Baseball Swinging, Clinging

Two years ago today, baseball called a strike and took a walk.

Players picked up their bats, hats, socks, jocks, sunglasses and sunflower seeds and began the Boycott of Summer, throwing a tantrum that lasted 234 days and cost them the attention and affection of many unsympathetic Americans.

Well, last Friday, mouthpieces for labor and management met in New York from 11:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m., then again for half-hour discussions at 5 p.m., then at 8 p.m., then at 20 minutes past midnight, then at 2:40 a.m., then 5:20 a.m. and once more at 10:30 Saturday morning.

Why?

Because baseball is a pastime on the edge, that’s why. Because baseball is one strike away from being as popular in this country as cricket.

Therefore, if meeting seven times in 24 hours is what it takes so the farmers and the cowmen could be friends, then baseball’s negotiators would hole up somewhere and keep talking until the cows came home.

Shivers went up spines when a recent threat was made by owners to make one “last and final” offer to the players, who presumably understood the difference between last and final, which, I regret to say, I do not.

Ultimata . . . just what baseball feared most and needed least.

A threat by one side could have led to a counter-threat by the other side, whereupon the subsequent name-calling would eventually result in strike-organizing, which would mean that the commissioner of baseball would again become the commissioner of nothing, provided baseball had a commissioner.

This was a baseball fan’s worst nightmare, short of ringing Albert Belle’s doorbell on Halloween.

One more walkout, lockout, wildcat strike, fat-cat strike or work-stoppage of any kind, and you might as well hire 28 bulldozers and convert every major league baseball stadium into 28 toxic dumps, 28 parking lots or 28 future sites of Starbuck’s coffee shops, whichever America needs most.

Baseball is a cat that has used up eight lives.

The game needs another strike like Marge Schott’s dog needs another flea. The 1994 World Series is gone forever, and so are thousands of fans. CBS once gave the game a billion dollars to televise baseball. CBS wouldn’t give a billion dollars now if both teams volunteered to let Bill Cosby play first base.

A new labor contract was essential, unless baseball wanted to become the most hated sport since cockfighting.

That is the reason a man named Randy Levine, who now serves as chief labor negotiator for the owners, invited everyone into his Manhattan office last Friday for the first two meetings. And that is why everyone commuted across midtown to the players’ union’s office and pulled an all-nighter, meeting five more times on Don Fehr’s turf.

Fehr, the ironically named union leader, proclaimed Saturday both sides to be “past the point of confrontation and threat.”

Hallelujah.

Levine said the owners were willing to compromise, even on such minor haggling points as terminating the six-year contract on Oct. 31 of its sixth year, rather than on New Year’s Eve.

Let me hear an amen.

Furthermore, players and owners alike, for once, would unite in asking Congress to end baseball’s anti-trust exemption in labor issues, which the Supreme Court first granted in 1922. Oh, how the owners have wanted to hold onto that little perk.

All of a sudden, for the plantation owners and their filthy-rich field hands, a settlement seemed possible. You get your millions, we get our billions and we’ll see y’all later at the big dance.

Isn’t it nice to see hard-working folks, working out their differences?

The baseball strike of 1994 has often been described as “a permanent scar” on the game, but scars can be hidden with a little makeup and a longer coat. Attendance is down, merchandise sales are low and the TV ratings from the All-Star game were so poor, the game might as well have been shown on CNBC.

But whatever hardball it takes, the players and owners have to find a way to play ball.

Because if either of you walk out again, don’t come back.