Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 5, 1993 TAG: 9304030182
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL TAMMEUS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE SAD STATE OF THE GAME
My job today is sad. Even as a new major league baseball season comes in on little cat spikes, I must tell you that, without fundamental and quick changes, the sport is doomed.That's because the liberation of our culture from oppressive standards has roared past baseball, which once was more American than anything but jazz.
The result is that everything - almost - still wrong with society is also wrong with baseball, sometimes outrageously so. The problem is not the rules of the game itself (details that still make it a better pure sport than any other), but the atmosphere in which baseball insists on playing.
It is too late to institute solutions for the new season. But maybe we can plant the seeds of regeneration now to reap a harvest of reformation next year.
You may be wondering what, exactly, I mean by my broad-stroke sociological criticism of baseball. You are looking for chapter and verse. Very well.
Big league baseball is scandalously androcentric, which is to say women have almost no place in it. How, in 1993, can this be?
How bad is the problem? So bad that it was a major story recently when the San Francisco Giants hired a female public address announcer. This is what passes for feminist progress in our national pastime.
The only real exception to the male-dominated nature of big league baseball has been the occasional female owner of teams. What benefit has that wrought? Well, we now know, because of the likes of Marge Schott, that some women can be as racist and obtuse as some men.
Surely that is a lesson worth learning, and should encourage us to make the entire sport gender-inclusive.
Where are the female radio and TV play-by-play announcers and color commentators? As rare as hen's dentures, they are. Where are the female umpires? In the minors, if anywhere. Where are the female groundskeepers? Home gardening, apparently. And where, finally, are the female players? They have run smack up against a jock-strap ceiling. Am I to believe the game is too complex, too demanding for women? Can't the hand that rocks the cradle also rock and fire?
And patriarchy is not the only way baseball has lost touch with the winds of freedom and equality.
The sport is utterly undemocratic. Owners and their general managers make unilateral decisions about team organization. Managers make unilateral decisions about who will play - even to the point of pulling out a pitcher with a 3-1 count on a batter. And umpires make unilateral decisions about how the rules will be interpreted in any particular situation.
Baseball has simply shut out the concept of collegiality, of shared authority, sweeping the business world. Yes, players and managers may get a few minutes to argue an umpire's already-made decision, but they have no power to overturn what has been done.
Nor is there an opportunity to develop even an informal - but binding - consensus among players, coaches and umpires on whether, say, a base runner really was out at third. There is no mechanism for a democratic vote on the matter - a vote that should, of course, include both participants and spectators (at least the ones still sober or not in the bathroom).
If we've learned anything in the last 70 years, it's that stifling debate and disenfranchising people leads to ruin. Yet baseball remains autocratic and authoritarian almost beyond imagining.
And that's not all. Baseball - by setting an outrageously high minimum salary - has become elitist. Players making more than $1 million a year now are so common as to be unworthy of note. This policy of financial snobbery has created an un-American aristocracy.
Baseball is an environmental disaster, too. Players spit hazardous tobacco waste around willy-nilly, and there is no conservation ethic. Forests, for example, are denuded to make bats, which, when they sustain the tiniest crack, are trashed.
And baseball encourages anti-social behavior by its tolerance - nay, its promotion - of stealing both signs and bases, to say nothing of its disdain for ethnic sensitivity, revealed in such team names as Indians, Braves and Giants.
Will baseball reform itself? Maybe not, but anyone who has seen the Berlin Wall down, South African apartheid dying and the decriminalization of tofu should never say never.
Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star.