DATE: Wednesday, September 17, 1997         TAG: 9709170659

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C1   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Bob Molinaro 

                                            LENGTH:   64 lines

YES, BASEBALL IS STILL ALIVE, BUT YOU WOULDN'T KNOW BY ASKING THE PURISTS

Came across something unusual a few days ago: positive news about baseball.

A misprint? Perhaps.

It seemed real enough, though. The newspaper story was a small one, packed with boring numbers. But it touched on the subject of baseball's popularity, a sore point for America in recent years.

For any story to suggest that baseball is not losing popularity is news itself. Baseball is the feel-bad sport of the '90s. It can never do anything right.

Baseball has lost touch with America. The kids don't love the game. People aren't watching. The game's biggest names are dwarfed by basketball and football stars.

Yadda yadda yadda.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I stumbled across this note in The Washington Post. The story reported that the minor-league baseball teams in the Maryland/D.C. area enjoyed significant gains at the gate this past summer.

Attendance at Bowie Baysox games jumped by 13,000 to 409,285.

The Frederick Keys drew 274,894, in increase of 16,000 over last summer.

The Delmarva entry in the Class A South Atlantic League drew 324,412.

Meanwhile, the Prince William (Va.) Cannons attracted 214,037 customers, an improvement over last season of 24,000.

These are cold statistics. I do not know how they compare with other parts of the country. They are just numbers. Numbers alone cannot give us a look inside the hearts and minds of Americans.

Maybe America is turned off to baseball. Maybe the critics are correct. Maybe the game can never compete again on an equal footing with the NFL or the NBA.

I suppose if you wanted to, you could come up with all sorts of reason for why baseball is changing from pastime to passe.

But you'd never know it from looking at these statistics.

In the Maryland/D.C. area alone, minor-league teams attracted more than 1.2 million fans. These people weren't drawn to the park by big names - this is the bush leagues, remember. They were there to see baseball, or to enjoy a night under the stars. What's it really matter why.

The baseball doomsday theory doesn't seem to hold water when faced with these sort of numbers (which don't even take into account the three million or more who pay handsomely to watch the Orioles at Camden Yards).

And yet, even as a fairly interesting, exciting season of big-league baseball approaches the playoffs, baseball critics abound. It's always something. Lately, the complaints have shifted to the proposed realignment of the major leagues.

Whether baseball agrees to radical realignment, less radical realignment or no realignment, Bud Selig is right (yes, even the acting commish is sometimes right) - baseball's public will cope quite nicely.

As it coped with the playoffs when they were introduced. And more recently, with the wildcards.

The purists' wing of baseball's Department of Complaints always overreacts to what it thinks will be a wholesale mutiny of fans.

In fact, you do not draw 1.2 million people to minor league games - and who knows how many millions more to backwater parks throughout the U.S. - by catering to baseball purists. Just as you cannot pack our own Harbor Park by offering nothing but pure baseball, whatever that is.

Strange, isn't it, that baseball always takes its hardest, meanest shots from the people who say they love it most.

A message to purists: Lighten up.

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