THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507160180
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Bob Molinaro
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
The fact that he is presiding over America's most tedious spectator sport didn't stop Judge Lance Ito from getting off a zinger last week at baseball's expense.
Maybe you've heard about this. Prosecutor Christopher Darden was questioning witness Robert Heidstra during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, when he asked, ``What are your favorite sports?''
``Soccer, what we call football in Europe,'' answered Heidstra, who lives around the corner from where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were killed.
``Anything else?'' asked Darden.
``Oh, yeah - ice hockey, basketball,'' Heidstra said.
``American football?'' Darden asked.
``Boring,'' Heidstra said, before Ito interrupted.
``Wait,'' said the judge, ``till you see baseball.''
Rim shots in the courtroom?
But seriously, folks, if the Simpson trial is our new national pastime, what does that make baseball - a guaranteed punchline?
Too bad for the seamheads. But laughs are preferable to the gloom that hangs over baseball in the Summer of '95. Except for the comedic asides of Judge Ito and the practiced one-liners of TV monologuists, most of the commentary on the game is all too grim.
Expressions of dismay and disgust abound across the land, where new problems are uncovered every day.
This is open season on baseball, a situation the major league owners and players brought on themselves. But if people think baseball is boring, they should read the obituaries that daily come across the wire at the newspaper office.
OK, baseball is in trouble. Attendance is down. Ratings for the All-Star Game were embarrassing. Advertisers are upset.
Now that this has all been said and said and said (by me as well as countless others inside and outside the media), can we just get on with the summer?
Apparently not.
``What worries me,'' Curt Smith says in a story from The Baltimore Sun, ``is that people aren't talking baseball.''
Smith, co-producer of documentaries on legendary play-by-play announcers, hosts a morning talk show in Milwaukee.
``The interest in baseball,'' he said, ``has never been at a lower ebb.''
Never? Not even in the late '60s and early '70s, when a franchise like the Baltimore Orioles averaged 14,000 fans a game?
Oh well, there is no convincing some people that the sky is not falling.
Another story, this one from Los Angeles, reminds us that Hideo Nomo's start in the All-Star Game did not have the expected impact on viewers. Nomo, the story suggests, is not baseball's savior, after all. Back to the drawing board.
As the season begins its second half, anxiety sticks to baseball like humidity.
Where are the great mood-lifters when we need them? George Steinbrenner remains in New York, but his zany style of ownership is not playing as well as it once did.
George isn't all that different than he was before. It's his audience that's off its game. Steinbrenner just changed the Yankees pitching coach for the 36th time. This is weird, funny stuff, and yet it hardly makes a ripple in baseball's sea of discontent.
Steinbrenner used to be one of the things that was most wrong with baseball. Now George can't even crack the top 10.
Meanwhile, cheerless stories of the game's demise keep popping up on my computer screen. A New York paper reveals that participation in baseball has fallen 9.5 percent. Little League, the story theorizes, ``does not have the stronghold on youngsters it did a generation ago.''
Too bad. But also, so what? Why all the angst over baseball? It's just a game, isn't it? Besides, it's not going anywhere.
That's another way of saying that it's time to lighten up. Maybe this will help.
Seems that Shea Stadium has been rejected as a New York site for a Mass to be celebrated by Pope John Paul II during his October visit.
The home of the Mets will not be used, because of the ``potential of a conflict with the baseball playoffs.''
The Mets in the playoffs? Cue the laugh track. by CNB