COMMENTARY : Despite Critics, Baseball Is Still Thriving

If you play video games in which images disappear in milliseconds as bells, whistles and sirens go off--or if you watch MTV’s near-subliminal flash-cuts, dream sequences and one-armed, barefoot drummers lost in a circling smoky haze on your television screen--if your eyes, ears and hair follicles are tuned to these hyperillusory delivery systems of virtual reality, then maybe you understood a TV spot prepared by Major League Baseball and played during the recent tournament won by our friends from Canada.

The spot featured young men talking about baseball. This much was apparent because one fleeting image was that of a shiny new baseball, though the image came and went so quickly it might have been a condor’s egg. The young men chattered on. But not in sentences. In fragments. A word here. Yo. A word there. Hey. Baseball. Third base. Bunt. And now we see a baserunner and we hear a young man in a Dodgers warm-up jacket say, “And that’s the suicide squeeze.” He looked well pleased, as if he had aced a calculus exam.

Sorry to go on so about such a curiosity, but something curious is happening in baseball.

What’s happening is that Major League Baseball is afraid the game is losing its appeal. So the anxious lords of baseball create an MTV-ish commercial that is a silly attempt to explain-while-jazzing-up the game. The idea is that young people then will rush to ballparks to catch the fever.

No one expects advertising to be truthful, but neither should it be a blatant distortion, as baseball’s commercial is. Yes, the suicide squeeze is a thrilling play. Yes, it is a moment of tension. Yes, young people should come to the ballpark and see the suicide squeeze for themselves, after which they’ll never again think baseball is dull and dreary.

But, yo and hey, baseball is not an MTV game. It is not measured in milliseconds and does not dance to the war sounds of one-armed drummers who play in bands we never heard of. Baseball is layer of meaning set upon layer, a drama building slowly, a piece of quiet literature to which we escape from the day’s howlings, screeches and false climaxes. Baseball is real, not illusion. Baseball simply is.

Far be it from your humble and obedient servant to be contrary, but contrariness seems called for after the recent World Series. Sportswriters from New York to San Jose have criticized baseball as an institution losing its grip on the American public. This criticism seemed curious coming as it did after another Series that gave us baseball at its best, each game memorable in ways basketball and football can never be memorable.

And yet the criticism was clamorous with most doomsayers citing three objective measurements:

--The Series’ poor television ratings (second lowest ever in prime time).

--A decrease in major league attendance (18 of 26 teams down).

--TV’s brusque business relationship with the game (ESPN pays a $12-million option rather than go on two more years costing $250 million; CBS warns baseball’s lords that a 1993 labor-management war will diminish the network’s interest in a new deal).

Along with these empirical observations come an assortment of subjective judgments that could be summed up in a fat paragraph such as this:

Baseball is dead. Flat-line dead. We can’t even beat Canada now. George Will hasn’t written a baseball word in months. It’s the Jane Fonda Factor. She shows up in Ted Turner’s box for two years and the American game goes to pot. Look at basketball. A with-it game with the best athletes. The inner cities are basketball heaven, and you can’t find a baseball diamond that isn’t broken glass and weeds. We can’t even beat Taiwan in the Olympics. We have to find an ineligible player to beat the Filipino Little Leaguers. Basketball’s where it’s at. Its guys are rock stars. Michael and Magic move in a galaxy all their own. If Dave Winfield is a kid today, he plays pro basketball, not baseball. Yo and hey. It’s Def Lepperd with the one-armed drummer. Basketball guys know their MTV.

Though no doomsayer said it directly, the inferences suggested baseball is in trouble emotionally as well as financially.

To those suggestions, the only proper response is one word, and that word is, beg your pardon, piffwaddle. There’s nothing wrong with baseball. If a few owners want to grouse about cash flow, the grousings mean no more than grousings a century ago, each owner then as now complaining about players’ greed. If such grousings were significant, baseball would have been dead long before 4 million Canadians--50,000 each game--paid their way into a $500-million ballpark in 1992.

The real downturn, small as it is, is baseball’s bow to the economic realities of a depressed economy as well as a drop from a record 1991 season. The economics professors call this a necessary correction before the graph lines go up the chart again. The game’s problems today amount to nothing more than an inconsequential blip on the radar screen of history.

After all, we’re talking about a sport 123 years old which in the last 15 years has created what historians someday will recognize as an era when baseball devised labor-management agreements making possible both short-term growth and long-term stability.

As a game pure and pretty, baseball is so good that even short-sighted owners and players cannot hurt it beyond wise men’s repair. And we should remember, when anxious, that the game is not the sole property of Major League Baseball. Far from it. Baseball belongs to us. It belongs to mothers and fathers and sons and daughters whose games of catch behind the house bind us together in ways we can’t explain. It really doesn’t matter, I think, if World Series games go on after the kids are asleep. That’s when kids dream of the game they played all day.