THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 12, 1994 TAG: 9412120152
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Bob Molinaro
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
You would not pay Broadway prices to watch actors who were bused in from a Connecticut dinner theater.
Although the twangs are similar, the ten-gallon hats comforting, there is a difference between the pros who perform at the Grand Old Opry and what's playing at the Holiday Inn out by the interstate.
The finger painting that hangs from the refrigerator door is cute, but nobody mistakes your kitchen for the Louvre.
How then, can baseball fans be expected to accept minor leaguers in big-league uniforms?
You could argue that fans have been paying big-time prices for minor league talent for years in places like Seattle, San Diego and Wrigley Field.
But this is different.
If the owners impose their new work rules, they could open spring training without the household names and familiar faces that we associate with major league baseball. If the striking players do not come in from the cold, a worst-case scenario has minor leaguers littering the fields on Opening Day.
Scab baseball would be a chilling thing. Baseball is not major league just because somebody says it is. There is the little matter of excellence to consider.
Even while baseball management rattles the saber, individual owners are guaranteeing refunds for season-ticket holders if their teams use replacement players.
Other teams are considering cutting their ticket prices if they open the season with minor leaguers.
We can only hope none of this will be necessary. Replacement games at any price would be a cruel parody that would only further damage the sport.
A home run hit by a minor leaguer in Yankee Stadium on a pitch from another minor leaguer is not the same as one hit by Don Mattingly off Roger Clemens.
This seems all too obvious. And yet, in a national poll released by The Associated Press, 51 percent of fans say replacement players would not keep them away from big-league parks.
Assuming they mean what they say, these fans want us to believe that it is the game, in its purest form, that matters more than the greedy players.
The same psychology was at work last summer after the strike. With the big-league stadiums empty, TV and print reporters filled their days by investigating baseball in the boonies.
Without fail, they determined that baseball at the grass-roots level was not only more innocent, but just as satisfying as the kind played at Camden Yards and Shea Stadium.
This is the sort of silliness one expects to hear in a time of national trauma. It is fantasy baseball, but it can't last another summer.
There is no substitute for major league baseball played by major leaguers. Only when the best go against the best can the game be whole again. Anything else is a masquerade.
Putting somebody else in Cal Ripken's uniform will not fool anyone for very long. People speak of rediscovering baseball's innocence, but the most innocent fan - the child - measures his dreams against the real-life exploits of Ripken, Kirby Puckett or Greg Maddux.
Yes, it's the game that matters most. But when we think of what baseball used to be and should be, what springs from our memories are not obscure moments in Durham or Bakersfield, but visions of Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park.
On the big-league stages, only big-league talent will do. by CNB