

“After everything that’s been happening in this game,” said Reading coach Bill Robinson, “there’s something about today that feels very cleansing to me.”