Coach's Corner

The lore and myth of our land has it that baseball's Opening Day is the sort of day our Founding Fathers might have looked upon with approval: All teams with 0-0 records. All teams still equal. No teams with 10-game losing streaks. The Yankees are still in hibernation. The long, losing road trips, the season-killing months of July and August are in the hazy, shimmering future. It is a time of rebirth from the 90 losses of last year. Fans from coast to coast can still dream.

Fact is, this sentiment -- penned certainly by bored and intoxicated sportswriters on a long train ride from Miami to New York back in the days before The Great Depression -- is drivel. Any of us who can still find our homes each evening understand it's twisted gibberish today; a little less obvious is: It's always been gibberish, straight from the gaping, salivating jaws of baseball's public relations machine. Teams from New York, in one form or another (i.e., the Giants and Dodgers) have dominated every decade since 1910. World Series winners not from New York are exceptions proving the rule. In other words, Pirate and Tiger fans of the pre-WWII era had as little hope of a World Series trophy (or even a league pennant) as the modern fan of these two laboring franchises. Little has really changed.

That noted, there are two major differences in the baseball landscape of today juxtaposed against the game prior to the ascendance of Richard Nixon. All baseball teams were once owned and operated, 100%, by a real, live owner, usually a family with an emotional stake in the fortunes of the team and a personal financial stake in turning a profit. Not the impassive, mass corporate conglomerates or complicated partnerships of today. It was a relatively simple time when ballplayers making $100,000 were quite rare. When athletes were, like it or not, going to play with the same team until the team didn't want them any more. Before the polluting gold of national TV contracts -- and even more crucial, the massive local cable and superstation deals for a few fortunate clubs. Before year-round, day-by-day media coverage, breeding a sullen, talk-radio-driven discontent and envy among losing teams' downtrodden minions. It was a time when a Tom Yawkey in Boston or a Gussie Busch in St. Louis could do what they loved: turn a profit with a decently run team, not hemorrhage cash with one not so well-run. If they couldn't beat the Yankees or the Dodgers, well, they didn't have to worry about being financially ruined with a salary structure run amok, or mocked by the national press (it didn't exist) as chronic losers if they didn't win, win, win.

Those times seem as quaint and out-of-date today as a Monet painting of picnickers in 19th-century Paris. Though the Yankees and a few other teams dominate the game as always, so great has the monetary imbalance become in pro baseball that many long-term operations in the hinterlands are threatened with financial ruin.

Contrary to what those of a more optimistic ilk are saying, when baseball's labor contract expires at the end of this season, a strike/lockout of unprecedented intensity and vitriol -- between the millionaire players and billionaire owners -- looms like the hand of God above poor Noah's little ark. Too many baseball organizations are backed up against a wall with nowhere to go and nothing to lose. Aside from the odd cornered German shepherd, hallucinating in the final stages of rabies, what's more dangerous than a desperate billionaire? The players, fat and rich and with the only effective labor organization in pro sports, have little short-term incentive to give anything back. All the ingredients are there for a scorched-earth, fight-to-the-death summer in '02. Don't be surprised if the entire season is canceled.

This fratricidal bloodletting is necessary. Baseball has to find some way to effectively spread the wealth from its free-flowing sources in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and it has to find a way to control its labor costs. For the first time in the game's history the players and owners will have to come to the bittersweet understanding that they -- the plantation owners and wealthy sharecroppers -- are all in the same fine yacht that's taking on water fast. They can drown like vermin on a sinking ship. Or they can live long and prosper. It's their choice. Blood will be spilled…

They say it helps to make it through life if you have a sense of humor. Since this is probably the last word on baseball you'll see here for months, a comment on baseball's Man of the Year, Mark McGwire. I hope someone, aside from me, giggled when the entire world of mass media (not me, I'm little media) gushed and blushed with the fluttering grace of a Georgia debutante over the down-home, old-fashioned, unselfish class of Big Mac, as he selflessly agreed to accept only 30 million from the Cardinals to play ball for them the next two years. I mean, you gotta love it. Here's a 38-year-old, chronically injured first baseman, with bad arms, shoulders, and legs, who's just like Joe down at the plant. What a prince! A baseball saint!! Playing for an "under-market" 15 mil!!!! No agent (or agent's commission) for Mac; he negotiated the deal alone!!!!!

It's said this is a great country. And so it is.