Nomo Is Pitching Relief for Baseball

Every few decades, somebody has to “save” baseball.

From itself, usually.

Babe Ruth had to save it in the 1920s. The Black Sox scandal had erupted and the game was afraid its fans would think it was as crooked as a riverboat roulette wheel.

The players had blown it then. With a little help from the owners. White Sox owner Charles Comiskey was so notoriously stingy and miserly in his dealings with players, they felt they had to turn to the underworld to earn a respectable living.

Baseball created a new position--commissioner--and hired a take-no-prisoners federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, to run the game, reassure the patrons and discomfort the moguls.

But Landis never put a customer in a seat or created a climate of favorable publicity for the grand old game. Babe Ruth did.

The game, in a very real sense, was saved 25 years later by another magnate, Branch Rickey, when he broke the invisible “color” line and brought baseball kicking and screaming into the 20th Century.

How the game thought it could disenfranchise 10 or more percent of the population in perpetuity defies credulity, but the Jackie Robinsons, Willie Mayses and Henry Aarons played their parts in saving the game again in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Now, the game is in trouble again. The owners and players have once again conspired to turn baseball into Public Enemy No. 1. They have alienated its support group, the fans, and left it slowly turning in the wind. Once again, a nation turns its lonely eyes to a new character who can lead it out of its bondage.

Hideo Nomo is about as unlikely a Messiah as you could wish. A gutsy little right-hander with a baffling delivery, a 90-m.p.h. fastball and a split-fingered something-or-other that tends to disappear on the way to the plate.

All he has to do is lead baseball back in the paths of righteousness, take the spotlight off its antisocial behavior, make it a game again, not a court battle or a labor war.

It’s a large order for a guy who can’t even speak English. He has to walk the walk of Ruth, Mays, Aaron and Robinson. Save the game. America pins its hopes on him.

He’s a lot more fun than Landis. Perhaps you noticed Nomo in Tuesday night’s All-Star game. They let him pitch only two innings. I guess they were afraid some dim-bulb of a .280 hitter would misconstrue the whole thing and rip him for a three-run homer.

The plot calls for him to be a hero. Lord knows, baseball needs one.

The media are busy casting around for a nickname for him. He came with one attached-- “Tornado.” It has been suggested he be called “Sayonara,” the Japanese equivalent of “See Ya Later” for the way he disposes of batters. ESPN’s Chris Berman will probably want to dub Nomo “It Ain’t Gonna Rain.”

He’s one Japanese import our industry wants. No trade war here. He’s worth five ambassadors.

But can he save baseball? Can anyone save baseball?

There are three kinds of attendance figures these days: average, fair and where-is-everybody? Baseball is the Sick Man of Sport at the moment. Apathy, not ill-will, is the real enemy. Better even a shake of the fist than a shrug of the shoulders. Even booing, after all, is a form of caring.

The broadcaster, Bob Costas, points out that “the very people who created the mess in the first place are in charge of the cleanup.”

He referred to Bud Selig, the first owner in history to pass himself off as commissioner, and Donald Fehr, the first labor leader in history to have a constituency instead of an adversary of millionaires.

Between them, they managed to cancel an American institution, the World Series, and jeopardize another American institution, major league baseball.

You would have to say they are each batting about .199. No wonder the game needs its Japanese import to put it back on its feet.

“We need a real live commissioner,” insisted Costas, interviewed on the ABC “Nightline” broadcast, “Will the Fans Ever Forgive the National Pastime?”

The game needs a real live hero. Not just someone who’s skilled or talented or able, but someone who can put the joy and the magic back in the game. Someone to root for. Someone who participates in the whole package who doesn’t behave as if he were doing you a favor just showing up.

Maybe Hideo Nomo likes the game and not just the money. If so, they ought to make him commissioner.