Fans Bored With Boys Of Spring

America’s baseball nuts have spent 1995 fretting about their sport. Attendance has tumbled 22 percent at major-league ballparks this season, and teams expect to lose more than $300 million by the end of the World Series. Television ratings have plunged despite close races in every division, and polls show the game has lost its allure.

Part of the problem is that fans are steamed. Players and owners walked away from the sport last year during the most exciting season in half a century. In the meantime, Americans discovered a dirty little secret. Baseball is dull.

A three-hour game includes about 10 minutes of actual action. That leaves 170 minutes of extraneous activity. Players and coaches spend most of their surplus time attending to hygiene. They adjust protective devices, scratch, craft chaws out of tobacco and bubblegum, perform amateur prostate exams, and do stuff that Peeping Toms wait a lifetime to see.

“Strategy” consumes the remaining moments. Here is an example of the baseball chess game: A manager steps to the edge of the dugout, pauses, calls time out, then strolls toward the pitcher’s mound. He taps his forearm along the way, beckoning a relief pitcher. A guy saunters in from the bullpen, while the skipper consoles the hurler who just got the hook.

Heart be still!

Not even Steven Spielberg could make that ritual interesting, which explains why the average couch potato slides into REM-grade slumber at least once a game.

To make things worse, the sport’s marquee events magnify its shortcomings. Consider the just-completed all-star game. That annual event is boring even if someone wins in the final at-bat. Managers herd players in and out. A dozen or so pitchers take the ball, a bundle of hitters put in cameo performances, and the proceedings look more like an audition than a competition.

Once upon a time, that was good enough to slake the sportoholic’s thirst. Americans latched on to every opportunity to see Mickey Mantle, Sandy Koufax or Vada Pinson (my childhood hero) on the tube.

But celebrity sightings lost their novelty long ago. We live in an age of MTV, talk radio and the Extreme Games. We can watch jocks leap from planes on ski boards, spinning earthward at 120 mph. We know whether the most powerful man on Earth wears boxers or briefs. So why should anybody interrupt an afternoon to watch Barry Bonds chomp on sunflower seeds?

In this stimulus-crazed age, baseball swims against the tide of our impulses, urging us to make haste slowly. Unfortunately, patience in this case yields few rewards. Recent innovations, such as the designated hitter rule, have dragged down an already doddering game. And the players no longer engage our imaginations.

In the old days, baseball captured the spirit of a growing nation. Rough kids drifted to cities from farms and mining towns, and their success made the American Dream palpable.

Today’s game, in contrast, looks like an athletic version of “The People’s Court” - a farce played by drug felons and tax cheats. For every Cal Ripken or Eddie Murray, there are a gaggle of Darryl Strawberrys and Steve Howes. Trivia buffs are as likely to ask about players’ rap sheets these days as about the members of the first $100,000 infield. And when was the last time you saw a player show up at a hospital and promise to belt a homer for a dying kid?

If a nation’s games reflect its character, America has become a land of self-important churls. As recently as the early ‘80s, baseball welcomed eccentrics like Mark “The Bird” Fidrych or Chico Ruiz, who once rejected an offer to start a game with the demand: “Bench me or trade me.” But no more: If Yogi Berra were playing today, publicists would pack him off to media training before he could mutter a mot, and he would end up doing spots for brokerage firms.

When baseball became respectable, it surrendered its common charm and its future. Thrill-thirsty kids have turned to more kinetic diversions, such as basketball, while the average big-league crowd looks like a casting call for “On Golden Pond.” It’s only a matter of time before teams stop giving away free bats and start luring patrons with promises of prunes.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the sport and cherish memories of playing on dusty diamonds back home in Cincinnati. But today’s baseball, like the reproductive arts, is more fun to play than to watch.

So Mudvillians ought to fret. Unless something happens in a hurry, time soon will bypass America’s once-great pastime.

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