The Fans in the Bleachers

After Pete Rose and Tanya Harding and O.J. Simpson, you’d think Americans would have learned a lesson or two about sports heroes and the people who make them. But what lesson did we take from the sorry story of Roberto Alomar?

Alomar is a brilliant baseball player for the Baltimore Orioles. But two weeks ago, in a crucial late-season game, he had a temper tantrum after he was called out on strikes by home-plate umpire John Hirschbeck. The brilliant star turned into a jerk.

He screamed, he bumped the umpire, and then he spat into Hirschbeck’s face. Ejected from the game, morose in the clubhouse, Alomar made matters worse by describing the umpire as “bitter” because Hirschbeck’s 8-year-old son recently died of a rare brain disease.

It was, in sum, quite a remarkable performance, even by the standards of today’s professional athletes, like the thugs--like the wife-beaters and drug addicts--called the Dallas Cowboys (“America’s Team”).

But it was not Alomar’s coarse conduct that ended up raising eyebrows so much as the light punishment he received from league officials and the Oriole management: Alomar is to be briefly suspended next year, when his services are less urgently needed.

The Alomar affair became a major topic of conversation on talk radio; editorial writers lamented the “slap on the wrist”; people talked about the bad example the crime and the punishment gave to America’s young. Last week, during the vice-presidential debate, Alomar was perhaps the only issue that made the normally reserved Al Gore turn passionate.

Jim Lehrer, the debate moderator, asked both Jack Kemp and the vice president about Alomar and if “something’s gone terribly wrong with the American soul, that we’ve become too mean, too selfish?”

Vice President Gore’s response was blunt: “I think [Alomar] should have been severely disciplined, suspended perhaps, immediately. I don’t understand why that action was not taken.”

But blaming the crass behavior of baseball officials misses a larger point. Baltimore’s fans were not noticeably offended by Alomar’s behavior; some even took signs of support to subsequent games. If we want to know about incivility on the playing fields and what’s wrong with our fallen sports heroes, in other words, perhaps we’d do better to look around the bleachers at ourselves.

We have become a restless people, overstimulated and capable of excitement at a baseball game only when a pitcher aims a ball at a batter and both teams race for the mound, fists flying, for a moment of mayhem.

Sentimentality still attaches to baseball. We say that we like the game for being slow, gloriously slow, slow and sweet as a summer day. Baseball remains remarkable for being a game of rules, a ritual of close calls--balls and strikes, runners judged safe or not by the neutral eye of the umpire.

Perhaps for that reason, however, baseball is no longer America’s pastime. The No. 1 spectator sport in the country is car racing. Football seems invented for television. Basketball is fast and sweaty, urban, juiced up, in sync with hip hop.

It’s impossible to imagine baseball coming up with a star who has the weird charisma of Dennis Rodman. On the other hand, in recent surveys of our most-respected Americans, it’s a basketball player, Michael Jordan, who’s right at the top of the list.

Because of Alomar’s spectacular hitting and fielding, the Baltimore Orioles made it into the playoffs. Last week, they traveled to New York (where Yankee Stadium has the reputation of having the meanest bleachers in the league).

Alomar got booed, of course. But he was barely the story of the week. The hero turned out to be a 12-year-old named Jeffrey Maier. Maier grabbed a flyball away from an Oriole outfielder, preventing him from catching it. It was ruled a home run, giving the New York Yankees a tie; they went on to win the game. That was, technically, a violation of the rules. But who, except the Oriole crybabies, cared?

The kid is a hero. Fans in Yankee Stadium chanted his praise: MVP! The kid who broke the rules was called “the angel in the outfield” by one New York tabloid. He ended up on the morning talk shows. Thus did the Alomar affair fade from the sports page and from talk radio.

We Americans told ourselves that Alomar is a jerk. And we told ourselves that league officials and team owners are moral cowards. We wrung our hands and lamented the decline of role models and civility in American life.

But we who sit in the bleachers do not end up asking embarrassing questions about our own role in the story. Robert Alomar is us.