Baseball’s IOU : Owners, Players Need to Recognize Fans, Who Paid Biggest Price During Strike

Now, baseball faces its greatest challenge.

Mending the injury the game inflicted on its fans with the longest strike in professional sports history will be no simple matter. Baseball owes the public bigtime and it will take more than the traditional giveaways and promotions to square this account.

Forget the flimsy caps with one-size-fits-all adjustable headbands. They’re not enough this time. Save the insulated picnic bags with the spiffy team logos on the side. They don’t quite make it. Skip the wristbands and batting gloves. They are far too little.

Some of the proprietors of the game seem to have figured this out all by themselves. “We have to reach out to the fans,” said Bill Giles, boss of the Philadelphia Phillies. “We have to understand that the fans are the ones who pay the bill. The fans are the most important ingredient of this great game and we have to reach out to them.”

With that in mind, the Chicago White Sox came up with an intriguing promotion, which is how come Edward O’Brien happens to be throwing out the first ball at Comiskey Park.

O’Brien, 77, is not a politician, not a celebrity, not some local hotshot. He’s just a fan, and when the White Sox, searching for some way to make peace with those folks, asked them for letters with their most vivid baseball memories, he responded.

“He wrote in saying he had been a fan since 1925,” said Rob Gallas, the club’s senior vice president of marketing and broadcasting. “His favorite memory was of Bobo Newsome and Nellie Fox. Newsome always wanted the mound neat when he pitched. Fox found that out and every inning would litter it with gum wrappers and stuff to throw Newsome off his game.”

Charmed by the letter from a pre-MTV generation fan, the Sox invited him to handle the first pitch. The Minnesota Twins did a similar promotion for their first pitch. The winner, picked randomly, was 10-year-old Michael Wilklow. The runner-up, Betty Nygaard, will walk the opening day lineup to home plate with manager Tom Kelly.

Hooray for them, smart enough to tap in on memories, the quality that makes--or is that made?--baseball so special. They ran the risk of reminding fans of the way the game was when they fell in love with it and the way it isn’t anymore.

Hooray, too, for Lenny Dykstra, tough guy Lenny Dykstra, tobacco-chewing, hard-sliding, dirty uniform Lenny Dykstra. He gets it, too.

“The players are going to have to go out of their way to do more for the fans,” Dykstra said. “The fans are really the people who have paid the biggest price of this whole thing. To me, that was the worst part of all, because without them, there’s no baseball, no big salaries, no Porsches. They’ve got to get some special treatment this year.”

Such as?

“Sign more autographs, be friendlier, as much as you can do. I’m going to do whatever I can. They’re the ones that were cheated out of baseball and out of all the people who deserve not to be cheated out of it, they’re the ones.”

New York Yankee reliever John Wetteland gets it. After a workout, he went up into the stands, in uniform, to chat with the fans.

Sadly, though, some teams haven’t the foggiest notion that any extra effort is necessary. Atlanta Braves promotions director Miles McRea said his club isn’t planning anything special, beyond a one-day-a-week commemorative card giveaway. “I would say we’re pretty much doing what we’ve always done,” he said.

That’s business as usual at a time when business has not been usual.

Usual are pennant races, playoffs and a World Series. Usual is a hot stove league with trades and signings all winter.

This is a time for innovative, a time perhaps for a buy-one-get-one-free ticket promotion at least once in every homestand. Or having old players greet ticket buyers at the box office.

Do something--anything.

There is a major IOU that needs to be paid off and it won’t be taken care of with the usual methods.

“We have to make a conscious effort to show the fans that they are important,” said Jeff Montgomery, the player representative of the Kansas City Royals. “During the negotiations, the fans were part of the equation. After Aug. 12, they never were. We’ll have to spend more time directly communicating with fans. But how do you reach these people? I would do anything within reason.”