from the Miami Herald--Tropic Magazine

March 29, 1998

What Have They Done to Our Game

by John Dufresne

I grew up in Mudville, the real one, Worcester, Massachusetts, where Ernest Thayer wrote his famous poem, where the first no-hitter in professional baseball was pitched, and where, alas, the Mighty Casey struck out. I grew up devoted to the Red Sox and in love with the game. The Sox, a spirited and troubled lot, were easy to adore, hard to figure. Jimmy Piersall played centerfield like a dervish but also climbed the backstop and sulked behind the flagpole. Jackie Jensen, American League MVP, would not get on an airplane and retired from the game when required to do so. Pumpsie Green and Gene Conley hopped off the team bus in Manhattan and surfaced three days later in Israel. Teddy Ballgame, the Splendid Splinter, perhaps the greatest hitter in history, refused to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd when he ended his career by lofting a homer in his last at bat.

Baseball was a neighborhood obsession on Grafton Hill. Our Parks League team won the city championship every year. Our tiny Catholic high school was state champ. Our Little League All-Stars went to the New England finals. We were city kids living in the country of baseball. Every summer day, we packed lunches and played ball at Lake Park from 9 till 3, and then hiked to our Little or Ruth League games. On weekends we played stickball in the schoolyard, scrub in the street, three-outs off the curb. At night, fathers and sons sat on stoops or porches, listening to transistor radios, to the voice of Curt Gowdy, to the slap of a hard liner off the left field wall, to the static of the cheering crowd.

We came to life each February when our beloved Sox reported to spring training. We oiled our gloves and headed out into the slush for a game of catch. This would be the year, finally, when we would beat the Yankees. And we lived with this hope through the long and glorious days of summer. But with September came the team’s inevitable collapse, and we found ourselves broken-hearted, bereft, pennantless, alone as always, in the face of the chill winds of the long New England winter.

Baseball is not a dance of the heart. Not any more. It’s not a pastoral elegy, not a bucolic symphony. Not Major League Baseball. It’s not an emblem of innocence or of the lost American paradise. It’s a game, fun to play, and occasionally delightful to watch. It’s low-tech, unsophisticated, played for bragging rights in the neighborhood, for dollars in the Bigs. It’s a game that is at its most compelling and intriguing in the stillness between pitches, a game played first in your mind, a game of imagination and possibility. Pitch the hitter in or out? With heat or finesse? Cut down the lead runner or go for the deuce? Lay it down or hit away? Sacrifice, steal, hit-and-run? And so on like that, every few seconds for hours--a process ruined by chattering sportscasters who would do your thinking for you. Ruined as well by trivia questions on the Jumbotron and by the wave and the macarena and the mascots and the Bleacher Brigades and the orchestrated chants and the rock songs and the rest of the mindless blather which reduces baseball to a sideshow in a theme-park stadium. Major League Baseball has become an amusement, and amusements are never significant.

Wayne Huizinga wanted something to fill space in his Pro Player Stadium and time on his sports channel, so he bought a baseball franchise. And then he wanted a new domed stadium to go with his old stadium and his new arena, and he wanted us to underwrite it with a $60 million tax break. When we wouldn’t, he pouted and sold his team, sort of. Baseball, he has said, cannot be played in Florida without a dome, despite ample evidence to the contrary. And Wayne can’t build a stadium without a tax break. Or can he? Let’s check the Huizinga Financial Index.

According to the Forbes Four Hundred issue of October 13, 1997, Huizinga was worth $1.7 billion. The March 2 update estimates Wayne’s personal wealth at $1.875 billion. So in twenty weeks he earned 175 million bucks. That’s $8.7 million a week or $1.25 million a day or $52, 085 an hour (even those spent sleeping) or $868.05 a minute or $14.46 a second. It takes Wayne 36 minutes, then, to earn the equivalent of the annual income of the average Broward County household. How could he afford a stadium on that kind of money? Why shouldn’t we help him out?

Am I trying to suggest that Wayne is being outrageous or avaricious in his request? Not at all. Wayne is like tofu: guiltless, if a bit tasteless. He’s a businessman. He is no more arrogant than, say, that corporate shill, Tiger Woods, who moved to Florida with his Nike bazillions and his golfing fortune so that he would not have to pay a state income tax. How do we even begin to comprehend that level of greed, vanity, and contempt? Just the kind of sterling citizen we need in our state.

Wayne tried to build support by buying a championship. In so doing he proved that he was inept at baseball management. He spent $89 million (ten weeks’ income) on free agents. He hired Gary Sheffield, a tax break all by himself at $61 million. Ten million bucks a year for a .250 hitter, whose fielding is either alarming or hilarious, a player who would not have cracked the Red Sox lineup in the Williams-Jensen-Piersall era or the Evans-Rice-Lynn era. Or any Yaz era. What Wayne doesn’t understand is why people follow a team: it is not to witness victory, but to be a part of the story. Support doesn’t come with triumph but with knowledge. In order to care about a team, we need to know it, live with it, develop a history with it, watch it suffer, struggle, and ultimately, but not necessarily, succeed. We don’t want to be amused or distracted; we want to care about a game that is played with grace, intensity, and passion, not with greed, ego, and complacency, and by players who’ll be around for a while. Baseball is not for a year but a lifetime.

