For one longtime fan, strike’s out

I was 6 years old when my father took me to my first professional

baseball game, played in a ramshackle stadium that was the home of

the Fort Wayne Chiefs, a Class A farm team of the Philadelphia

Phillies. It was love at first sight that was transferred over the

years to the Chicago White Sox and California Angels, both of whom

stiffed me repeatedly without guilt and also without extinguishing

the flame that was lighted by the Chiefs.

Fort Wayne is halfway between Chicago and Cincinnati, and in those

Depression years, hitchhiking was a legitimate way of getting around.

So I would often take off with a school friend to hitchhike to Cincy

or Chicago and sit in the bleachers for a buck. I remember well an

entire night spent on a street corner in a small Ohio town before a

truck picked my friend and me up and took us to Cincinnati, where the

St. Louis Cardinals’ Dean brothers would be pitching a double-header.

I was so tired when we got there that I slept through most of the two

games but somehow took them in by osmosis.

When I went off to the University of Missouri, I was halfway

between Kansas City and St. Louis and hitched in both directions to

see as many games as my academic survival permitted. And when I left

college in my junior year to enlist in the Navy for World War II, I’m

sure my primary motivation was to save baseball.

Four years later, I returned to Missouri to finish my journalism

degree, and that’s when baseball first broke my heart. The St. Louis

Cardinals owner, Sam Breadon, and his general manager came to

Columbia to interview several dozen applicants for a publicity job

with the team, and I got it. The pay was lousy, and I had a wife and

child by this time, but my wife understood that the opportunity for

me to rub elbows with Stan Musial and Enos Slaughter superseded such

mundane matters as a decent living.

So I found my dream job right out of the box -- and it lasted

three months. The Cardinals front office was an arrogant, secretive,

confused mess with a management style right out of “Alice in

Wonderland.” Two examples: The guy I was working for didn’t know I’d

been hired and viewed me with understandable hostility. And I was

living at the YMCA because Breadon, who seemed to own half of St.

Louis, wouldn’t help me find housing to move my family there. So I

quit and went back to Fort Wayne to look for a real job. A telegram

from Breadon was awaiting me there. It said: “Have found you housing

in Pocatello. Please confirm.”

When I called and asked him what he was talking about, he seemed

surprised that no one had told me I was slated to be the general

manager of the Cardinal farm team in Pocatello, Idaho, the following

year. I declined, not only ending my baseball career but giving up an

opportunity to work a World Series press box, since the Cardinals won

the National League pennant that year. Maybe I could have been one of

Bud Selig’s tycoons today if I had just taken that job in Pocatello.

This history is offered up to establish my credits to speak to the

threatened strike of major league baseball players on Aug. 30. I am a

charter member of the Silent Majority not represented in the

negotiations to prevent that strike and get on with the season. I buy

baseball tickets in the outer reaches of the stadium not reserved for

the corporate expense account crowd, pay $8 to park, $6 for a glass

of beer, and stand up for the seventh-inning stretch and sing “Take

Me Out To the Ball Game.”

I’m not going to say that if this idiotic strike scenario is

played out I’ll never buy another baseball ticket. It wouldn’t be

true. And it’s because of this grip that the game has on so many

millions of us that baseball has become a public trust that should

never be put into the exclusive hands of people whose only

qualification for running it is that they are rich.

That’s why the first thing that needs to be done -- and quickly --

is to put baseball under the same federal anti-trust laws that govern

all other professional sports. Then the owners could be required to

open their books and prove the doomsday economics used as a

negotiating weapon -- and ridiculed by such friendly sources as

Forbes Magazine. It should also be pointed out to the owners that

they brought all these agonies on themselves by paying absurd wages

to mediocre players, and they are now asking the players’ union to

save them from their own bad judgment by accepting a salary cap.

Meanwhile, the players need to recognize that they have been set

up as the bad guys by taking the strike bait and that they are

playing into the hands of the most excessive and arrogant owners by

refusing a salary cap. They also need someone to tell them that they

aren’t going to get much sympathy from people who have to make real

sacrifices to afford to take the family to a ballgame. And to ask

themselves if that extra million of greed on top of other millions is

really worth destroying the game.

And both of them might reflect on the Silent Majority that has

been given no seat at these negotiations. We could really torpedo the

game if they finally push us to that place. Then the owners would

have to find a new toy, and the players would have to learn a

considerably less-lucrative trade.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.