Kid Glove Treatment Was Way Off Base

Little Jeffrey Maier ought to be sent to bed without supper for a week or two.

Instead, he’s a star.

To understand what Jeffrey Maier’s celebrity says about major league baseball today, we might go back to July 24, 1983.

That’s the day George Brett hit a Rich Gossage pitch into the right-field seats at Yankee Stadium. Billy Martin, the mouse studying to be a rat, came from the New York Yankee dugout to protest that Brett had done the foul deed with an illegal bat. Pine tar! More than 18 inches from the knob! The umpires called off Brett’s home run. You’re out!

Well. This so annoyed Brett he became a madman. Already on the Kansas City Royal bench, happy to have put his team ahead 5-4 in the ninth inning, Brett hurtled toward an umpire--his body about to fly apart. His arms rotated wildly. His eyebrows strained at their attachment to his forehead. From a distance of three inches, maybe four, Brett shouted suggestions into the umpire’s nostrils.

Impassioned as Brett’s pleas were, they gained him no comfort. The umpires stood firm. Later, Martin all but cackled. The manager had seen the pine tar two weeks earlier and waited to complain until Brett hurt the Yankees. “It turned out to be a lovely Sunday afternoon,” said Martin, a 4-3 winner that day.

But four days later, a baseball man did the last right thing that has been done in major league baseball.

American League President Lee MacPhail reversed the umpire’s decision. MacPhail, a baseball lifer bred by a baseball lifer, said Brett’s pine tar didn’t violate “the spirit of the rules.” By that, MacPhail meant the rule had been created to keep baseballs clean in a day when new balls were used sparingly. No longer necessary, the rule shouldn’t be used the way the umpires used it, MacPhail said.

So the game was replayed from the point of Brett’s home run--and this time the Royals won, 5-4.

As to what all this has to do with Jeffrey Maier, the answer is that no one in baseball today has enough feeling for the game to know what’s right, let alone the courage to act on instinct.

We’re not suggesting that every mistake be basis for starting over from that point. But if the mistake is acknowledged by everyone--even right field umpire Rich Garcia, who made the mistake--and it comes in a game as important as a League Championship Series game, then it’s time for someone to do what’s needed.

It’s time for someone to commit an act of leadership.

Do something.

A player spits in an umpire’s face and nothing is done. Now a 12-year-old kid might have decided who went to the World Series and nothing is done--except he’s made a star.

The grown-ups who should have scolded little Jeffrey Maier instead raised him on their shoulders. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and New York Governor George Pataki defended him. The state’s brain surgeon in Congress, Sen. Al D’Amato, called the boy’s interference “almost a miracle.”

Two days running, little Jeffrey Maier’s picture was on the front page of The New York Times, a newspaper of dignity. On one of those days the story began, “Jeffrey Maier joined Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio in the pantheon of great Yankee heroes of all time . . . “

ABC-TV’s morning television show, Good Morning America, put the kid and his parents overnight in New York’s fancy Plaza Hotel to hide him from other networks. Before dawn, he was whisked away in a limousine to a studio where he mostly looked adorable but also did the weather.

Later that day, he told the assembled literati at a news conference he wouldn’t answer any more questions because they were getting repetitious. “Good grief,” said Tom Callahan, the sports columnist. “One day and he’s already as obnoxious as the players.”

The kid put in a call to David Letterman, who’d invited him on that late-night television show. The kid said no thanks, maybe another day, have your people call my people.

And off the kid went in his limousine to Yankee Stadium. This time he watched from a box along the first-base line instead of from the right-field seats as he’d done the day he became a star. Capless the day before, the kid this time wore a Yankees cap.

My, my, my.

Let’s see here. Little Jeffrey Maier is adorable. He’s 12 years old. He’s a Yankee fan who plays kid’s baseball and went to Yankee Stadium carrying his glove. It was a day game, which meant he played hooky from school.

When a fly ball from the bat of Derek Jeter came toward him, Maier ran from his seat and entered an area marked off-limits to fans. There he reached over the fence and into the field of play. Doing that, he knocked the ball away from Baltimore Orioles right fielder Tony Tarasco, who was camped under the ball ready to make the catch.

So what we have is a truant trespasser who committed an act punishable by ejection from any ballpark in America.

But because he’s a kid playing out every kid’s fantasy, he was forgiven the mistake. (Incidentally, he should give thanks it was not an Orioles fly ball. “If one of the Orioles had hit it,” said Bobby Bonilla, an Oriole from the Bronx who knows the natives’ habits, “the kid would have been strung up on the Throgs Neck Bridge.”)

All of which is reason to remember something the sainted Red Smith once wrote about Babe Ruth. In the interest of spontaneity, Red reported, a radio interviewer typed out his questions and Babe’s answers in advance.

“Well, you know,” Babe read one night, “Duke Ellington said the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton.”

“Babe,” the radio man said after the show, “Duke Ellington for the Duke of Wellington I can understand. But how did you ever read Eton as Elkton? That’s in Maryland, isn’t it?”

“I married my first wife there,” Babe said, “and I always hated the . . . place.” He was cheerily unruffled. In the uncomplicated world of George Herman Ruth, errors were part of the game.

So be it.