THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605050225
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BOB MOLINARO
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
Hardly a day passes that somebody isn't taking baseball's temperature.
Alarmists note that earned run averages throughout the major leagues are up. That's bad, I suppose.
More encouraging is attendance at big-league games, with an average increase of 7 percent in the first month of the season.
Fans are coming back. What they're seeing, in many cases, are home run orgies played out over interminable nights.
When baseball romantics say that their sport is timeless, they aren't talking about four-hour games, are they?
On the other hand, what are they talking about when they complain that baseball isn't what it used to be?
Nothing is what it used to be, including the country that once embraced baseball as its national pastime.
Think about it. Do you know anyone under the age of 50 who has the endurance, interest or time to watch entire ballgames?
I read stories written by seamheads who fret that baseball has slipped terribly. Their evidence? Baseball often is nudged from center stage by the NFL and basketball.
Here, then, is a certain solution to the problem: Change the fabric of society. Turn back the clock. Take the information superhighway and get off at the exit marked 1956.
Baseball became the American pastime in the era of Henry Ford's Model T. Times change. The rhythm of a nation changes. Now we're a country that wants its Headline News. Sound bites, please. A few seconds of video and we're on our way.
So baseball isn't the NFL. Or the NBA, with its attractive youth market. Or, for that matter, MTV.
Still, millions each year pay to watch it. In their own way, millions upon millions follow it on the tube. Thanks to cable, more of the med-ia's time and effort are devoted to bringing us baseball than at any time in history. A case could be made that the game is grossly overexposed.
You'd think that would be satisfaction enough for the seamheads.
But no. Not when it's fashionable to bemoan the game's plummeting stature. And you can count on those who do to quote baseball's ills ad nauseam, not to mention chapter and verse.
The verse may not be iambic pentameter, but in one form or another, baseball poets still abound, even if a great part of their constituency has died off.
When the U.S. hostages were released from Iran in 1981, commissioner Bowie Kuhn announced that the returning Americans would receive free lifetime baseball passes.
Beano Cook, the ESPN college football commentator, heard this and said: ``Haven't they suffered enough?''
Point is, baseball's problems didn't start with the 1994 strike.
Even so, the game's self image might not be so bad if only those who say they love baseball would lighten up.
No more conceited talk, for example, about how the game is meant to be handed down, generation to generation. It's such a cliche. What's more, it sets up baseball for ridicule.
It's no secret, after all, that baseball skipped a generation or two, not to mention entire social and racial groups.
Baseball's newest solution is to produce ads aimed at minorities and kids. The commercials will feature rappers, rockers, soul singers and country crooners doing their versions of ``Take Me Out to the Ballgame.''
Some of us can remember when kids came to baseball by actually playing it.
It seems sort of pathetic, then, baseball's attempt to hook children with funky spots starring LL Cool J.
Does Yogi know about this? by CNB