What Wayne doesn’t know, but Sox fans do, is that it’s often failure that makes a team loveable, weakness that strengthens the bonds between players and fans. There are perhaps no more avid fanatics than those that follow the Red Sox or the Cubs, and you could look up how long it’s been since either has won a Series. And it is probably no coincidence that these two teams play in parks that are old, small, unsymmetrical, and sold out, with real grass, real sky, real dirt. Rain is part of the game. So are heat, cold, gusts of wind, a glaring sun. These are the factors that make each game the wonderful problem it is.

Wayne learned, perhaps, that you can’t buy a player’s desire, commitment, joy, and will. And you can’t buy a fan’s heart, interest, and loyalty. I suppose because he has his price, Wayne thinks we’re all up for grabs. An honest mistake for a captain of industry to make. This is the new corporate baseball, after all, where the word team now means the player, his agent, his lawyer, his personal manager, his financial planner, his jeweler, his stockbroker, his spin doctor, and his probation officer. Wayne proved that in the new baseball, winning is not measured in runs but in dollars. And the Blockbuster Marlins were losers.

Is it a good idea to pay enormous salaries to slackers, whiners, and thugs and to set them up as icons and role models? Oh, I know, players don’t want to be role models. They also don’t want to run out slow grounders, show up in time for spring training, answer civil questions, conduct themselves as gentlemen, drive within the speed limit, treat their wives or their public with dignity. They don’t want any responsibility, in fact. But they do want our respect.

My son’s school was recently honored by a visit from one of our local athletes who boasted to the class that they had all better listen to him because he had three Jaguars and a house half the size of the school. Fortunately, my 12-year-old and his friends were able to recognize this comical fellow for what he was--a bear of little brain.

Is there something wrong with a society in which college coaches make ten times the salary of college professors, where men who play a child’s game earn more than surgeons? Oh, we’ve heard the old cliche that sports build character. Yes, sort of in the way religions build tolerance. I suppose if we define character as the exploitation of weakness, as delight in inflicting injury, as the flaunting of small victories, as the bending of rules, as glorification of minor accomplishment, then sports do indeed build character. Sports as organized by adults for children build the egos of adults and engender the insipid and impoverished notion that winning is the only thing. Doing your homework builds character. Talking about what it’s like to be a human being builds character. Performing the corporal works of mercy builds character. Reading Shakespeare builds character. Holding down a job at minimum wage and showing up every day, that builds character. Sports build muscles.

Major League baseball is self-destructing. Soon we’ll have the Super Series at the Xanadu Dome between the Time-Warner Braves and the Disney Angels with Sport Goofy tossing out the first pitch and Sir Elton John singing the Star-Spangled Banner to an audience of glitterati. But here’s the good news. Baseball is still a graceful, lovely, and thoughtful game. Just not in the Big Leagues.

Terrific and beautiful baseball is being played in places like Tullahoma and Pine Bluff, Lubbock, Salinas, and Lethbridge by teams with names like the Goldeyes, the Redhawks, the Locomotives, the Kettleers, the Barge Bandits. In a place like, say, Sandusky, on a breezy summer night, with the Bay Stars hosting the Lima Locos and your son shagging foul balls, with players talking with fans down the left field line, with a beer in your hand, with a million stars in the sky, why if you took a deep breath, you might even smell it, that fragrance, what Cool Papa Bell called the sweet rose of life. Here is baseball played with hustle, execution, desire, and with something other than a contract renegotiation at stake. The finest essay ever written about baseball, Roger Angell’s "In the Country," details life in the remote Northern League in St. Albans, Vermont. In places like these the diamond still dazzles.

So here’s what we do, here’s my modest proposal. We do the right thing, the American thing, the free-enterprise thing. We end Major League Baseball’s monopoly over the game. We end the social welfare, the cozy tax breaks and incentives, the sweetheart deals that keep the old boys in charge. No more socialism for the rich. No more chance for owners to blackmail cities into building them personal pleasure domes where they can shmooze clients and close deals, impress the relatives. Any town that wants a team gets a team.

Or we do this. We leave the millionaires to themselves. We let Wayne, Sheff, and the boys regale one another with talk of their latest purchases, leave them to their cynicism and acquisitiveness, their narcissism, while we head out to the high school fields, the sandlots, the semi-pro and independent leagues, out to where the game is still a passion and not a business, and we take the kids and the coolers and the camp chairs, the blankets. We root for the home team. We watch that young kid, that second baseman, leg out a single; we talk about our lives and our friends; we glance at the newspaper; we buy a hot dog; we remember the day long ago in Tavajian’s field when we ran down a long fly ball to win a game that meant nothing to the world, everything to us. We have fun.