Friday, April 13, 2001
Fans' turn to be greedy
The guy in Pittsburgh who caught Sean Casey's home run ball wants $5,000 for it. Four nights ago, Casey hit the first homer in PNC Park. He grew up in Pittsburgh. The ball means a lot to him. Not that it matters, but Casey also happens to be a saint, as ballplayers go.
Five thousand bucks, or no deal.
Reds PR man Rob Butcher offered Michael Wilmer free tickets and an invitation to tour PNC Park, visit the Reds clubhouse and collect some autographs. Wilmer is such a baseball fan, none of that impressed him. “I'm not into that kind of thing,” he told Butcher.
Oh. Wonder what special place Wilmer has reserved for the ball.
We like to paint players and owners as mercenaries
killing the game. It sounds great, until something like this. Then it sounds like they're just doing what anyone would do. They're just like the rest of us.
Five thousand bucks.
It's really a bargain
Wilmer said a collector offered him $10,000 for the ball, but he'd let Casey have it for a mere $5,000. What a guy. Knowing Casey, he'd have given Wilmer half his locker in exchange for the baseball.
“I didn't realize how bad he wanted it,” Butcher said Thursday. “He said, "I'd really like to have it.' Players never say that kind of stuff.”
Casey is a guy who believes he should put his celebrity to work for the common good. He visits enough sick kids, they could name a wing for him at Children's Hospital.
Last year, he flew home after a road game to sign autographs at a Dayton card shop, helping to pay the funeral expenses of a man whose son he'd seen at the players' entrance to Cinergy Field.
Casey didn't know the dead man; he barely knew the son, who was just a guy hanging outside the gate after games, hoping for autographs. That's the kind of person Casey is.
Fans didn't start this. Fans get gouged at the ticket window and the beer line. Fans are held for ransom by owners seeking new stadia. In some cities, fans build stadiums for owners who repay their generosity with lousy football.
You could sympathize with Wilmer and not be wrong.
But should everything be for sale?
Is there no space for grace?
The best thing about Mark McGwire's 62nd home run was that the guy who caught it didn't demand oil wells for its return. He simply gave Mac the ball.
Wilmer was going to do that for Casey, until others told him there could be swag involved. Then he opened the bidding.
Five thousand bucks.
Special to only one
It's just a baseball. It's special to no one but Casey. In the early '90s, he and his father had season tickets above the third-base dugout at Three Rivers Stadium, where Casey could study the swings of the Pirates' prodigious lefty hitters, Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla and Andy Van Slyke.
“My life will go on without the ball,” Casey told Butcher. “It's sad it turned into a money issue.”
What's sadder is, every time something like this happens to someone like Sean Casey, the kind and generous spirit loses a little war with cynicism. We don't need more cynicism. Neither does baseball.
But hey, get what you can get, sports fan. Everyone else does.
What an unfortunate (dollar) sign of the times.
E-mail: pdaugherty@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/daugherty.
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DAUGHERTY: Fans' turn to be greedy
