Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 14, 1994 TAG: 9409150017
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Jack Bogaczyk
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
... However, since they don't pay me for nothing here - and the baseball strike is about money - well, let's just say it's the bottom of the ninth, and there is no joy in Mudslingingville.
Fehr has struck out, and the baseball season has been Ravitched. The World Series, which made it through two World Wars and the guidance of Mountain, Happy, Ford, Bowie and even Fay, is going to be canceled by someone named Bud.
See, there's no commissioner, so now no one has to act in the best interests of baseball. OK, there is one positive development in the strike. It brought those rotisserie leagues to a shrieking halt, too.
This was supposed to be the season of new playoffs, not no playoffs.
Yes, that was a double negative, which, considering the subject matter, is appropriate. Owners vs. players. Remember when baseball's greatest rivalry was Yankees vs. Dodgers? The grand game that still celebrates Grover Cleveland Alexander and Henry Aaron now plays like Alexander Hamilton against Aaron Burr.
This players' strike was and is about owners vs. owners, however. The owners were asking the players to save them from one another. The players, accustomed to winning in these work stoppages, refused to try on a new cap. It wasn't the right size.
The owners started the strike and they are going to end it when they want. That's been evident since Aug.12. And the owners, until now the Seattle Mariners of labor negotiations, are going to end it as the winners, if anyone really wins and loses in a strike.
The owners are going to get their salary cap, and the players are going to swallow hard - their pride and more - and probably ask, ``Whatever happened to Marvin Miller?''
While the players are pondering why union boss Don Fehr couldn't make their pitch like the retired Miller, the owners will be otherwise occupied as baseball returns to a city where it has failed twice before.
That's Washington, D.C., where more than a few members of Congress want to know not why Heath Shuler isn't starting at quarterback for the Redskins yet, but why baseball should retain its antitrust exemption. Some old senators - Howard Metzenbaum and Dennis DeConcini, not Bob Humphreys and Toby Harrah - have this notion that there are antitrust questions in baseball, not to mention anti-trust questions.
This winter, baseball won't need Hot Stove talk to stay warm. There will be National Labor Relations Board hearings and more hot air from Fehr and loathing owners. Updating the strike, Peter Gammons will get more ESPN air time than Dick Vitale. The game will go split-screen on Court TV with the O.J. Simpson trial.
And then, spring training will begin, and most of the fans will return.
That's because they love the game and the ballpark experience not the business, not the owners. The players are here today, gone tomorrow. The strike has damaged the sport, however. It will be a long time before baseball's loyalists forget the year Ken Griffey Jr. and Cal Ripken Jr. became the Boys of Slumber.
To most fans singing ``Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don't care if they ever come back,'' it doesn't matter whose fault the strike was. If the players don't want to play a game, they can go to work. That's why they'll return, because playing baseball is what they do best, what they love. And if they don't, someone will take their position. That's why there are Hickory Crawdads, Toledo Mud Hens, Chattanooga Lookouts and Salem Buccaneers.
After the sport's earlier work stoppages - this is the eighth in 23 years - baseball always came back like a bouncer on artificial turf. This time, it will be more like a slow roller. That's because the owners finally learned how to bust the fastball up and in.
Yes, it took millions of dollars to run Cleveland out of a pennant race.
by CNB