The boors of summer

It's hard to take either side in baseball's labor battle

To visually appreciate how far apart baseball's union and management are, you need only attend a major league game and note how the players dress. In all other prime team sports around the world, the players are required to wear their uniforms, well, uniformly. In baseball, however, some of the diamond heroes wear their pants as plus fours, bloused up around their knees. Others wear their pants more as long culottes, reaching down to their spikes. To inspect some big-league contests, you would think they were amateur softball games played for beer.

If management cannot even effect a simple dress code, you can appreciate how difficult it remains -- still -- for it to obtain any substantive financial concessions with the union. Just about everybody in the know despairs that the players will probably strike.

This would, of course, be the greatest disaster ever for the olde National Pastime. Both sides are so much more vulnerable to adverse public opinion now. The commissioner, Bud Selig, commands even less respect since the All-Star deadlock travesty. He has been sued for fraud by the former minority partners of one of his own clubs, the Montreal Expos. If this is not enough, allegations that George W. Bush acted in sleazy fashion in land speculation for a new stadium back when he owned the Texas Rangers reinforce the prevailing image that baseball owners -- even those who become President of the United States -- are a nefarious lot. The owners have always been accused of manipulating their books. So, at a time when accounting malfeasance is so prominent in the news, distrust of the owners' pleas of poverty is heightened.

As for players who average millions of dollars in salary a year going on strike at a time when fans are losing jobs and nest eggs, it smacks of a vulgar greed that not even Alan Greenspan professes to see in board rooms. Besides, some players are viewed as being illegally pumped up, as they smash home runs and sacred baseball records alike. The baseball union remains virtually the only major sports organization in the world which tiptoes around the issue of steroids lest it intrude on the privacy of its muscular members.

But the baseball players' association always prevails -- whether it's fighting for principle and the American way or, as it is now, for the right of the New York Yankees to destroy competition and the American League. The players' association has often been described as the most powerful union in the nation -- and it is -- but this is rather like saying that the Church of Scientology is the most successful religion in the land. Something should count besides the collection plate.

Jimmy Carter -- a President who did not grow rich as the owner of a team and who was only associated with baseball in the sense that he grew peanuts, which he might have happily consumed at a game -- has offered his services as a mediator between the players and owners. Would that the two haughty sides accept a noble peanut vendor in their midst before a strike becomes inevitable for the season . . . and catastrophic for the great game.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. His new novel, The Other Adonis (Sourcebooks Landmark), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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