Our Game

I grew up in Mudville, the real one, Worcester, Mass., 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 center field 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 League 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
brokenhearted, 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 that reduces
baseball to a sideshow in a theme-park stadium. Major League Baseball has become an amusement, and amusements
are never significant. Wayne Huizenga 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 Huizenga
Financial Index. According to the Forbes Four Hundred issue of Oct. 13, 1997, Huizenga was worth $1.7 billion. The
March 2 update estimates Wayne's personal wealth at $1.875 billion. So -- if we can believe Forbes -- in 20 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, the dozens
of wealthy pro athletes who move their fortunes to Florida so they won't 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 citizens 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 (10 weeks' income) on free agents. He hired Gary Sheffield, a tax break all by
himself at $61 million. Ten million bucks a year for someone who hit all of .250 in 1997, 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 will 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 lovable, 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. 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 kids in 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 10 times the salary of college professors, where
men who play a child's game earn more than surgeons? Oh, we've heard the old clich� 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 re-negotiation 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, Vt. In
places like this 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 schmooze 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.