This Sport Just Can’t Get to First Base

Who’s your favorite sports star?

The question was asked of a couple of thousand Americans by the Harris Poll folks this winter, and the top 10 was a jaw-drop 10.

Five guys who work beneath a helmet and pads.

Two guys in a sport where fans recently attacked the players.

Two guys in sports that require big money or hot wheels.

And, oh yeah, one baseball player.

Their faces, down to the last drops of brown juice rolling from the corner of their bottom lips, are on television for six months.

Their habits, from hemlines to hairstyles, inspire as much childhood imitation as a Hummer full of rappers.

More than any other athletes in any sport, they are constantly in America’s face.

While America scrunches up its nose.

We really don’t like baseball players anymore, do we?

“Baseball players have become aloof to consumers,” said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. “They are arguably the most prolific athletes in terms of exposure, but they’re just not great ambassadors for friendly athletics.”

We really don’t like baseball players, or we wouldn’t have ranked only Derek Jeter in the top 10 of a list that includes NFL stars Peyton Manning, Brett Favre, Tom Brady, Donovan McNabb and Ben Roethlisberger.

We wouldn’t have put only Jeter in a list that includes two NBA players, retired Michael Jordan, who ranks first, and Shaquille O’Neal.

We would have more of them in a list that included Tiger Woods and Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Those last two guys may be worth as much as the Dodger clubhouse combined, yet it is baseball players who are considered overpaid louts.

Football players never sign autographs anywhere near their playing field, yet it is baseball players who are considered fan unfriendly.

Basketball players are no strangers to police blotters, yet it is baseball players who are perceived as immoral cheaters.

Attendance is rising, October ratings have been huge, the sport has made such a resurgence that folks will even pay $85 to sit in Dodger Stadium seats from which you can see only two bald heads and a hairy neck.

But it is the game we love. It is not the players. Not anymore.

Saturday was just another reason.

Commissioner Bud Selig finally proposed a steroid policy that would work, one with a short leash and long penalties, a three-strikes-and-you’re-out-forever fastball.

And what did one of the Dodgers say?

“That’s ridiculous,” Jason Phillips said.

Phillips, who makes $339,000 a year, complained that Selig’s proposal of unpaid suspensions ranging from 50 days to lifetime would hurt guys in his tax bracket.

“Do I think the penalties are a little harsh? Yes,” he said. “Not for, say, the guys who have already been in the big leagues a lot of years and are making millions. [But] put yourself in my position. I play paycheck to paycheck to support my family.”

Phillips even implied that some players would have to get a part-time job if they were suspended for questionably illegal substances.

“What are you supposed to do?” he said. “Go work at Burger King for 50 days because you’re not getting paid because you ate five poppy-seed muffins? Until they can come to an agreement on what is positive and what is not positive. ...”

Positively, we hate this sort of talk. Absolutely, baseball players remain singularly famous for sounding like entitled brats.

Phillips is known as a solid guy, but ... Burger King?

Some of that is inspired by working in sports’ most combative and fan-ignorant union.

And some of that is because nobody has been coddled from childhood to stardom like a major league baseball player.

Did you know that after games at Dodger Stadium, no matter how many fans are waiting, one of two full-service elevator operators is ordered to override all buttons if a player needs a ride up to the parking lot?

I’ve ridden before with players who didn’t even bother to thank the poor guy pushing the buttons.

“It’s different today than it used to be,” said Tom Lasorda, who remains the most popular living Dodger even though he hasn’t been in uniform for nearly 10 years. “Taking time with the fans, some players do it, some players don’t do it.”

When players take time with the fans today, television shows them throwing chairs at them or punching them.

Of course, Gary Sheffield, who threw a forearm at a Boston patron recently, was commended by the commissioner’s office for showing “restraint.”

Has it become so bad that a player is officially a good guy if he hits a fan only once?

Even everyone’s darling Angels canceled their in-season autograph sessions for season-ticket holders.

(The Dodgers, incidentally, hold their first of three in-season autograph sessions for children in Lot 32 today.)

“Young people today like an aggressive, violent, bad-boy image in their athletes,” said Dodger Jeff Kent. “Major league baseball players are only seen as selfish prima donnas.”

Just ask Paul Roberts, longtime owner of Landry’s Sporting Goods in Montrose, who supplies his community with 4,000 youth-league baseball uniforms and only 200 football uniforms each year.

Yet he sells far more NFL jerseys than baseball jerseys in this town without an NFL team.

Steroids have eroded our trust of the men. Idiotic beanball incidents like the one between Boston and Tampa Bay have dwindled our respect. Free agency, used in baseball like in no other sport, has cost them our love.

In a sport whose most famous player is Barry Bonds, well ...

Brian Cochran of Palos Verdes, one of the adult participants in a youth league day at Angel Stadium recently, doesn’t need a poll to tell him about baseball’s problems.

Marching around the field with hundreds of young baseball players before a game between the Angels and Oakland A’s, Cochran noticed something odd.

All but one of the major league players acted as if the kids didn’t even exist.

Only the Angels’ Steve Finley took the time to slap hands and offer encouragement.

“None of the other players made any effort to acknowledge us.... They didn’t even look at us,” said Cochran.

And they wonder why we don’t look back?

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.