These grinches are real: baseball owners have stolen the season, and the offseason as well

Sporting News, The, Dec 26, 1994 by Mike Lupica

A year ago, or in any baseball Christmas other than this, there would have been a line away from the ticket sales window at Yankee Stadium that would have tried to stretch to the Major Deegan Expressway. The Yankees had made a deal for a pitcher the night before, a star pitcher named Jack McDowell who won the Cy Young Award just a year ago.

There should have been a lot of action there, even in the middle of December, fans studying seating charts and checking the home schedule, which is supposed to begin April 10 against the Twins. But it is a schedule for a season that does not exist. No one knows when the next baseball season will begin, if it will ever begin.

Yankee Stadium could have been any ballpark the other day, quiet since August. The Grinches who stole the season -- and more and more you can see it was the owners who shut down the game as surely as if they had put a padlock on Gate A -- have now stolen the offseason as well. There is no Hot Stove League because they took the stove, too.

The day after the trade, there was no line of people outside Yankee Stadium buying up tickets for next season because of Jack McDowell. There was no one.

"There were two guys maybe an hour ago," a kid named Wilkins Batista said. "They walked up to the window, but I don't think they stayed there long enough to buy anything."

Batista is 16, a junior at Alfred E. Smith High School. He said he lived a couple of blocks from Yankee Stadium, and was a ballplayer himself, the backup shortstop on the Smith baseball team.

"I heard the Yankees got Tony Fernandez to play shortstop," he said. "That true?"

"Jack McDowell last night, Fernandez this morning," he was told.

"I'm a shortstop, like I told you," Batista said. "I always liked that Tony Fernandez when he was with the Blue Jays, 'cause he was so smooth."

We stood outside the ballpark for a while. No one came up to buy tickets to watch Jack McDowell pitch for the Yankees or to see smooth Tony Fernandez play shortstop.

Finally, Batista said, "Why'd they all do this?"

The fans want the answer to be player greed, because that is always the easy answer to everything in sports, and it is easier to get mad at the players, because everybody knows the players. But if it is only about their greed, why have these players given up so much money in salary already? Nobody ever has walked away from money like this.

Everything the owners have done was designed to shut down the game, eventually force a salary cap on the players. If the owners institute some kind of cap, the next drama will come in the spring, when they open the camps and see which players are willing to cross the picket line. They are sure players will cross, no matter what you hear about solidarity. And the owners are hoping the first ones across will be big names making big money. The owners always have believed the strike will fall apart after that.

All along, the owners have screamed that the game was on the verge of economic collapse, and they somehow had to get control back from the players. But the insane business of baseball, the insane spending, goes on. The owners demand that the players give them back money to save the sport, and then Gregg Jefferies is paid $20 million by the Phillies and Paul O'Neill is paid almost that much by the Yankees, and the Astros, who are supposed to be on the verge of going out of business, pay Jeff Bagwell nearly $30 million.

The owners have tried to blame the players from the start. But these negotiations always end up looking like some kind of pose from the owners. Maybe they don't want a negotiated settlement, if they think they can get a surrender once players start crossing the picket line.

And a 16-year-old stands outside the ballpark and asks why. Maybe a children's book, one of the famous books for this time of year, is needed to explain all this to a kid like Wilkins Batista and everyone else. Go into the early pages of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." Change the word "Grinch" to "owners." Change "Christmas" to "baseball."

"The owners hated baseball.

The whole baseball season!

Now, please don't ask why.

No one quite knows the reason.

It be their heads

weren't screwed on just right.

It be, perhaps,

that their shoes were too tight.

But I think that the most likely

reason of all.

May have been that their hearts

were two sizes too small."

That is the answer for all baseball fans, no matter how young or old they are. In Dr. Seuss, the Grinch did not just hate Christmas. He hated the Whos. It is what all the people in this baseball strike answer when asked about the fans:

Who?