Spring straining

Sporting News, The, Feb 27, 1995 by Steve Marantz

Spring baseball brings no quickening of the heart this year. It promises no respite from winter gray and tedium. It offers no bulwark against sickness, unpaid bills and loneliness. This is the spring of baseball's discontent Something good and warm is missing.

Spring baseball usually is a soft breeze, a tendril of green leaf, an ascendant February sun. This spring it is dark and mean-spirited and smelling of burnt flesh.

Camps in Florida and Arizona open with little relish and anticipation. Clubhouses are haunted by ghosts of striking regulars; new blinking faces occupy cubbyholes with the trepidation of squatters. At best, it is a molting process. At worst an elaborate artifice.

Ballparks enclose fields of ambiguity. Nobody involved in the game, or watching it, is certain of ethical bearings. Managers and coaches are tom between warring sides; fans weigh a compromise between the intrinsic appeal of the game and its depleted quality.

Continuity is one of baseball's underlying attractions. Fans may measure last season's drama against that of 1979 or 1960 or 1925. Cardinals fans may measure the skill of Ozzie Smith against that of Dal Maxvill or Dick Groat or Marty Marion. The best Dodgers rookie is weighed against an illustrious line of predecessors. Cal Ripken's endurance is meaningful relative to Lou Gehrig's.

But this spring, continuity is broken. There are no finks between players in uniform and the past. A championship team is not gathering to defend its title. There are no batting champions, no home-run kings, no Cy Young winners in camp. There is no 1994 season, no cultural memory, no shared baseball experience.

There is only a shared strike experience. Spring baseball, 1995, conjures economics, ideology, politics and the frozen-in-time faces of Donald Fehr and Bud Selig. Spring baseball reminds us of what we are and not what we wish to be. It is something to escape from, instead of to.

It is said that a manager gets paid for how much he suffers. But conventional wisdom could not have anticipated the strike of 1994-95. Today, Sparky Anderson probably is suffering more than he has in 25 years of managing, and he is being paid nothing.

Anderson is on unpaid leave of absence as manager of the Tigers because he could not bring himself to run a team of replacement players.

The emotion underlying his decision is evident on the first day of Tigers camp in Lakeland, Fla. "I've been managing for 25 years, and what have I been, a thief?" Anderson says. "I will not be a thief. I will not take the money and rum."

The money, in Anderson's case, is a $1.2-million salary. But he makes clear that losing money is not what he regrets most.

"This is the hardest day in my career," he says, "because I didn't get to walk across the street and put on a uniform." He adds, "I am not retiring and not quitting. I will be back to manage the Detroit Tigers when the regular players come back."

However, Anderson's future with the Tigers appears to be running out. He is on the last year of a contract. He is relatively old, 61, for an organization stressing youth. His cronies, former G.M. Jim Campbell and former pitching coach Billy Muffett, are gone, and his influence in personnel matters is diminished.

There are indications Anderson's relationship with G.M. Joe Klein is strained. Klein says, "I don't think you've won too many points when you've left the club on the first day of spring training." Moreover, Anderson is not close with Owner Mike Ilitch, who bought the club in August 1992.

Dodgers Manager Tom Lasorda speaks of Anderson in the past tense. "I'm sorry to see that happen to Sparky," Lasorda says. "He's been a teammate, a friend, a great manager. It's sad to see him go out this way."

With Tom Runnells, manager of Triple-A Toledo, replacing Anderson on an interim basis, other managers are weighing their positions.

Yankees Manager Buck Showalter plays Hamlet, rent by conflicting loyalties, withholding a final decision until games begin in March. The Mets'Dallas Green and Marlins' Rene Lachemann say they will re-evaluate before games start in March. The Blue Jays already have relieved Cito Gaston of replacement duties, and the Orioles' Phil Regan is spared by Owner Peter Angelos' refusal to field a replacement team.

But none of their fates carries the symbolic import of Anderson's. He is, after all, the fourth-winningest manager in baseball history, a three-time World Series champion. Anderson once opined that managers are fired because "they get tired of seeing you. Really, that' s all it is." If the Tigers finally are tired of Anderson, he could turn out to be the most distinguished casualty of the strike.

Clubhouses are populated by players recently employed in sheet metal, cotton farming, truck driving, grocery clerking, video production, sales, youth recreation, stock brokering and private security.

Yankees public-relations director Rob Butcher despairs of providing useful biographical information to media. But then he hits on a plan. Butcher devises a questionnaire for each player to fill out