Why is it that Baseball '93 does not send my spirit soaring once again?
A bit of background to the question. Mine is the familiar American story of the son whose father delighted in sharing with him, among many other things in life, a love for baseball. The fact that I played the game passably well added to our enjoyment together as fans. Dad settled one of the burning questions of my boyhood: Who was better, Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams? (He said that DiMaggio was a great player, while Williams was just a great hitter.) My love for the game endured in no small part because of that relationship.
I should, therefore, feel once again the excitement of Opening Day in the major leagues, when, as the saying goes, every team has a chance to win the World Series. The bursting forth of spring in big league parks around the country, the reappearance of established stars, the arrival of the rookie who might become another Willie Mays or a Sandy Koufax -- all of this has gotten my blood racing in other years.
What is more, two dramatic stories that should fill any fan's cup of joy to overflowing will play out during the '93 season. Nolan Ryan, the all-time strikeout leader, makes a last round of National League parks in a long farewell to the game after a remarkable 26-year career. He will win several more games and add dozens of batters to his strikeout total -- and then next October tip his cap for the last time to the cheers of crowds around the league. Great theater.
A different kind of drama also unfolds in this new season as Bo Jackson attempts to play big league ball with an artificial hip. In 1991, near the beginning of a promising baseball career, Jackson injured his hip playing professional football. Should he regain something of his former speed and power and grace, the comeback of Bo Jackson could itself make the season of '93 one for the books.
Why, then, am I less than excited about the return of baseball to the land?
Three names sum up the malaise I feel this April: Bud Selig, John Olerud, and Steve Howe. Each represents a different if interconnected problem with baseball. Together they point to the game's erroneous direction these days. Selig, Olerud, and Howe symbolize the reasons why many fans have a sense of disillusion with the sport that has stood for more than 100 years as America's Pastime.
Bud Selig, the Milwaukee Brewers CEO, chairs the major league executive council, the association of those who own baseball's franchises. These moguls are a curious lot that includes Cincinnati's Marge Schott -- she of the racial slurs -- as well as Chicago White Sox's Jerry Reinsdorf and the ubiquitous George Steinbrenner of the Yankees. In an all-time demonstration of absurdity, if not blasphemy, Reinsdorf recently referred to Steinbrenner's return to baseball from his two-and-a-half-year suspension as "the most ballyhooed return since the resurrection ... This is the biggest thing to happen in 2,000 years."
This crowd forced Fay Vincent, a fair and knowledgeable baseball commissioner, out of office last year because he stood up to them. The game has no commissioner now and faces 1993 subject to the whims of owners whose bottom line is profits. They continue to gouge the fans with inflated prices, bicker among themselves over shrinking TV revenue, and discriminate against women and people of color in their hiring practices. And the owners' new plan for expanded playoffs and interleague play seems motivated less by the "best interest of the game" than by the desire to increase their earnings.
John Olerud, first-baseman for the champion Toronto Blue Jays, batted .280 last year, hit just 16 home runs, and batted-in a modest 63 runs. Despite that mediocre performance, Olerud's 1993 salary will increase by more than a million dollars -- from $387,000 to $1,487,000. Even casual observers know that Olerud's case is far from the exception. He is one of the 265 millionaire ballplayers around today (100 of them are making $3 million per year!). The Giants' Barry Bonds gets $10,000 more for each two games he plays than Babe Ruth earned over the course of his highest-paid season.
Steve Howe returns for the 1993 season after his seventh drug-related suspension from baseball, this one supposedly for life. The fact that Howe is a superb left-handed relief pitcher has made baseball officialdom unable to see the absurdity of reinstating a player after "permanent" banishment from the game.
Perhaps it's not only us oldsters who are finding baseball less than the thrilling sport it used to be due to this claque of greedy owners, overpaid ballplayers, and scofflaw drug users. There is a noticeable absence anymore of kids playing pickup games during long summer days. Maybe the game has become so "yuppiefied" at the top that its base -- fans like me as well as youngsters who would play and support the game well into the future -- is fast eroding.
Three years ago Dom DiMaggio, Joe's younger brother who played a wonderful centerfield during the '40s at Boston's Fenway Park, wrote a book called Real Grass, Real Heroes -- a reference to a time when artificial turf had not been heard of and the players seemed larger than life. Surely baseball will never recapture that idyllic time -- perhaps it only partially existed anyway. But the Bud Seligs, John Oleruds, and Steve Howes had better take a hard look at where the game is heading. Otherwise its 100-year lock on the imaginations of millions in this country will break under the weight of disillusion.
Joe Nangle, OFM was outreach director of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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