THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 18, 1994 TAG: 9409170027
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
IN ANY society with a reasonable criminal justice system - say, Mexico or Peru - the baseball strike would be moot because all the owners would have been thrown into prison in the late 1980s.
That's when the owners engaged in a crass conspiracy to cheat the players out of their right to seek bigger salaries from competing teams.
Survivalist hustlers like George Steinbrenner would have adjusted quickly to the daily routine of bartering hand-rolled cigarettes for a fistful of rat meat in a Mexican drunk tank. He would have jaundice by now, and a bad case of pellagra.
A few owners might have bribed their way out by now and disappeared into the jungles of Brazil.
In a just world, Ken Burns' nine-part PBS epic, ``Baseball,'' would include a 10th segment in which Morley Safer and a local guide set out across the pampas on a burro in search of a mythical village where the ex-owners live in jungle mist and shadows. Their neighbors, according to local legend, are elderly white men whose furtive whispers still carry a twinge of German accent.
Ah, sweet fantasy. Baseball fans love fantasy. Fantasy camps, fantasy leagues, fantasy teams. We have a lot of time for fantasies this autumn. Fantasy is all we have left.
That, and 18 1/2 hours of Ken Burns' elegant ode to the national game, a pastime so beloved that it will not die no matter how many criminals, fascists, neurotics and scam artists clog its base paths and clubhouses.
Burns' baseball series was timed for release as the extraordinary 1994 baseball season headed for a climax. Now it is offered up as the only game in town, a last-chance palliative for grieving fans who've had their season stolen.
There are lessons in ``Baseball'' that Ken Burns found important even before the season folded.
When the game turned pro, greed became part of the game. Baseball always survived. Baseball has survived civil war, bigotry, corruption, gangsterism, depression, world wars, hurricanes, earthquakes, artificial turf and the designated-hitter rule. The fans always came back.
But there's no evidence in Ken Burns' series that baseball has had to survive arrogance on the scale that it is practiced in the major leagues today.
A lot of failings are easily forgiven, but arrogance is a sin that people are slow to forget. The average ballplayer today earns 50 times the average blue-collar salary, and the ballplayers don't seem especially appreciative.
The owners? Nobody's quite sure what they earn, which is part of the problem. But for measures of arrogance, they offer this: Bud Selig, the Milwaukee Brewers owner who laughably doubles as baseball commissioner, showed up last Sunday at an NFL game in Green Bay, Wis. He was affable, nonchalant, and he smiled for the mini-cams.
This was something of a shock for baseball fans, who were drunk with the fantasy that Selig, the other owners and the players would be holed up in a New York hotel for frantic all-night sessions in a king-hell stretch drive that would rescue baseball at the very last moment.
Silly us. But we're suckers for a good fantasy.
To be fair, George and Bud and the owners of the other 26 major league teams are baseball fans, too. They have fantasies of their own, dreams of clicking turnstiles, the clatter of busy cash registers, the thunder of TV revenue checks tumbling into their bank accounts . . . and the desperate hope that the fans will be as forgiving as they've always been.
In the long run, that's a safe bet. It's a game for dreamers, and dreamers will drift back to its safe and gauzy rhythms. But they will be very edgy about succumbing to anybody's fantasies of the purity of the game. by CNB