Sunday, July 14, 2002
Baseball losing its allure for fan
As baseball bickers, fan's love fades
He had the No. 14 jersey, white with red stripes, V-necked, folded in the top drawer of the dresser. He wore it in 1970, to the All-Star Game at Riverfront Stadium. He was 14 years old, and he loved the game.
He sat in the last row in the red, in straightaway center field. The players looked like ants at a picnic. Satellites orbiting the moon had a better view than he did. He was elated.
He couldn't get enough baseball. At night, he tucked the transistor radio under the sheets as he pretended to sleep. In the morning, he read the box scores, first thing. He knew all the players in the National League. Who didn't? He grabbed his Tony Perez model glove and slid the strap over the handlebar of his bike. He was off, all day, to crouch like Pete Rose in the batter's box drawn in the dirt in the lot at the end of the road.
When he wasn't playing, he was arguing. Mays or Mantle? Clemente or Oliva? There is no way the Dodgers will catch the Reds this year. It was the stuff of his life.
He held onto baseball, even as he grew into adulthood, got married and had kids of his own, because holding onto things is what boys do, even when they are men. It's why we still have our first glove and we surreptitiously fight back the lump in our throat when we watch Field of Dreams. Baseball is the romance novel of most men over 40.
Until it isn't. It is possible to love baseball without loving the major leagues. It hurts like a best friend telling you he's moving. But it's possible, so now he watches the pros doing their self-important labor dance with detached contempt, as he pitches to his 12-year-old or plays softball at Rumpke Park.
It is possible to kill a passion, even one as deep as Reds baseball. We're watching it happen right now. It's not a swift death, and it won't ever be complete. There always will be sports fans with an acute baseball jones, who will go no matter what. It's more a slow, steady erosion. An ever-widening cynicism of the heart. Fans aren't mad any more. They just don't give a damn.
He won't go, he says, not ever again. If the players strike or the owners lock them out, he won't go to the new taxpayer-funded ballpark, won't watch the games on TV, won't even listen to Marty and Joe. He used to go to 10 or 15 games a year. Since the '94 strike, it's down to two or three. He takes his wife and three kids to a game now, it costs him 25 percent of what he makes in a week.
And for what? To watch a bunch of greedy, arrogant ballplayers who have no regard for their public? To fill the treasuries of owners whose idea of public service is to agree to keep the team in town if you pay for their new stadiums?
They give nothing back. This is how he feels. He saw it again Tuesday night, at an All-Star Game that ended in a tie because players didn't want to play anymore. He remembers the '70 game, when Rose scored the winning run. What drama! What an ending! What a game! He watched Tuesday night, all the way to 12:45 a.m. when they called it, and he thought:
What drama? What ending? What game?
He felt like a sucker. He'd been feeling that way for years, since '94, when the players flushed the season and the commissioner canceled the World Series and no one wanted to let Pete Rose come back.
He looks at Bud Selig and sees a smart man without a clue. Selig reminds him of a person with a high IQ who can grasp the tangible — dollars, contraction, payrolls — but not the intangible. It is possible to be smart and not wise, is what he thinks about the commissioner.
"It's a great game,” he tells himself. “I love the game. Not the soft millionaires who strike and call the All-Star Game a tie and think that's fine because it's just a show. Not them, or the people who sign their checks. The idea. The institution. The game. I still love the game.”
He slips on the No. 14 jersey, history pulled over his head, across his eyes and finally resting on his shoulders. How good this game used to be, he thinks.
In the soft twilight of a beautiful summer evening, he fits the Tony Perez model glove to his left hand, admiring its creases, its smell, its character. Believing there's a metaphor there somewhere, for the way baseball used to be.
Men reach for memories the way women seek true love. Neither is as good as how we remember it. He called to his 12-year-old daughter. “Wanna have a catch?”
They strolled onto the languid lawn and tossed.
The Reds were playing somewhere, he thought. He couldn't quite remember.
E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com
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DAUGHERTY: Baseball losing its allure for fan
