Mighty Baseball Has Struck Out in Courtroom Too

While you sort out the losers from the bigger losers in the baseball strike, consider the lawyers.

Perhaps they just forgot to tell Bud Selig and the owners that if a lockout was held to be a violation of a court injunction, they were liable for treble damages.

At any rate, the owners caved in, opening the gates under the old rules as soon as a court issued the order the National Labor Relations Board had sought.

On ESPN’s Sports Reporters, Bill Conlin commemorated the gaffe with a takeoff on “Casey at the Bat:”

Said Conlin:

The outlook wasn’t brilliant For the Budville nine that day. The score was three to zip With not a motion left to play.

Add strike: “What happens next in Casey at the Bar,” continued Conlin, “three federal judges take turns beating up on Casey, the lead dog in major league baseball’s battered kennel of seven-figure attorneys.

” . . . Don’t insult Perry Mason’s courtroom foil, Hamilton Burger, by comparing him to the Bud Lights. At least the Red Klotz of jurisprudence beat Mason once. The bottom of the legal pecking order now reads: public defender, ambulance chaser and baseball lawyer.

“I think when William Shakespeare wrote we should kill all the lawyers, he was speaking with clairvoyance on behalf of millions of baseball fans.”

Trivia time: What high school has the most players in the NBA?

Le bargain: Baseball has a new look after so many deals like the one that sent relief ace John Wetteland from Montreal to the Yankees for Fernando Seguignol, who averaged .262 in two years of Class A ball.

This was not a fire sale, it just looked like one, assuming you believe the principals.

Said Expo General Manager Kevin Malone: “A fire sale is when you’re giving guys away.”

Said Yankee General Manager Gene Michael: “All the people I’ve talked to tell me Seguignol should become a fine major leaguer.”

Translation: Seguignol was so deep in the Yankee organization, Michael had to ask someone about him.

“This trade is what’s wrong with baseball,” Cleveland General Manager John Hart said. “The small-market teams have got to sell their star players to survive, and those teams are being preyed upon by the big clubs.”

Au revoir: Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, the biggest-market owner, has long been a proponent of the big ones dining on the little ones.

If the Expos, who led the NL East by six games at the strike last season, have traded Wetteland, Marquis Grissom, Ken Hill and let Larry Walker go, they shouldn’t come crying to Steinbrenner.

“I don’t want to help Montreal,” he told ESPN’s Peter Gammons. “I’ll tell you why.

“They deserve for everybody in Montreal to go out to every game and draw 10 million people off the job that they did. Now, if the people in Montreal, which is a great city, don’t misunderstand me, (it’s) one of the great cities in the universe, but if they don’t want baseball, they don’t want baseball.”

Trivia answer: Dunbar High in Baltimore with four--Muggsy Bogues, David Wingate, Reggie Williams and Sam Cassell.

Quotebook: Lenny Dykstra, on the baseball strike: “I didn’t think we’d get to play this early. I thought it would be like hockey. And it would have been except for some woman (Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor) who probably has never seen a baseball game, who wouldn’t know if Barry Bonds was a car salesman or the best player in the game.”