An Asterisk Needs to Be Placed by Oriole Victory

A wonderful thing happened before the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers played the third game of their playoff series in Georgia.

When the game’s six umpires walked through a right-field gate and into sight, 50,000 people began to applaud. As the umpires moved toward home plate, the applauding fans rose to their feet. They rose all around the stadium, from owner Ted Turner’s box to the highest seats in center field. Warm and sustained, the applause came to the men in blue.

On first hearing the applause and not sure what to make of it, crew chief Harry Wendelstedt allowed himself a small smile. In 31 seasons as an umpire, Wendelstedt had heard nothing like it. In 100 seasons of baseball, no one had heard anything like it.

In an essay on Ted Williams’ last game, author John Updike spoke of the great hitter’s refusal to tip his cap to Fenway Park fans. “Gods don’t answer letters,” Updike wrote.

Maybe not, but now the next best thing has happened. Because the applause followed his crew the 200 feet they walked to home plate, Wendelstedt at last believed what he heard. So he looked around the ballpark. And he tipped his cap.

We should name the umpires: Wendelstedt, Dana DeMuth, Frank Pulli, Greg Bonin, Jim Quick and Gerry Davis. And we should write down the date, Oct. 5, 1996. If we’re lucky, the date will become a piece of history.

It might be the day baseball understood that it must quit being Money Ball, Agent Ball, Owner Ball and Brat Ball. It must become sweet, simple, lovely baseball again.

Unexpected, spontaneous, sincere, the Atlanta standing ovation for umpires may be a start to that transformation. Only a week earlier, a superstar second baseman spat in an umpire’s face. Fans in Toronto, where the star once played, jeered him; Cleveland fans covered him with boos. And now 50,000 Atlanta fans delivered their own verdict. They rose to cheer for umpires.

It felt good, and it has been a long time since anything felt good in a major league stadium. That applause should carry a message to owners and players. When fans stand in celebration of umpires, the message is that the fans understand the heart of the game better than owners and players do.

The fans understand that dignity, fair play and respect for authority are at the heart of the game they love. Otherwise, the game is not worth their time. That’s why so many people have given up on baseball; instead of a game whose customs and rules create harmony that inspires us, they see baseball as an enterprise that is morally and ethically bankrupt. They see a game they no longer can love. The game’s heart is gone. In its place is a cash register.

It will be a long time before anyone who understands respect and compassion can look upon Roberto Alomar and see the heart we thought was there. Now we know he can be a snarling cur who would spit in our face and explain the act by speaking of our dead children, all because a ball was called a strike.

He should have been suspended immediately for 60 days with his docked salary--$1.5 million--going to a trust fund for umpire John Hirschbeck’s surviving child.

But the only suspension was for five days in 1997. That’s because the fools who run baseball distrust each other so profoundly that they have created a thicket of legalities that call for meetings, hearings and appeals before anything can be done. As dispiriting as such paralysis is, it is a consequence of decades in which owners arbitrarily punished players.

Even so, and though no one so much as suggested it, there yet existed a simple way to do the right thing with Alomar. The Orioles had the power to make a common-sense decision. They could have benched the brat’s butt.

Instead, Alomar’s home runs moved the Baltimore Orioles into the playoffs and then into the American League Championship Series. Those will always be tainted victories. They will stand as proof certain of the moral and ethical black hole at baseball’s center.

It’s sad for anyone who grew up believing baseball is beautiful. Some of us who long since have grown weary of millionaire jerks yet believe the game itself is beautiful. We counted Alomar among the players who confirmed that beauty.

But now his presence in the Orioles’ lineup is so distressing it is as if the game itself has been disfigured. It is as if Alomar’s saliva had been acid thrown into baseball’s face. Yesterday there were heroes. Today there are gargoyles.

Prompted by the Alomar outrage, the fools who run baseball have spoken of a “summit meeting” this winter to bring umpires, players and officials together. Something must be done. St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Ozzie Smith wants players to be less “confrontational” with umpires. Los Angeles Dodgers center fielder Brett Butler adapts a thought made famous by Rodney King in the Los Angeles riots: “Why can’t we all get along?”

In the umpires’ dressing room in Atlanta, Wendelstedt chuckled at an idea he has seen in print. “There’s no ‘growing animosity’ between players and umpires,” he says. “That’s in the whole history of the game. But let me give you my honest impression of what’s happening. What’s happening is that umpires today are better than ever, brighter, better educated, more fit. With that kind of umpire comes the question of dignity. They’re not going to be pushed around; they’re not going to be challenged on every call; they’re not going to be spat upon. It comes down to respect. We’ll handle it professionally. We just want the players to handle it professionally, too. Spitting in someone’s face is not handling it professionally.”

One sentence there rings loudly. It comes down to respect. The problem, as we know all too well, is that too many people in baseball today respect nothing except a dollar bill.