Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 18, 1994 TAG: 9408190059
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
As the baseball strike drags on, major league owners get desperate - and look to break the dispute with scab labor.
In Roanoke, the telephone rings.
The San Diego Padres - baseball's worst team - are on the line. Answering: the Roanoke Mudcats, the last place team in Roanoke's 30-and-over adult baseball league.
Here's the hypothetical: the Padres hire the Mudcats.
Around the country, other big league clubs follow suit, picking up players and teams wherever they can.
Baseball is back in business.
Fans - disgusted by major league baseball's greed - dance naked in the streets. Beer companies, hot dog vendors and ESPN quickly join them.
Hey, why not?
Baseball is baseball, whether the Padres are on the field or the Mudcats.
Look at the ball: same size. Look at the distance between bases: 90 feet. Same. The rules: three strikes and you're out, nine players to a team, no spitting on the umpires. Same. Same. Same. About the only difference would be:
The salaries.
On the Padres, the players are wildly overpaid, like most professional athletes. The team's highest paid player, Tony Gwynn, makes $3.6 million a year. The team's lowest paid player makes the league minimum: $109,000.
The Mudcats, on the other hand, are paying to play baseball: $65 each to join the league, and $3 a game per player to pay the umpires.
Total cost: $120 for the summer, not including Gatorade and Ben-Gay expenses. But they don't complain. Because:
They love the game.
"Paying a guy five or six million dollars a year to play baseball, I mean get real," said Mudcats pitcher Larry Beheler, echoing the sentiments of his teammates and 'most anybody else who has an opinion about the baseball strike. "That's just stupid."
So, the Mudcats are called up. How much would it take for them to sign on the dotted line? To play in the big leagues, wear the Padres colors, even if it's only until the strike is settled?
If the strike is settled.
Figures among the Mudcats varied slightly from player to player, but the bottom line is that the Padres could get the Mudcats dirt cheap.
"They could probably get all of us for half a million," said Robert Vaden, the Mudcats' best pitcher. His counterpart on the Padres, Andy Benes, earns $3 million.
For himself, Vaden would settle for the league minimum of $109,000. Who wouldn't?
"To get out there and play ball at Yankee Stadium or Wrigley Field or someplace like that?" said backup catcher Rich Cranwell. "I mean, how many people make a hundred-grand a year?"
Other Mudcats were more than willing to accept less.
--"Man, I'd settle for $50,000," said Rodney Hall, a warehouse worker. "That's more than I make in four or five years."
--"Living expenses, which is about what I make now," said George Smith, a staff supervisor at the Virginia Baptist Children's Home.
--"Just cover any injuries and my plane ticket out," said Neil Moser, a clinical social worker.
--"League minimum," said Jim Hamrick, a policeman. To which teammate Bob Padula prodded: "C'mon, you'd do it for a case of beer." And Hamrick amended himself: "O.K., a case and a-half. I'm not easy."
Padula, however, is. "I'd play for nothing, sure I would. Are you kidding?" he said. "I'd give up my job to throw one pitch in the majors."
As for Larry Beheler, the Conservator of the Peace at Carvins Cove Reservoir, he said: "If I was single and had no kids or family, I would play for $500 a month. I would."
Imagine, then, the possibilities.
With salary expenses cut to a fraction, ticket prices, hot dog prices, beer prices, hats, T-shirts, baseball cards, all could be slashed. Attendance and vendor sales would soar. The economy would boom and everybody would be happy, except perhaps former Padres Gwynn and Benes and other millionaires around the league, who squander their fortunes on legal fees and picket signs.
Of course, purists would scoff.
Sure, baseball is baseball, but the quality of the game would suffer, they would say.
Yeah. Yeah.
But that wouldn't make it any less entertaining. In fact, a touch of gray hair and a few pot bellies might help liven things up a little.
Take this past Sunday's double-header between the Mudcats and the Roanoke Indians, for example. For sheer entertainment value, it was a comedy of errors that was hard to beat.
Three Mudcat plays stood out.
--As Rodney Hall, 44, tried to slide into third base, he ran out of steam, tripped, somersaulted, and ended up crawling in a cloud of dust on his hands and knees to the bag. He was called safe.
--Rich Cranwell stole second base, then essentially stole first base back again when the Indians protested that he had stolen second improperly, and he listened to them, and trotted back to first. Confused? So, was everybody else.
--George Smith, bolstered by six stolen bases in the first game of the double-header, tried the improbable in the second game: stealing home. He was called out.
Not that it was all comedy. There were also all the universal emotions of sport, the agony and the ecstasy of victory and defeat, of pulled muscles, and skinned elbows.
Sunday, in a dramatic finish to the first game, the Indians, down by one run in the final inning, loaded the bases and scored two runs when Randy Morris just missed a diving catch in the Mudcats outfield. Final score: 8-7.
The Mudcats also lost the second game, which poses another question: Would the Padres suffer with the Mudcats in the lineup? Maybe. The Padres record is 47-70. The Mudcats are 1-12-1. Adjusted over 117 games, however, the Mudcats would be 8-101-8, or thereabouts.
But so what? Last place is last place.
Plus, fans really don't care, judging from an informal poll taken at Sunday's Mudcats double-header. Except for a pair of union loyalists, spectators there said they would gladly come out to watch the Mudcats play major league baseball as the Padres. Most said they would even pay full ticket prices.
"You go for the event," said one woman.
Reached by telephone in San Diego, Padres spokesman Jim Ferguson seemed less than amused. He didn't agree that the Mudcats would draw the fans in like the real Padres. "I don't think that would generally be the case," he said somewhat tersely.
Nor did he believe that the Mudcats would settle for such bargain basement salaries. "How many times have you heard a major leaguer say they play for the love of the game?" he said. "It's easy to say I'd do that or I'd do this, but when it comes down to it, would they?"
Does that mean he thinks Tony Gwynn is worth $4 million a year?
On this point at least, Ferguson shared the same distaste that the Mudcats and baseball fans in general feel about baseball's inflated salaries.
Hypothetically speaking, he said: "Is anybody?"
by CNB