
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, September 16, 1994                   TAG: 9409170011
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BASEBALL

BASEBALL has been a business as well as a game for more than a century, since at least the organization in 1869 of the Cincinnati Red Stockings as an avowedly professional club.

Is the baseball business now, 125 years later, on the verge of bankruptcy?

Each autumn since 1904, the World Series has capped the season, notwithstanding world wars, snowstorms and earthquakes. This year, the World Series will not be played, nor will the League Championship Series (a fairly recent innovation), nor will the final 20 percent of the regular season.

All those have been canceled because owners and players are at loggerheads over the owners' effort to alter the previous contract so an industry-wide salary cap can be imposed.

Player pay has escalated astoundingly in the years since the judicial execution of the lifelong reserve clause that once bound a player to the same club in perpetuity. But the owners have changed, too. No longer are they baseball people. They are, for the most part, big corporations or extremely wealthy individuals for whom ownership of a major-league baseball club offers opportunities for tax savings and perhaps a spot or two of amusement.

Will baseball return next spring? Most assuredly at the amateur, sandlot levels.

But at the major-league level, a return is not assured. And with baseball, unlike basketball or football, the amateur game was essentially created and is informed by the professional game. The big leagues, not the Little League, have made baseball a defining characteristic of American life.

Ken Burns, creator of the 1990 PBS series "The Civil War" and now of an 181/2-hour series "Baseball" that begins airing Sunday, says baseball is one of the few threads that connects the history of post-Civil War America. Writes Burns, in a recent edition of U.S. News magazine:

"Baseball has been a constant for us, generation after generation. It's one of the few things that if we were all transported back 150 years, we could all do and not look like idiots. The game is a glorious reflection of American democracy. It is mirror or a prism in which we can see refracted all of our tendencies as a people."

At the moment, the game is not looking very healthy. In this regard, let us hope it recovers soon. A good dose of old-fashioned American values and common sense would help.

by CNB