Just Another Blown Save by Baseball

Barry Larkin and Albert Belle should be the MVPs, Greg Maddux and Randy Johnson the Cy Young winners, Chipper Jones and Garret Anderson the rookies of the year, and Don Baylor and Kevin Kennedy the managers of the year -- if you care about such things, and chances are you care less than you once did.

The temptation is to say baseball needs a Cleveland-Colorado World Series to make you care again. Only in Cleveland and Denver has the game been embraced without hesitation this year; and maybe, just maybe, a grand, glorious and delightful World Series in those new ballparks with teams up from nothing could redeem this season of misery.

That temptation, however strong, will be resisted. Nothing can repair the damage baseball has done to itself, the greatest damage since 1919 when eight men conspired with gamblers to fix the World Series. Today’s misery is the work of a thousand men who broke a compact of faith with the fans. No World Series in ‘94? No one had ever caused such a thing in 90 years, not Hitler, not Hirohito, not Stalin, not even Mark Fuhrman.

So this season has been the fans’ payback for ‘94, crystallized one day last week.

It began when a young woman named Lucy Murray took a phone call from her husband, John, who told her he was headed to Wrigley Field.

She’s 23, he’s 27. They live in suburban Chicago. He’s a bond trader at the Chicago Board of Trade. A year old during the Cubs’ great collapse of 1969 and a teenager in ’84 when Leon Durham couldn’t pick up a ground ball, Murray went to the ballpark last week hoping to see his heroes move a step nearer the playoffs.

At home, Lucy Murray zapped her way through the TV channels until she came across the Cubs game. There she saw an odd thing. She saw a fight at the pitcher’s mound that wasn’t your basic baseball brawl featuring a dozen uniformed brats. This one included a man in street clothes.

“I had no idea who it was,” Lucy Murray told the Chicago Tribune. “I just saw some guy rolling around on the ground with Randy Myers. I thought for a fleeting second that it might be my husband, because I knew he was at the game, but then I said, ‘No way.’ ”

Though John Murray has not explained himself, circumstantial evidence suggests he did not like Randy Myers’ late-inning relief work that day. Myers gave up a two-run home run. Before the next pitch, Murray left his seat to have a word with Myers, who responded with a forearm shiver and glowerings of menace followed by a schoolyardy roll in the dirt.

Police arrested Murray for assault and disorderly conduct. His wife said he’d never done anything like that before: “He’s probably embarrassed.”

We mention this affair not because John Murray did the right thing. It’s a fool’s thing he did. But, alas, alack and sad to say, the truth is this: A lot of folks would like to do the same fool’s thing. Never have baseball fans been so angry at the game’s hero/brats.

Even with wild-card races -- a good thing, creating competition where there might be none -- this has been a season of discontent and disillusionment. Let us count only a few of the ways.

Chili Davis goes into the stands after a fan. A fan comes out of the stands after Randy Myers. Bobby Cox is arrested when his wife calls the police. Carlos Perez is arrested when his date calls the police. Slouching toward indolence, Barry Bonds watches a line drive land behind him. Deion Sanders says, Gotta go, it’s football time. To judge by stadium votes and political rhubarbs, folks who live in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee don’t much care if baseball stays or goes. Except in Cleveland and Colorado, apathy is running wild.

A measure of that apathy is available in attendance figures. To see how bad it has been, we looked at 16 games involving playoff contenders from Sept. 20-28 in Seattle, New York, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Texas as well as two contenders’ road games at Anaheim and San Diego.

It’s bad. Those 16 important games by baseball’s best teams didn’t fill stadiums even halfway. In ballparks averaging 52,413 seats, attendance averaged 25,169; that’s 48 percent capacity. Even that may be stretching the truth, since many clubs count season tickets whether or not the customer shows up.

Such is the sorry state of baseball that fans in different parts of the country spoke angrily the other day. Midwest fan: “I went to Cub games with my father forever, maybe hundreds of games. But not this year and never again. I’ve had it.” Southeastern fan: “I used to watch every Braves game. But my boycott is total. I do not go to games or watch games. I will not buy any product associated with any player unhappy making $3 million a year.”

There is evidence that such discontent has reached the ears of baseball people who heard nothing for so long. Everyone has promised that a World Series will be played this time. (Think of that. Once, the World Series was as certain as autumn leaves. Now we need a promise that they will allow a World Series to go on. Meanwhile, the owners lost again in court in their efforts to crush the players’ union. Will those little men never learn?)

Speaking of Randy Myers and fisticuffs, as we were, a sportswriter remembers a day when Myers worked relief for the Reds in the 1990 World Series. The sportswriter went to the Reds’ clubhouse hoping to get a word or two. As he waited, the sportswriter made notes about the stuff in Myers’ locker, snuff and shoes and photos of women wearing only smiles.

The pitcher didn’t like the inventory being printed in the next day’s paper. He let the sportswriter know it. His harangue included short Anglo-Saxon oaths beginning with the early letters of the alphabet. He felt better afterward, even if we didn’t roll around in the dirt.