Fans Can’t Forsake Game

For its most ardent fans, baseball cannot simply be cast aside in retribution for the strike, erased as if it never existed. Baseball is too important to them for that, too entwined in their minds, hearts and lives.

And so, despite an ugly labor war that exacted a costly price, despite seemingly endless, mindless negotiations that settled nothing, despite all that, the congregation has assembled for its return.

The seeds, you see, are still planted, rooted too deeply.

Some of the faithful remain angry. Some of them are just annoyed. All of them, however, remain passionate about the game, ignoring the scars. By and large, the romantics remain wedded to baseball, their affection perhaps diminished but certainly not extinguished.

“I am 53 years old,” political columnist George Will said. “I grew up about four years ago. I didn’t just learn the facts of baseball life. I know how it works.

“This work stoppage was particularly disappointing because it was so unnecessary,” Will said. “The players were innocent bystanders in a fight between the large-market and small-market teams.

“This is distressing because it means we will go from 1993 through 1996 without a proper season. By that, I mean at least a 154-game season because 154 games gives you a basis of comparison and conversation. Bart Giamatti said baseball was all about conversation.”

Nonetheless, Will said, the strike has not destroyed his passion for the game. “It dampened it; it didn’t kill it,” he said. “I’ll be there on opening day.”

So will horror writer Stephen King, who couldn’t wait to renew his four season tickets to Fenway Park, where he will resume his long-term, mostly unrequited love affair with the Boston Red Sox. This despite the fact that he lives in Bangor, Maine, 4 hours or so away.

Then there is NBC “Today” co-anchor Bryant Gumbel, an otherwise sensible fellow who happens to have a fatal flaw. He roots for the Chicago Cubs, every bit as futile a pursuit as King’s attachment to the Red Sox. His zeal has been decreased this year, though.

“I don’t know,” Gumbel said. “I’m a little like a jilted lover. I may yet be back in love come summer, but right now, I’m just not very excited.

“I’m sure I will enjoy watching games and for some stupid reason, I will continue to pull for the Cubs. But I just don’t feel the same positive anxiety about the start of the season. The stark realization is that the people running the game don’t love it as much as I did.”

Gumbel’s father once advised him to lighten up over baseball, reminding him that his team’s wins wouldn’t put a nickel in his pocket and its losses would take nothing out, that the ups and downs of a baseball team are something less than life and death.

“I never suggested it was logical,” Gumbel said. “Clearly, it wasn’t. But the owners’ lack of logic has superceded mine.”

What happens, though, if his beloved Cubbies find themselves in first place on July 4? “I’ll be jumping up and down,” he admitted. “I’d get a thrill but it will take a lot to be back where I once was.”

Filmmaker Ken Burns, whose monumental series on the game was broadcast last summer just as the strike began, said his passion for the game was not diminished by the ugliness.

“Not at all,” he said. “Of course it was horrible. It was a tantrum. When a 2-year-old throws a tantrum, you don’t throw him out. You wait until it’s over.

“I don’t downplay the significance of what happened. It was gritty realism that sometimes comes with sublime play. It was just like America, chilling and yet uplifting,” Burns said.

“I try to divorce myself from the part that likes to see the game and the metaphor it is for our country, from the part watching the egos and the failure to compromise that has existed in it since 1860. It was horrendous but the historian in me was somewhat entertained by it.

“You had Donald Fehr in the shadow of Marvin Miller. You had the owners jettisoning the commissioner so they could do this. It was like a classic western.”

Without yet knowing whether the good guys or the bad guys won, Burns is still happy to have the game back. He threw out the opening pitch for the Rochester Red Wings of the International League a couple of weeks ago and hopes to be at Camden Yards for Baltimore’s home opener May 1.

Lawrence Ritter, author of numerous baseball books including the classic “The Glory of Their Times,” is pumped up, too.

“I find myself more excited than normal,” he said. “I never blamed the players. I was not resentful of the players. I felt badly that there was no World Series. It was a calamity to end what promised to be a wonderful season that way. My main resentment was with the owners.”

He has put all that aside, though.

“I am delighted they’re back,” Ritter said. “I’m excited by their return.”

Broadcaster Bob Costas, who fell in love with baseball as a youngster, feels less engaged with the game now than he once did. “I’m sophisticated enough to separate the baseball I grew up with from the reality of modern baseball that is the product of all the wrongheadedness in the game,” he said.

“The last couple of years, the romance of the game has gotten a bad name. People scoff at it. But if not for the romance, what’s the point?”

Still, Costas remains involved in baseball, his interest sustained by his 8-year-old son, Keith, who loves the game as much at his age as his father at the same age. It is a struggle, though, for young Keith Costas to remain involved with World Series games starting at 8:30 p.m. EDT, even on the weekend.

“I’ll give you an example of how much he loves it,” Costas said. “Two years ago, when he was 6 1/2, he took a nap on a Saturday afternoon so he could stay up to see the Toronto-Atlanta sixth game. He loves it so much that on a Saturday afternoon, when he could have been out playing with his friends, he was taking a nap.”

So, father and son watched the game that stretched into extra innings and when Otis Nixon dragged a bunt for the last out, Costas glanced over at Keith. “He was fast asleep,” he said.

Baseball balladeer Terry Cashman was bruised by the labor ugliness. “To me, the blowing off of the World Series was a culmination of many years of deterioration,” he said. “Most people didn’t notice it because they can’t know what it was like before.

“These parks that are football fields with artificial rugs, the alienation, the mistrust that led to what happened. It’s not the same … except for 60 feet, 6 inches and 90 feet and players like Griffey and Bagwell and Clemens, players you can appreciate.”

So, like the others, Cashman is back, talkin’ baseball.

“We are like heroin addicts,” he said. “The game is so important, so ingrained in our lives and relationships. Almost nothing they can do causes you not to come back. Baseball is about having a catch with your father, about love and family. that’s why it’s so strong.

“When they start and the season is for real, I’ll get into it. I love it too much. I can’t do without it. I follow the statistics. It’s part of my life.

“I’m angry that they are strictly business guys who don’t understand our culture and society. They have traded greed for the game of baseball. They can’t do that. Baseball belongs to the fans. They have no right to take it away. They forget the fact that it belongs to America, it’s part of America.”

Cashman’s latest CD includes 15 new songs, one of them written last summer, just before the strike. “It’s called, ‘Give Us Back Our Game,”’ he said.

A good suggestion.