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

DATE: TUESDAY, April 4, 1995                   TAG: 9504050061
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LOYALTY TEST

FIRST, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that continuing negotiations should be held with the terms and conditions of the expired labor contract still in effect. Then the players' union last week decided to go back to work if a federal judge granted the NLRB request for a temporary injunction restoring those terms and conditions. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Sonia Sotomayor did so. Finally, on Sunday, the owners agreed to accept the players' return under those conditions, rather than pursue the risky course of a lockout.

And so big-league baseball will be played this season after all, with real big-league players and everything.

Well, not everything.

Opening day has been pushed back three weeks, to April 26, after the players undergo a semblance of spring training. That leaves time for each team to play only 144 regular-season games, instead of the customary 162.

After a strike of eight months - the longest work stoppage in sports history - the wealthy players and megawealthy owners still haven't agreed on a long-term settlement over how to divide baseball's revenue spoils.

Potentially, though, the most notable absence of all could be lost consumer confidence.

Seasons had been strike-shortened before. But last year's season was the first that had a beginning without an end - no division champions, no pennant-winners, no World Series champion. From the fans' point of view, will 1995 be the first season where it doesn't matter whether there's a beginning or an end?

Perhaps not. Over the decades, and in part because of its exemption from antitrust laws, baseball has proved a remarkably resilient American institution. It has survived all manner of insult and injury, from the predations of professional gamblers to the incompetence of miserly owners, from the disruption of bonds between club and community to the rise of new competitors for the entertainment dollar.

Neither owners nor players, however, should fool themselves into thinking that the good times will inevitably go on forever, or even that baseball holds anything like the place in American life that it held a few decades ago. In World War II, the federal government made sure that major-league baseball of a sort carried on, deeming the game too important to morale to suspend. During this strike, President Clinton's trial balloon to test sentiment regarding presidential intervention was met with the indifference of a population for whom baseball is but one of many available amusements and diversions.

Baseball's capacity for bouncing back, in other words, is not limitless and may be shrinking - even as its current custodians keep stretching that capacity ever thinner.

by CNB