You Can’t Count on These Chickens

They’ll scream at an umpire to improve their batting average.

They’ll curse at a reporter to protect their reputation.

Yet when it’s time to say something about saving their sport, baseball players are silent.

They’ll charge the mound when an opponent has bruised them.

They’ll kick a water cooler when fate has wronged them.

Yet when it’s time to put a headlock on a strike that could ruin their game, baseball players will not lift a finger.

As usual, Friday’s setting of a strike date has affected our swaggering, glaring friends like a Randy Johnson fastball.

Seven-hundred and fifty strapping men turned to mush.

Cubs and Tigers and Marlins and Blue Jays transformed into sheep.

The union has announced that, on Aug. 30, barring a new labor settlement, it will abandon a game in which the average player makes $2.4 million per year for sweating an average of 2.4 hours per day.

The most luxuriously treated athletes in sports are threatening to walk out in opposition of a luxury tax.

This is stupid.

Many players agree this is stupid.

Why can’t one of them just say it?

We know baseball has great leaders, guys who can inspire clubhouses and create championships, guys like Derek Jeter and Chipper Jones and Luis Gonzalez.

Where is that leadership now?

We know baseball has great “gamers,” guys unafraid to go head first into a base or a wall, guys like Darin Erstad and Torii Hunter and Craig Biggio.

Why won’t they get their feet dirty now?

Come to think of it, where is Gary Sheffield when you need him? He complains about everything, doesn’t he? He’s not afraid to rip anything, is he?

Why isn’t that dog barking now?

The baseball union is again showing why it is the most powerful sports organization on Earth.

It has gathered hundreds of players who can’t agree on how to wear their socks and convinced them to march single file, blindfolded, off a cliff.

“It’s all about history lessons,” said Matt Young, former Dodger pitcher and union activist during his 11-year major league career. “The union does a phenomenal job of talking history to the younger players, year after year, telling them about the sacrifices older players have made for them.”

Young said it starts in minor league spring training, when union leaders meet with lowly prospects and treat them with the respect not offered by their bosses.

“My first spring training, they came into a room where only 10% of the people will make the major leagues, and yet they talked to us like major leaguers, telling us about other players who have fought for us and how we should all stick together,” Young recalled. “As a young kid, I was blown away.”

It continues at the major league level, where, because of the longer career span, the baseball union has an advantage over the weaker basketball and football unions.

“There’s always a veteran in the room to remind the younger players that they wouldn’t be making this kind of money if somebody had not gone on strike for them,” Young said.

Young remembers one such labor meeting in 1985, when he was pitching for the Seattle Mariners in a series in Anaheim against the Angels.

Because the Angels were filled with veterans, while the Mariners were mostly kids, the union requested that both teams meet together.

“We’re all sitting there not really sure what was going on until Reggie Jackson stood up,” Young recalled. “He started talking about how much money he would lose in a strike, about how much he was willing to give up for the rest of us. Jackson said, ‘Somebody had the courage to do it for me, so I have the courage to do it for you.’ ”

Added Young: “I’ll never forget those words.”

Sure enough, that day, the teams voted for a strike.

But it’s different now. The players are no longer fighting to be treated with decency. That fight has been long since won.

The players are now fighting for ... what, exactly?

To keep from losing a couple of jewels from their heavy crown? To keep from losing anything to the owners, period?

Here’s guessing that some of them aren’t sure, but are afraid to ask.

“The union never tells the players what to say, or ask them to be puppets,” Young said. “They just give examples of how, every time a player says something that doesn’t totally support the union, negotiations can get set back two weeks because management thinks we’re going to break.

“Nobody wants to be the knucklehead to say that wrong thing.”

I wouldn’t call that person a knucklehead. I would call him a hero.

The fight here no longer belongs to the players, but the game itself.

It is a fight to become a competitive sport again, a believable sport again.

It is a fight to reclaim the hearts of folks in small markets who give up every April because their team clearly has no money and no chance. It is a fight to make our former national pastime more, well, national.

Purists hate to hear this, but it is a fight to make baseball more like football.

It is certainly not a fight that can be won by walking away in the middle of a pennant race.

The union leadership says that without a deadline, negotiations will continue to drag into the off-season. Fine. That’s where they belong.

So maybe owners wouldn’t allow them to start next season. Isn’t that better than ending this season early?

In 1998, the NBA started a season late because of labor strife. Do you even remember?

In 1994, baseball canceled a season early, and nobody will ever forget.

Where are the true leadoff hitters, players unafraid to start things off by sticking out their necks?

Where are those cleanup hitters so proud of their muscle?

The players spoke out individually against steroids, against the advice of their union, and look what happened. The steroid issue has apparently been solved.

The players spoke out against confrontational and inconsistent umpiring, and guess what? The leagues combined their umpiring staffs, and the taunting has ended.

Over the next couple of weeks, it will appear that a pale suit named Donald Fehr has all the power.

If only the players had the courage to realize that, no, that power lies with them.

Where are the St. Louis Cardinals, a team whose personal misfortunes have led their sympathetic community to wrap them in a giant, summer-long hug? Why can’t they use this occasion to hug their fans back?

Where is Sammy Sosa? Fans literally bow to him every day. For once, why can’t he bow back?

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com