We'll come back, too

Sporting News, The, April 10, 1995 by Dave Kindred

Al Campanis one day took a bat in his hands and stood in against a kid lefthander who never really knew where his fastball would go. The Dodgers' top scout and a disciple of the genius Branch Rickey, Campanis may have been the dynasty's true heart because his work made real the Mahatma's ideas. With a bat in his hands, Campanis wanted to see the kid lefthander for himself.

Came the kid's fastball.

Came and went.

Not so much seen or heard as felt.

"The hair on my arms stood on end," Campanis said years later when we all had seen Sandy Koufax. "The only other time that happened was when I saw the Sistine ceiling."

At a dinner party the other night, an advertising man wanted to know about the end of the strike. He blamed the players for all of it. He said they are greedy brats being paid too much to play a game. What would it hurt any of them, he said, to settle for a lousy $1 million a year?

In answer, a question: "Have you ever stood in against a major league fastball?"

"No."

"I did once. Didn't even see it go by me. And I was a player then. I didn't even see it. "

Roger Kahn once wrote that a major league fastball comes with the sound of a hissing snake, pure evil promising harm.

Because we all have played baseball, we think we know the game. The truth is, we don't know the major league game at all. These are not men playing a kid's game. These are extraordinary athletes playing the hardest game there is. Like Tom Wolfe's astronauts, they have the right stuff. They have made it to the top of a ziggurat pyramid. They have left the rest of us below. Occasionally, they allow us so close to their gift that it raises the hair on our arms.

How many games have we missed now, almost a thousand? In those games, how many times have we missed the work that makes major league baseball unique? These are not ordinary men doing extraordinary things; they are extraordinary men doing unimagined things. To see Ken Griffey Jr. on his knees in the gap throwing out a man at second base is to see baseball as more than a game. It becomes art. It tells us of life's possibilities.

So, no, a lousy $1 million a year is not enough when a Griffey, a Frank Thomas or a Barry Bonds does unique work, the demand for which exceeds the supply. Those players create a product that customers have shown they want. They want major league baseball.

And even with the pain that baseball's owners have inflicted upon us, we will be back in the ballparks. We will be back because we can't not go back. The game is too good to be ruined forever by the likes of bully-boy owners who not once, not twice but three times were found in violation of federal labor laws. Clearly, if irrationally, the owners decided to break the law in hopes the players would cave in to public pressure and give back collective-bargaining gains legally made in the past two decades.

The resulting damage is great. Even lifelong fans have said they want nothing more to do with the game. As pro basketball profits by Michael Jordan's return, baseball's marketers face imposing challenges created by the widespread and enduring hostilities of this strike.

The truly sad thing is, the strike didn't need to happen. The owners knew from the start the players would never accept a salary cap, and yet the owners dallied 18 months or more before starting this round of collective bargaining - and then they proposed the hateful salary cap.

Had the owners made a sensible proposal two years ago, negotiations might have been fruitful. While rightfully refusing to accept a revolution in the game's economic system, the players came to show a willingness to tinker. Considering the players' long-held opposition to any device that limits the money a team wants to pay a player, the union's acceptance of the concept of a luxury tax was no small step toward the owners.

The best hope now is that the owners have been so embarrassed by their failures to honor the laws of the land that they will decide to negotiate in good faith and fairly with the players who create the product that makes all of them wealthy.

Yes, the owners take the big-money risks. (But not without public help in the shape of taxpayer-built stadiums and dozens of other giveaways.) And, yes, the owners ought to make a buck the same as players. Yet the owners know - now if not before - that without what acting commissioner Bud Selig calls "the regular players," their ballparks will sit empty. Spring training showed that. Anyone who would pay to see scabs wear Yankees uniforms is, to be charitable, a cretin who sleeps wrapped around a football.

So, what now?

Another season with a strike is unthinkable. The players union, though, can not promise not to strike because such promise is illegal; it deprives the represented workers of their strongest weapon against management and cannot be given away by union leaders.

Still, even the most recalcitrant union leader knows that another strike by the players, however justified legally, morally and ethically, would be a public-relations disaster beyond repair.